Organizational democracy, ethics and leadership: The mediating role of organizational politics

There has been a growing concern amongst commentators about the disconnection between the apparent pluralisation of society and the relatively limited adoption of democratic practices in the corporate workplace. This paper examines the experience of employees in an international broking company in order to explore the extent to which a political leadership perspective can provide insight into furthering organizational democratisation. Attention is given to the integral relationship between democracy, ethics and a political mindset, and the influence this has upon others. In the account reported here, the ethical and developmental agenda of one influential senior manager is central to both the enactment of politics and the form of democratisation which it enables.

‘You have to choose a novel’: The biopolitics of critical management education

In this article, we engage empirically with the biopolitical nature of pedagogic practice in critical management education. We do so through considering the effects of employing literary fiction in an introductory management and organization module taught to master’s degree students in a UK business school. We see the deployment of fictional literature in teaching as a way of consciously intervening in this biopolitical predicament. By urging students to work with fictional literature that has been part of their personal past, we encourage them to develop a ‘care of the self’. In the analysis, we first discuss the pedagogic process of the module, reflecting on our own presumptions and behaviours. Second, on the basis of students’ assignments, we analyse the outcome of their learning. In the concluding discussion, we argue that the fact that critical management education is already biopolitical does not preclude the possibility for it to renew educational practice. We suggest that as a result of the potential for creative self-formation offered by the use of literary fiction, transformation of both students and educators is possible.

Arts-based methods in leadership development: Affording aesthetic workspaces, reflexivity and memories with momentum

There is a growing cry for ways of approaching management and leadership development that embrace the complex, dynamic, chaotic and highly subjective, interactional environments of contemporary organisational contexts. One response has been the use of arts-based methods for management and leadership education. Although a community of research has grown around these practices, there remains a lack of empirically grounded work focusing on the underlying, situated, experiential learning processes of such methods. Working from the concept of experiential learning as knowledge creation through the transformation of experience, I develop a three-stage theoretical model that explores experiential learning processes of arts-based methodologies. This study is based on an inductive, grounded theory approach in analyzing descriptive essays written by Executive MBA students on their experiences of a choral conducting masterclass. The model describes how arts-based learning environments afford aesthetic workspaces where participants engaged in aesthetic reflexivity to create memories with momentum to inform their future leadership practice. This model builds an interdisciplinary bridge to the theory of affordances and the concepts of aesthetic workspaces and aesthetic reflexivity found within cultural sociology, a discourse with a focus on the reflexive use of the arts for self-configuration, regulation and development.