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• W2045536620 abstract "Mountains are there for climbers Leadership is there for professors To theorize and write books Mountains don't change Neither does bad leadership Dennis Tourish is a professor of leadership and organization studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. This is his eighth book on leadership and organizational communication. Eight books on the subject from one author are a bit much. How long, for goodness sakes, does it take an intellectual to understand leadership? Its meaning to me is very simple. In its most generalized, abstract, and simple form, leadership means controlling means in the pursuit of ends. My definition obviously won't suit Professor Tourish, probably any other professor, or the Harvard Business School, or any other business school. As for all these schools, Tourish would agree for he devotes Chapter 6 to “The folly and the dangers of leadership education in business schools” (p. 96), a topic I'll let speak for itself. My reading of history tells me that the world throughout the ages has been plagued by leadership in the public, commercial, and spiritual spheres of life that has led to negative successes (e.g., wars fought and won) and negative failures (e.g., wars fought and lost), and rarely to positive successes and positive failures (i.e., positive ends not achieved due to unpredictable situational interventions). There are today numerous tinder boxes throughout the world being fueled by reckless leaders in their quest for more power, and some notable observers believe U.S. militarism is setting the stage for WWIII (e.g., Boyle, 2012; Roberts, 2014). Tourish alludes to this volatile situation very early in the first chapter when he states: “The world is on fire and it will take more than a spirit of sorrowful torpor (whatever that means to Tourish) to extinguish the flames” (p. 14). But judging from the four ill-chosen case studies he uses in Part II to illustrate the dark side of transformational leadership, I wonder if he's got a clue as to the size of the fire, its causes, or what to do about it. The six chapters of Part I are spent as he puts it on unraveling leadership agency. He clearly disdains the theory, teaching, and practice of transformational leadership, all three of which he claims result in giving leaders all the power and followers none. He examines the dynamics of excessive leader agency that encourages authoritarian forms of organization and popularizes transformational leadership that to him resembles “a form of ‘nympholepsy’” (p. 37). Transformational leaders, he says, “often exercise their power through ‘coercive control mechanisms’” (p. 40). Relying on a study (Schein, Schneier, & Barker, 1961) of U.S. POWs in Korea in the 1950s, Tourish in Chapter 3 compares side-by-side the key techniques of coercive persuasion used by the captors with those used by leaders of organizations today, such as, for example, role modeling. In Chapter 4, Tourish explains how leaders use ideology to enhance their power. There's certainly no doubt in my mind that leaders do just that. To me, ideology is an intellectualized and usually firmly held set of beliefs, and a perfect contemporary example is that of the neoconservative politicos who influenced President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq. But Tourish settles for a different example, one that he spends a whole chapter discussing, namely, the example of leaders promoting spirituality in the workplace as a very invasive form of control. A more uncommon, off-beat example would be hard for me to imagine. But Tourish defends his choice by mentioning that “The Academy of Management has a special interest group devoted to the subject with almost 700 members, a development which has created ‘legitimacy and support for research and teaching in the field’” (pp. 59–60). Well, I am singularly unimpressed. Spirituality has helped to fuel, not dampen the world's fire, and it is worth noting that President Bush reportedly prayed before making momentous decisions (Suskind, 2004). In the fifth chapter he explains the obvious, how the dark side of leadership stifles if not extinguishes dissent among followers. He describes the benefits of upward feedback and the barriers to that feedback ever happening. He ends the chapter by offering “Ten commandments for improving upward communication,” as if any powerful leader would, for instance, “promote systems for greater participation in decision making” (p. 88). This brings us to Part II and its four case studies, which themselves are a case study in the irrelevance at worst and limited implications at best for taking transformational leadership out of the ethereal of Part I and into the real world of leadership. Even taken together, the case studies don't even remotely reflect a world on fire and primarily at the hands of the dark side of leadership no matter how theorized. “Enron revisited” (p. 117) is the first case study, and the story of this corporation's implosion is indeed a revisited one. Tourish himself cites two books and a documentary about the company's fall, and there are countless more post mortems that could have been cited judging from a browsing of the subject on the Internet. Enron's executives clearly were operating on the dark side, but the harm they caused, although widespread and varied, was still mostly confined to the United States. Although two of them were imprisoned and one died before being jailed, “hands up corporate crooks” could be on a theater marquee but is as uncommon in America's corpocracy as is the failure of companies “too big to fail” where U.S. politicians are indebted to large corporations (see Brumback, 2011, 2012). The second case study, picked by Tourish to illustrate cultic leadership in practice, is way out in left field, literally, on the political spectrum. It is an accounting of the rise and fall of the far-left Trotskyite movement and the Committee for a Worker's International in the 1980s and early 1990s that had launched “a prolonged struggle against the Tory government” (p. 136). He could have but didn't mention that leadership on the right and in the center on the political spectrum can be even darker, and he could have but didn't include the cult of unbridled capitalism in the discussion (a subject not in the book's index). Tourish continues his fascination with cultic leadership in the third case study so anomalous so as to be beyond even the extreme fringe of transformational leadership. He entitled the chapter, “Leadership, group suicide and mass murder: Jonestown and Heaven's Gate through the looking glass” (p. 157). This is such a ludicrous choice that it doesn't deserve comment other than to say it makes me wonder if he is deliberately avoiding politically sensitive cases such as the role of nations’ warriors-in-chiefs in sending millions to their graves for the sake of self-serving imperialism and the demands of multinational corporations, banking cartels, new world order ideologues (see below), and the military/industrial complex (see Brumback, 2011; 2013). The last case study puts four UK senior “banksters” (my term) in the slimelight (again, my term) by highlighting in testimonies before the UK House of Parliament's Banking Crisis Inquiry their rationalized excuses for the global economic meltdown of 2008. Tourish shows no sign of insight into the more dangerous role that big banksters play in helping to instigate and fund wars or whatever other means necessary to establish, in the words of the world's premier banker, David Rockefeller, a new world order of “supranational sovereignty” dominated by “an intellectual elite and world bankers” (Kozy, 2013). Tourish, seemingly without any sense of irony, declares that the banksters have learned their lesson and are now “keen to shore up their tattered reputations and to ensure that they retain their ability to lead banks in a manner as close to the way they have traditionally done as possible” (p. 178). Yes, Professor Tourish, the banksters are now displaying the same impression management they displayed in giving their testimonies, and the state of the world will never improve as long as the international financial system remains “corrupt to the core” (Todhunter, 2014). Tourish wraps up his book in the 11th and final chapter, “Reimagining leadership and followership: A processual, communication perspective” (p. 199). It stands to reason that being a specialty of his organizational communication would be part of his perspective. It offers, he says, “a dynamic conception of power dynamics—as a struggle over meaning” (p. 211). That is certainly not my conception of power, which is simply the capacity to control the means to ends. The proper perspective furthermore is one he says in which leadership “emerges through the interaction of organizational actors and has a contested, fluid meaning for all of them in a given social situation for determinate amount of time” (p. 205). I suppose that quote would make more sense to you if I copied the rest of the chapter here. He concludes it with the “hope that the journey undertaken in this book enables us to map at least the outline of some answers” (p. 215). If by the time I was writing an eighth book on the subject, I surely think I would have more than an outline to offer. You can easily tell from my foregoing review that I can't give an unqualified endorsement of the book. Yet, recognizing that Tourish is an eminent authority on leadership theory, I have no qualms in recommending his book for professors and their students who can't get enough of the subject. For readers like me retired from their careers, you should have the time I think to understand leadership better, if you want to, by reading history and current events as reported and analyzed by the independent media. The rest of you will know what to do." @default.
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• W2045536620 date "2015-02-25" @default.
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• W2045536620 title "Dennis Tourish. The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013, 252 pages, $39.95 paperback." @default.
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