Work in Progress
Leadership and Authority in a Crises-constructing World: towards a synthesis and
clarification.
Dermot O’Reilly, Eleni Lamprou, Claire Leitch and Richard Harrison
Corresponding author: d.oreilly@lancaster.ac.uk
Paper presented at the XII International Studying Leadership Conference, Rome, 2013.
Introduction
Much of the leadership literature makes reference to the potential of crises for new
orders. Many early accounts in the ‘great men’ tradition stressed the importance of times
of ‘unbelief, distress, perplexity’ as being like ‘dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out
of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force directly out of God's
hand, is the lightning’ (Carlyle, 1966)(p. 13). Similarly, Weber (1978) believed that times
of great distress were the opportunity for charisma (one of his ideal-typical forms of
authority) to act as a revolutionary force. Padilla et. al (2007) too, identify instability and
perceived threat as two of the key elements of environments that are conducive to toxic
leadership (which is also identified as charismatic). Similarly, Schein (1985) identifies the
way in which leaders react to critical incidents and organizational crises as one of the
primary mechanisms through which leaders embed culture in organizations – in particular
the learning of new norms and behaviours. These relations of crisis to leadership all point
to a reading of crises as ‘dangerous opportunity’ (Neumann, 1995), reflected in Rahm
Emanuel’s (Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff) comment in relation to the Global Financial
Crisis: ‘You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that [is that] it's an
opportunity to do things you think you could not do before’. These positive evaluations of
crises as ‘windows of opportunity’ for leadership see crises as an opportunity for new or
extended legitimate domination – and, tellingly, they tend to be leader-centric in
orientation. Crises, however, are also potentially disruptive of embedded power and
leadership relations – not least because the emergence of a crisis can provoke a
questioning of the legitimacy of those in power and leadership positions – crises are not
simply tests for leaders; they are tests of power and leadership systems, which entail a
closer examination of the relational and processual aspects of leadership and authority
relations. As Grint (2005b) pointed out, much leadership literature assumes that crises
enable, authorise or favour particular modes of leadership or authority, which he counters
with the argument that the relationship is often the other way around – it is the successful
use of modes of leadership and authority that construct the crises and thus authorize their
own reproduction.
In response to these crucial interlinkages between these phenomena, where crises are a
crucible for the authorization of leadership, this paper undertakes to contribute some
theoretical groundwork by presenting a conceptual map of the inter-relations between the
concepts of leadership, authority, and crisis through reviewing, synthesizing and adding to
their respective literatures. In particular, a number of underlying inter-relationships
between these concepts are developed and explored. Firstly, we explore the importance
of the processes of social construal (the semiotic representation of a state of affairs) and
social construction (the actualisation of a social construal into a social fact) (Sayer, 2000)
– which is crucial to all three concepts and explicable via the lens of critical realism.
Secondly, we examine the role of leadership in establishing, enacting, supporting or
resisting modes of authority, in particular, in the construal or construction of crises (Grint,
2005b). Thirdly, we highlight the importance of crises as potential turning points in the
unfolding of social processes is highlighted - that is their potentiality for change and
revolution (Harvey, 2010), or conversely, as a means for legitimating extended domination
(Wright Mills, 1956, Kerr, 2008). Fourthly we explore the role of the parsimony of
theoretical representations of crises as itself being potentially implicated in the
reproduction of modes of authority and leadership
The paper begins with an outline of the methodology and philosophy of science informing
our theoretical synthesis, given the crucial role of critical realism as enabling a
theorization of both semiotic and material aspects in social structuration, which is
important in explicating the roles of construal and construction in the processes and forms
of authority, leadership and crisis. This is followed by sections detailing and discussing the
processes and forms of each of these focal concepts. The discussion focuses on the interrelationships among authority, leadership and crisis, and we finish with an outline of a
future research agenda.
Methodology and philosophy of science
The methodology of the paper is ideal-typical (Weber, 1978, Hekman, 1983, Parkin, 1982)
in form and content, by extrapolating and abstracting the core conceptual components of
the phenomena in order to better understand their nature (O'Reilly and Reed, 2011)
without reifying analytical categories to an ontological status. The ideal-typical approach
is augmented by adopting a ‘natural language’ and ‘forms of life’ sensibility (Wittgenstein,
2001). That is, the purpose of identifying ideal-types is not to arrive at essentialist atemporal definitions, but to point to the contextual and specific variability of languagegames and forms of life and the relations within them, while at the same time abstracting
the generic aspects of these relations and identifying their continuous and discontinuous
aspects. What this means in practice is that instead of attempting to define leadership,
authority and crisis and the inter-relationships among them we instead develop a
cartography of the different meanings of these terms and their inter-relationships, as well
as of the different situations in which these meanings have purchase. These ideal-typical
typologies are developed by synthesizing a range of academic literatures including
philosophy, politics, sociology, organizational studies, crisis management, anthropology,
and leadership.
This methodology is employed within a critical-realist philosophy of science (Archer, 1995,
2000, Sayer, 2000) informed by cultural political economy (Jessop, 2007, 2010, 2013). The
relevant aspects of critical realism for our theoretical groundwork include the ontological
notion of the world/ phenomena as being composed of a series of unfolding generative and
dynamic powers and processes that underlie the actual (all that has taken place) and the
empirical (what one experiences). These dynamic powers are composed of mechanisms at
various levels (genetic, psychological, social etc). These combine, re-combine and interrelate at various emergent strata, which are themselves inter-related but open systems.
Powers/mechanisms tend, therefore, to produce causal tendencies (including double or
multiple tendencies), but not causal laws. These powers/mechanisms result in actual and
empirical phenomena and forces which undergo various stages/processes of generation
and variation, selection, and retention (Jessop, 2013). The social sciences are different
from the natural sciences in that all social phenomena are comprised of inter-relations
between semiotic elements and processes (where semiosis is understood as the social
production of intersubjective meaning (Jessop, 2013)) and material elements and
processes. Imaginaries are a subset of semiotic elements, involving an ensemble of
relatively durable but not exhaustive meanings, perceptions and guides; they are symbolic
reservoirs through which individuals and communities imagine and construct the world
(McNally, 2012, Gosling and Case, 2013, Wright et al., 2013, Halsall, 2013)(Gosling and
Case, 2013; Wright, Nyberg, De Cock and Whiteman, 2013; Halsall, 2013). Taylor (2004)
describes them as ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together
and how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally
met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations" (p.
23). Imaginaries enable action in so far as they reduce the complexity of experience and
perception and enable ensuing planning and activity. Construal, then, can be understood
as a largely semiotic process, in that particular imaginaries are developed, deployed
and/or promoted to interpret particular events. Some of these construed imaginaries will
be selected (and others not), and if retained sufficiently over time they will be
constructed into new sedimented institutional, social and political arrangements and
processes (and imaginaries), which will be partly semiotic, but even moreso, material in
their nature. Selection and retention of particular imaginaries over others – the movement
from construal to construction – is affected both by semiotic features: for example, which
imaginaries have resonance, or which help account for the variability of the particular
event; and material features: for example, which imaginaries are supported by
‘legitimate’ sources of knowledge, or which actors are able to generate and disseminate
their imaginaries and ignore others’. Agency is thus enabled by sedimented structures, but
is also constrained by them; the mutual interventions taking place over time – generating
new, or regenerating old, structures – what Archer refers to as morphogenesis (Archer,
1995).
Having outlined the key critical realist concepts that we will employ in our analyses, we
move on to consider each of our three focal concepts.
The processes and forms of authority
“Of authority it may be said in the most general way that it is an attempt to interpret the
conditions of power, to give the conditions of control and influence a meaning by defining
an image of strength” (Sennett, 1980). What Sennett is articulating here is that authority,
in the most general sense, is the right to direct, the licence or prerogative to order or
enjoin socio-material phenomena. This ‘right’, ‘licence’ or ‘prerogative’ may be assumed
or granted for multifarious different reasons – owing to beliefs in individual sovereignty,
expertise, the nature of the universe or force of personality, but in each case there is the
presumption, or granting of, a right to power.
Weber (1978), arguably the most influential thinker on authority, also regarded authority
as being related to right, or in his terms, legitimacy. Weber, however, explicitly excluded
the consideration of modes of mundane personal authority from his works as he regarded
them as amorphous and intermittent, whereas he was primarily concerned with persistent
association or ‘social order’, hence his focus on ‘organizations’ where he regards
organizations as ordered social groupings with an administrative cadre.
Such organizational authority is conceived by Weber as a type of domination, because
some superordinate party, parties, or system, through an ‘administrative cadre’ enforces a
prescribed purpose on other subordinate parties in a regular pattern. It is considered
legitimate because the subordination is achieved through the consent of those
subordinated parties, as if the purpose were their own maxim for conduct (1978)(p.946)
(even if there are also motives of expediency, habit or self-interest in their acceptance of
subordination). Legitimate domination is thus effected without the recourse to force, even
if the threat of force is present1. Legitimate domination, moreover, is guaranteed not
simply by the accession of the subordinated to the mode of domination employed by the
superordinate, it is buttressed by the belief, by the subordinate, in the legitimacy of the
mode of domination2. Beetham (1991) extends Weber’s insights by pointing to the
justifications that are held, by both the superordinate and the subordinate, to support the
moral obligation imposed by legitimacy, and the consent provided by subordinates through
their actions.
Grint (2005b) can be interpreted as extending Weber’s insight about authority as
legitimate domination (although Grint un-explainedly reproduces Weber’s phrase as
legitimate power, whereas Weber appears to regard these phenomena as being different)
in that he develops three modes in which this authority can be carried out – command,
management and leadership. Grint (2005b) presents these three modes of authority in
terms of their inter-relationships with problems (critical, tame, wicked) and power
(coercive, calculative, normative), where the construal and construction of processes and
events as crises tends to favour a move away from either normative leadership or
calculative management to coercive command (although the three modes of authority are
not mutually exclusive). Grint’s explication of leadership as a mode of authority and its
distinctions from management and command are useful to consider in relation to the
forms of leadership, developed below.
In summary, we have identified two polar types of authority, understood as the right to
direct: (a) the various modes of personal or informal authority, and (b) regular and
administered authority that involves (i) administering and legitimizing the will of a
superordinate party, parties or system, (ii) the content of the beliefs shared by both
dominant and subordinate, and (iii) producing the active consent of the subordinated
party or parties. In turn, we pointed to Grint’s development of three modes of regular and
administered authority as types of command, management and leadership, which in turn
leads on to a fuller consideration of the forms of leadership
The processes and forms of leadership
Leadership is an amorphous concept, in that its form and meaning is dependent on its
context3. The amorphous nature of leadership underlies both the well-documented
definitional problem (Stogdill, 1974), and the related contested nature of the concept of
leadership itself (Gallie, 1956, Grint, 2005a). Particular versions of what leadership is
conceived to be are used to judge or help influence how leadership should be put into
action, that is, leadership is an ‘appraisive’ or evaluative (and hence, political) concept,
not simply a descriptive-analytical one.
1
In Weber’s terminology non-legitimate domination, by contrast, is achieved through the use of force. Real
cases, of course, may involve elements of both types of domination.
2
Scott (1990) critically examines various theories that place a role on the consenting beliefs of the subordinate
and finds these theories wanting, arguing that submissions by the powerless are strategically dramaturgical
rather than representing their real beliefs. There is not space to properly discuss Scott’s arguments, but while
his work is considered a useful corrective to superficial explorations of the role of semiosis in the reproduction
of power structures, his implicit stress on public submissions as only, merely, and always, dramaturgical is
considered reductionist and thus rejected in this paper.
3
Power is also an amorphous concept, which is different, but often related, to leadership and/or authority.
Space does not allow for a fuller discussion of power.
Despite the amorphous and contested nature of the concept of leadership, the notion of
leadership invariably involves some mode or process of relational direction-giving (which is
related to the etymological root of ‘lead’ as ‘to cause to go with one’) or direction-finding
(O'Reilly and Reed, 2010). Most ‘heroic’ notions of leadership stress direction-giving,
mostly in terms of an asymmetric influence process (e.g. Hollander, 1978, House et al.,
1999), whether it is through arousing motivation (e.g. Burns, 1978), meaning-management
(e.g. Smircich and Morgan, 1982) or initiative (e.g. Stogdill, 1974). Other versions of
leadership, however, can be read as allowing for a direction-finding aspect of leadership.
For example, Yukl (2009) defines leadership as ‘the process of influencing others to
understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of
facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives’ which could
entail either asymmetric direction-giving or collective direction-finding, whereas Grint
(2005b) and Raelin (2013) explicitly argue that leadership involves (or should involve)
asking questions or inquiry, and seeking collaboration.
Critical commentators, however, have noted that this preponderance to argue for versions
of purportedly progressive or distributed modes of leadership can sometimes obscure the
fact that leadership, as often practiced as asymmetric direction-giving, involves the use of
force, whether physical, psychological or semiotic (Gordon, 2002, Kamoche and
Pinnington, 2012, Tomlinson et al., 2013), or that leadership as a mode of regular and
administered authority, even if it is inquiry- and collaboration-based, is itself often
predicated upon, or enabled by, positional power (whether formal or informal in nature,
and recognizing that formal power often generates a shadow informal power of influence).
Leadership, therefore, is often (normally) fused with hierarchy. The amorphous character
of leadership, however, means that even if leadership is normally mixed with, or
expressive of, hierarchy, this need not always be the case. Considering resistance
leadership, however, is salutary in considering the difficulty in disambiguating or
disaggregating hierarchy and leadership. While resistance leadership is a particular form of
leadership, the benefit of examining it is that it points to the nascent, emergent, fragile
and brokering qualities of leadership that are often overlooked in mainstream leadership
literature, and thus adds to a fuller analysis of the processes and forms of leadership, and
in particular, is useful in considering the relationship between leadership and hierarchy.
Zoller and Fairhurst (2007) point to a number of dialectical tensions and processes at play
in the leading of resistance which they use to inform conceptualisations of leadership (in
particular, they look at resistance that aims at changing structural arrangements rather
than simply individual, covert or discrete acts of resistance). They identify a number of
processes that are instructive to this discussion. Their work is also useful in that it fills out
Gramsci’s (1971) evocative notion of ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ – which he
identifies as the mode and means of creative and constitutive uses of power, in contrast
to restrictive or coercive uses of power.
Firstly, Zoller and Fairhurst (2007) consider how leadership relationships develop among
resisters. They point to a number of dynamics that can be important – the pre-existence of
perceived injustice or ‘hidden transcripts’ of injustice (that is, drawing on Scott, 1990,
private discussions and views of the powerful by the powerless); the emotions that are
evoked or provoked in particular instances; the ‘handling’ or ‘scaffolding’ (Tronick et al.,
1998) of such emotions; the infusion of emotional talk with ‘rational’ or instrumental
arguments; the differential positions of agents in relation to such phenomena as rhetorical
ability, group identity, networks, knowledge, organizational power, or status; the selfattributions of resisters and attributions by others; as well as acknowledging the potential
role of explanatory variables from the mainstream leader-centric literature such as
charisma or ‘crucibles’ of experience. They note also the importance of happenstance in
sometimes sparking a situation where these processes collide and solidify, while being
careful to acknowledge that often instances of resistance leadership are temporary and do
not necessarily result in stable relationships.
Secondly, they discuss the sources of power that resistance leadership draws upon or
develops (interestingly, they slide into discussion of resistance leaders in this section
rather than keeping open the possibility of leadership not being located in particular
leaders). Zoller and Fairhurst (2007) acknowledge the interplay between sources of power
and the development of leadership relations, and also note previous identifications of
sources of power – such as formal power, critical resources, network links, social
relationships, discursive legitimacy (Hardy and Phillips, 2004), information, money, reward
power and expertise (Zald and Berger, 1978), and self-, group- and collective identities
and subjectivities. Zoller and Fairhurst’s contribution, however, is their identification of
the crucial activity of creating or identifying resources of resistance. In particular, they
note the role of communication in the creation of resources of resistance – especially in
creating meanings, symbols, and/or narratives, that build legitimacy (whether internal or
external) and create alliances. In relation to previous theorizations about such discursive
power they note the tension between conceptualizations that focus on macro- or societaldiscourses (or formalized aspects of imaginaries), and approaches that focus upon microinteractions and language use (incipient imaginary work). Zoller and Fairhurst argue,
rather, for the need to recognize that both larger systems of meaning and micro- language
interactions are both involved in structuring reality. Indeed, Zoller and Fairhurst read
Foucault’s work on power as implying that it is possible to critique particular Discourses
(formalized aspects of imaginaries), but that it is only possible to do so by manoeuvring
between Discourses through the use of micro-language interactions. These sources of
power have both moral and intellectual aspects – moral, in that leadership involves the
evocation or invocation of a moral order – the creation or exhortation of a mode of
communality or shared ground (even if there are also distinctions or stratifications within
the moral order); intellectual in that leadership involves capturing and extending the
imagination of agents (rationally and/or emotionally or affectively), and through
developing this, directs action.
Both of these processes – the development of leadership relations and the sources of
power that resistance leadership draws upon or develops are processes pertinent to the
generation and variation of imaginaries. New, or previously only imagined, orientations
are potentially generated from the fusing of pre-existing perceptions and conflicting
multiple experiences which are stimulated by the collision of hidden transcripts, multiple
identities and subjectivities, discursive resources and interactions, resentment,
opportunity and particular constellations of situated alliance and conflict.
Zoller and Fairhurst’s third process, moves onto the selection of such variably generated
imaginaries. In particular, they assess the role of leadership in coalescing individual,
subjective or covert resistance into collective and/or overt attempts at change. They
quote Hodson approvingly that those involved in resistance aimed at deflecting abuse must
first ‘symbolically reject the definition of the situation provided by those in power’ (cited
in Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007) p.1348. As such, they argue that ‘leadership plays a
significant role in transforming such rejections into collective action’ (p.1348). In contrast
to modes of leadership that are in the service of a regular and administered authority
which is predicated on the consent of the subordinate (even if it is passive or insincere),
resistance leadership (that is resistance which is not simply individual, covert or discrete)
involves the active dissent of the subordinate. This argument points to both semiotic and
material processes in the conflict between alternative imaginaries and their proponents,
and their selection in the establishment of moral and intellectual leadership. Semiotically,
this includes, again, the management of meaning and emotions, and also the importance
of symbolic actions, performed for an audience; and material practices such as ‘massing’
which involves bringing people together to both facilitate and display collective power
(Scott, 1990), and material issues such as how the position of the enunciator affects
whether their voice is considered to be warranted (Hardy et al., 2000) – both of which are
crucial for the evocation or invocation of a moral order.
This aspect of resistance leadership echoes Grint’s (2005b) specification of leadership as a
mode of authority, in the sense that it involves asking questions (disrupting or provoking
imaginative work) and seeking collaboration – coalescing individual concerns into
collective experience, and hence action. Grint’s illustrations all involve instances where
those exercising this form of leadership are in superordinate positions – but Zoller and
Fairhurst’s discussion show that this form of leadership (and indeed the other forms of
authority that Grint distinguishes – command, and management) are all also potentially
present in resistance leadership. In resistance leadership, however, such forms of
authority are not initially predicated upon formal authority, but upon informal authority
(in the stabilisation of resistance, however, such movements may develop their own
authority and administrative systems).
Fourthly, Zoller and Fairhurst (2007) address the issue of how resistance leadership
attempts to make the discourse of change ‘stick’ (although they again slide into the
terminology of resistance leaders), that is how imaginaries move from selection to
potential retention. The crucial issue here, of course, is how temporary instances of
resistance or resistance leadership, are enabled to sustain conflict. Weick et al are
invoked to note that the articulation of a resistant or alternative imaginary is not static,
rather it involves the ‘continued redrafting of an emerging story so that it becomes more
comprehensive, incorporates more of the observed data, and is more resilient in the face
of criticism (cited in Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007) p.1352. As such, the tension that
resistance leadership needs to manage is between ‘penetrating’ or ‘unsettling’ dominant
modes of meaning or Discourse (formalized aspects of imaginaries), and the development
of some degree of fixity in the resistant discourse or narrative (a formalization of a new
imaginary). As noted above, the unsettling of pre-existing imaginaries involves both
semiotic and material elements and processes, and likewise, the relative fixing of
resistance leadership also involves semiotic and material practice – including the
elaboration and (relative) definition of alternative imaginaries, and their instantiation into
material codes, forms or practices.
The value of Zoller and Fairhurst’s (2007) analysis of resistance leadership is that it points
to key processes of informal authority, which are often present in, but are erroneously
equated with, formal authority and leadership in the mainstream leadership literature.
Whether informal or formal, however, authority always involves some expression or
development of hierarchy – evidenced in Zoller and Fairhurst’s slippage into the
terminology of leaders rather than leadership. Nonetheless, there are also elements of
their illustrations that suggest the possibility for leadership existing without leaders – e.g.
in the ‘massing’ of groups where the collective becomes a temporary entity with its own
power. Leadership involving leaders, whether formal or informal, therefore, is always
hierarchical, whereas leadership without leaders may not involve hierarchy, formal or
informal (but may, however, be transient or fleeting).
A further aspect noted by Zoller and Fairhurst (2007) also warrants consideration. They
note that the leadership literature tends to focus either on the leader or the follower,
whereas they argue that what is required is a view that can accommodate both
asymmetric and mutual influence (p.1341). This insight calls to mind Weber’s stress on the
importance of an administrative cadre in regular and administered forms of authority, and
this insight can in turn be extended. For example, mainstream leadership literature tends
to focus on simple leader-follower binary relationships – either between a senior business
leader and their staff, or between a middle-management leader and rank-and-file
employees – but this is incredibly reductionist – there are multiple tiers and functions
within an organization each of which will have multiple direct and indirect relations with
each other, as well as there being multiple external parties which will likewise have
multiple direct and indirect relations with the tiers and functions of the organization as
well as with each other. Leadership relations are not binary – they potentially involve
multiply extended multi-directional, multi-qualitative, interlinked and multiply mediated
relations.
In summary, we have identified a number of different forms and processes of leadership
(the amorphous relationship of giving or finding direction) – in particular we have
recounted the asymmetric relations of force, meaning-giving, influence, initiation,
command or management, and discussed the potential mutual forms of moral and
intellectual leadership that were brought to the surface in considerations of resistance
leadership where there is not regular and administrated authority (while noting that these
same forms and processes can also be asymmetric depending on how they take place in
practice). The moral aspects of collective leadership involved ordering via the experience
and recognition of emotions, relationships and links; while the intellectual aspects of
collective leadership involved inquiry, attributions, narratives, the use of transcripts and
the adaptive use of micro-language interactions and macro-discourses, as well as the
adoption of strategic intent. Both these moral and intellectual aspects were seen to
involve both semiotic and material aspects that either enabled them, or were part of the
grasping of resistant agency, and the contiguity of these processes with the broader
concerns with generation and variation, selection and retention of social imaginaries and
practices were delineated.
Having thus developed a broad rubric for understanding the forms of authority and
leadership we move onto a more detailed consideration of the forms of crisis.
The processes and forms of crisis
There is one thing upon which consensus has been built in crisis research: there are
multiple types of events discussed under the concept of crisis, multiple terms used
interchangeably in the same account and multiple perspectives employed to approach its
emergence and unfolding (Buchanan and Denyer, 2013, Pearson and Clair, 1998). The field
appears to develop comfortably in its multiplicity and, whilst earlier attempts to review
crisis research aimed at synthesising points of departure to create a unitary perspective on
crisis (Pearson and Clair, 1998), more recent attempts embrace this multiplicity (Buchanan
and Denyer, 2013). In this light, a crisis can be construed or can be constructed as a
number of things: it can be a low-probability, high-impact situation with a tight timeframe
for response (Hadley et al., 2011); it can be a seemingly mundane event that invites
individuals to reflect upon their underlying assumptions (Probert and Turnbull James,
2011); it can be a context that bestows emerging situations with a certain affective load
and cognitive colour (Williams et al., 2009); it can have more or less positive and negative
effects (Pearson and Clair, 1998) or it can be different from something else (Hannah et
al., 2009). Importantly, a crisis can be any of the above, or it can be semiotically
construed and constructed as such.
Grint (2005b) moves away from a functionalist perspective of crisis (an event, situation or
context that carries certain properties) to a constructivist perceptive. He approaches
crisis as something that becomes through collective engagement and contending accounts
of ‘reality’, assuming ever temporary forms as it unfolds. Language, he suggests, is central
in such a process, as it provides both the tool and the frame to make sense of and perform
‘reality’. In this light, the value of discourse, narratives, images and storytelling in the
construction of crises has received increased attention (Boudes and Laroche, 2009, De
Cock et al., 2011, Hartz, 2012, Moynihan, 2012, Riaz et al., 2011, Svetlova, 2012, Tourish
and Hargie, 2012). Narratives materialise processes of sensemaking, which have been
extensively linked with crisis research (Maitlis and Sonenshein, 2010, Mullen et al., 2006,
Stein, 2004, Weick, 1988, 1990, 1993). As Weick put it, ‘the sensemaking sequence
implied in the phrase, 'How can I know what I think until I see what I say?' involves the
action of talking’ (1988: 307). Such conversational episodes and the stories constructed
thereof allow individuals and groups to cope with the ambiguity and unfamiliarity of crises
(Boudes and Laroche, 2009, Probert and Turnbull James, 2011). As Boudes and Laroche
aptly note, ‘stories are used to domesticate dangerous and hostile events that we are
confronted with’ (2009: 392). Moral stories, in particular, are quite relevant in exploring
crises, as they engage with issues of accountability, responsibility and blame (Whittle and
Mueller, 2012). They are also quite powerful, as they have a performative role in changing
or maintaining the status quo (Riaz et al., 2011). Apart from their obvious audiences, they
also serve unconsciously to help their authors construct their perception of self-in-crisis
(De Cock et al., 2011). Research reveals ante-narratives of crisis which capture the
plurivocal, gradual, fragmented and tentative quality of crisis narratives (Whittle and
Mueller, 2012).
Highlighting the discursive elements of crises construction is not intended to shadow
material elements thereof. Technologies have long been present in accounts of crisis,
albeit tightly coupled with the organisational and institutional context of their production
and use (Pearson and Clair, 1998). The effects of the materiality of technological artefacts
are often subordinated to the intentionality of human agency, as it is the latter that
purportedly inscribes agency to artefacts in the design phase. Recently, discussions of
material performativity have become more pervasive in social and organization studies,
finding their place in crisis research as well. The manner in which material spaces provide
the resources for constructing crises (Bar-Lev and Vitner, 2012), framing and calculating
devices and economic theory perform aspects of emerging crises (Roberts and Ng, 2012),
and material structures constrain the construction of alternative resolutions to crisis (Levy
and Spicer, 2013) provide insight on the performativity of materiality in crises
construction. Such a perspective substantiates beautifully critical realist accounts that
discuss how materiality and its consequences become implicated in narratives of crises,
particularly in moral accounts of accountability and blame.
What emerges as central in discussions of crises construction is the temporal dimension.
Crises become as stories are told and retold, as images are circulated, interpreted and
revised. When addressing the temporal dimension of crises, we need to distinguish
between their chronology (Boudes and Laroche, 2009), namely, the unfolding of events in
clock time, and both their phenomenological duration, that is the intertwining of a psychic
flow with the immediate data of consciousness (Bergson, 1910) and their symbolized
‘duration’ (Chia, 2002). The latter refers to how events become weaved in storylines,
assuming certain temporal spaces that altogether communicate the lived experience of
the author. Even further, we refer to how authors and audiences move from the past to
the present to the future in constructing these accounts. At times, it is memory that is
constructed, tying the present to the past (Whittle and Mueller, 2012). At other times, the
narrative reveals the perceived irreversibility of the past of the current crisis, the
dependence of current constructions of a crisis on past ones (Di Mascio et al., 2013) or the
usefulness of an irreversible past in approaching a current crisis (Brandstrom et al., 2004).
Sometimes, however, memory is deconstructed to recover the lost potential of the past,
in the hope that it finds actualisation in the present, thus, keeping open the possibility of
resolution in the future; ‘we have to expose and dissipate the illusion of continuity in
history and endow the present with its abilities to become other than it is’ (Wright et al.,
2013)p. 653). In this sense, crises emerge as liminal spaces (Bar-Lev and Vitner, 2012), as
they unfold in the absence of or despite the presence of contested structures (Powley,
2009). At the same time, they create a temporal space when the past can be reviewed and
the future imagined. Crises carry the particular quality of inviting and establishing
connections across temporal dimensions; successful construals of climate change, for
instance, bring far consequences close, they make them part of the author’s and the
audience’s present (Wright et al., 2013).
As insinuated in the above, it is not only crises that are constructed through discourse and
narrative. So are resolutions of crises, the construction of which has also been approached
through the concept of the imaginary (Gaonkar, 2002, Jessop, 2013). Crises disturb
prevailing frames of reference, as well as discursive and material practices, allowing for
multiple constructions of crises, some of which will be accepted as ‘imagined recoveries’
(Jessop, 2013). Such osmosis often gives way to competing imaginaries, as contending
accounts of the legitimacy and reasonableness of different responses unfold (Levy and
Spicer, 2013). The social construction of imaginaries suggests they are far from wellcontained, determinate technologies of organising social activity (De Cock et al., 2013).
What they offer, nonetheless, is a reconceptualization of the contemporary understanding
of crisis. Whilst the contemporary understanding of crisis carries the connotation of
intense danger or difficulty, imaginaries communicate an understanding closer to the
etymological root of the Greek krinein, ‘a time which requires one to decide ... a turning
point or ‘moment’’ (Mabey and Morrell, 2011) p. 106). Thus, through the consideration of
imaginaries, their generation and variation, selection and retention, a successfully
constructed crisis may be theorized as involving the following processes: (i) a fundamental
change in generative powers that sustain a process, (ii) a potential turning point, and (iii)
a decision.
Congruent with this theorization of crisis, Jessop (2013) identifies two polar continua for
understanding crises. Firstly, there is a polar distinction between, at one pole,
‘accidental’ crises, which are construed or constructed as being caused by some ‘external’
factor, and at the other pole, ‘form-determined’ crises, which are construed as being
rooted in crisis-tendencies or antagonisms associated with specific social forms (the
Marxist construal of capitalism as entailing crisis tendencies is an archetypal formdetermined construal of crisis). Secondly, Jessop differentiates between the polar cases of
crises in a given social configuration, and crises of a social configuration:
Crises ‘in’ occur within the parameters of a given set of natural and social
arrangements. They are typically associated with routine forms of crisismanagement that restore the basic features of these arrangements through
internal adjustments and/or shift crisis effects into the future, elsewhere, or onto
marginal and vulnerable groups. This is exemplified in alternating phases of
unemployment and inflation in the post-war advanced capitalist economies and
their treatment through countercyclical economic policies. Crises ‘of’ a system are
less common. They occur when there is a crisis of crisis-management (that is,
normal responses no longer work) and efforts to defer or displace crises encounter
growing resistance. Such crises are more disorienting than crises ‘in’, indicating the
breakdown of previous regularities and an inability to ‘go on in the old way’
(Jessop, 2013) p 243?
In other words, construals of a crisis as being ‘in’ a system favour responses which define
the causes of the crisis and their remedies as being relatively known and manageable. In
contrast construals of a crisis as being ‘of’ a system, imply that the crisis is both systemic
(it affects the entirety of the system in question) and systematic (it is methodical in the
perpetration of its effects), and potentially favour responses of a radical or transformative
nature.
In summary, the processes and forms of crisis display a multiplicity of characteristics: the
role of the construal, construction and de-construction of crises and their resolutions; the
semiotic and material interpenetration of these processes, including the moral dimension
of blame and accountability and the aspects of the temporal dimension – material
chronology, individual and group phenomenological durations and symbolized semiotic
durations; the crucial features of (i) a change in generative powers; (ii) a potential turning
point, and (iii) decision; and finally, the distinctions between ‘accidental’ and ‘formdetermined’ crises on the one hand, and between crises ‘in’ a system and crises ‘of’ a
system on the other.
Discussion: the inter-relations of processes and forms of crises to those of authority
and leadership
Mabey and Morrell (2011) very eloquently describe how crisis relates to leadership and
authority by destabilising existing domain paradigms and modes of engagement:
It can expose the shortcomings of outmoded orthodoxy, paving the way for more
radical, more ‘in touch’ ways of working. It can push people to the extreme which
has the tendency to surface emotion, uncover latent conflict, reveal true motives
and bring out the sacrificial best (in some at least). It can tell us what is important,
by stripping away the superfluous and paring down to essentials. It can lay bare
unfair, discriminatory, fraudulent practice and point to the root of accountability.
It can puncture the pomposity of self-sufficiency, the myth of someone being in
charge, the hubris of having all the answers (Mabey and Morrell, 2011) p.106
It is this myth of invulnerability that is dissolved in crisis - consequences directly affect
the regulative, normative and cognitive grounds of the institutional field (Wicks, 2001).
Crises are relevant to authority precisely because they undermine the belief in the
legitimacy of regular and administered authority and its shadow informal authority.
Essentially, in crises individuals and institutions ‘abdicate’ their authority by facilitating
the emergence and maintenance of cultural elements that contribute to the crisis (Stein,
2011). Because there is a fundamental change in the generative powers of the process in
question, the mode of legitimating that process comes into question (the justifications
that ground the obligation come into question). Without the buttressing of belief naked
power relations and conventions of order become apparent – the ‘crisis of legitimacy’ (cf
Habermas, 1975) becomes the context in which any presenting crisis plays out. Crisis may
in fact free both the administrators of formal authority and its subordinates from formal
positional authority – which may be differentially experienced, between and within these
groups. Experiences and construals of, and responses to, crisis will be influenced by
position, relations and resources, the potential generation and proliferation of
imaginaries, as will their ensuing selection and retention. In this sense, crisis is a potential
moment for modes of authority to be suspended – and for alternative modes of leadership
or resistance leadership to be tested. Crises offer opportunities for affected individuals
and groups to revisit their ‘leadership concept’ (Probert and Turnbull James, 2011),
namely, their unconscious and collective assumptions about how they perceive, engage
and evaluate leadership. Crises invite the exposing, reflecting and renewing of these
assumptions so as to develop the potential for resolution, which often requires significant
paradigm shifts (Brookes, 2011).
As noted in the introduction, much of the leadership literature makes reference to the
potential of crises for new orders, in particular notions of charisma with both its
authoritarian and revolutionary connotations, crises as ‘dangerous opportunity’ and crises
as tests of leadership character. Much recent research engages with the relationship
between crisis and charismatic leadership, contending that uncertain and turbulent
environments often facilitate the emergence of charismatic leadership (Bligh et al., 2005,
Davis and Gardner, 2012, Williams et al., 2009). Perceptions of charisma, nonetheless,
relate also to the position of the leader within crisis. For instance, an incumbent leader’s
perceived charisma is more likely to fade in a crisis due to the perceived contribution of
the leader to the emergence and unfolding of crisis. At the same time, charisma is more
often associated with a challenger who constructs a vision that provides a resolution to
the crisis. Nonetheless, more mundane characteristics of leaders have been highlighted as
relevant to crisis (Hadley et al., 2011), and the discussions of the processes and forms of
leadership, in particular of resistance leadership open up a range of further inter-relations
between crisis, leadership and authority.
Figures 1 and 2 distil some of the key processes and forms of crisis, leadership and
authority, while not exhausting the preceding discussions. Figure 1 focuses on construals
of crises ‘in’ a system with ‘accidental’ causes, whereas Figure 2 focuses on construals of
crises ‘of’ a system with ‘form-determined’ causes (these representations do not exhaust
the above combinations of processes and forms of crisis, authority and leadership, but
they do enable consideration of two polar opposite construals of crisis and of some of the
key features of authority and leadership).
Figure 1: Crises in a system, ‘accidental’
Relatively
stable powers
Crisis
Generation
and variation
of imaginaries
Selection of
imaginaries
Retention of
imaginaries
Accident
Construal and Construction
Force; moral and intellectual leadership
Resistance leadership
(informal authority);
incipient
administered
authority
Regular and
administered authority;
Informal authority
Figure 2: Crises of a system, ‘form-determined’
Generative powers and crisis tendencies
Generation
and variation
of imaginaries
Systematic
crisis
Selection of
imaginaries
Altered generative powers and crisis
tendencies; or, Re-inforced generative
powers and crisis tendencies
Retention of
imaginaries
Construal and Construction
Force; moral and intellectual leadership
Resistance leadership (informal authority); incipient administered authority
Regular and administered authority; Informal authority
The co-construal and co-construction of authority, leadership and crises is perhaps the key
relationship between these three phenomena highlighted through the two Figures. Figure
1 points to the role of an accident acting as a reverse- deus ex machina – instead of
inexplicably or unexpectedly resolving an issue or crisis, it is construed as unexpectedly
causing the crisis. The crisis then requires explication via the generation and variation of
imaginaries, their selection and retention, which involves both semiotic and material
construal and construction through an assemblage of modes of leadership, which can
variably involve force, moral or intellectual leadership. While a crisis that is construed as
‘in’ a system from an accidental cause may momentarily threaten regular and
administered authority, its very construal as accidental tends to favour the re-application
or moderate modification of the modes of power normal to the administrative system,
assuming, that is, that these modes of power have not themselves been disabled by the
crisis or its consequences, which would create more potential for alternative or resistant
modes of leadership and incipient authority.
In this respect Figure 1 highlights the important difference between understanding
leadership as ‘socially constructed in and from a context’ (Osborn, Hunt and Jauch (2002:
798) cited in Hannah et al., 2009) p.898. That is, it focuses attention on the ability of
those in formal authority or leadership positions to intensify or attenuate the experience
of crisis, and underlines the importance of approaching leadership as a phenomenon that
essentially constructs its context. Understanding crises as constructed through leaders’
selective engagement, appropriation and narration of surrounding circumstances bestows
leadership a performative quality that is often missing in situational/contextualist
accounts. Grint (2005b) suggests that a crisis emerges as such only when leaders construct
events as particular kinds of problems, assuming particular forms of authority. In this
light, ‘what counts as legitimate authority depends upon a persuasive rendition of the
context and a persuasive display of the appropriate authority style’ (Grint, 2005b: 1477).
This discussion shares similarities with Boin et al’s (2009) discussion of framing contests
around the significance and causality of triggering events and subsequent blame games.
In contrast, Figure 2 puts an emphasis not on individual instances of crisis, leadership or
authority, but on inter-related and mutually impacting crisis tendencies, and recurrent
and concurrent generation and variation of imaginaries, their selection and retention, and
on ongoing conflict and negotiation of alternative and resistant modes of leadership and
incipient authority with regular and administered authority. For sure, it recognizes the
impact of systematic crises as particular instances where these processes collide and
interact, but puts these in relation to the previous (and ensuing) accommodations
between different groups and their modes of leadership and authority.
Figure 2 also highlights the ‘minor’ or ‘contained’ crises that are construed out of the
equation in Figure 1. As Jessop (2013) points out, the normal crisis management in
construals of crisis as being ‘in’ a system as represented in Figure 2 normalizes or
authorizes the administrative mechanisms that distance or externalise crisis effects onto
vulnerable or external parties (e.g. the poor, the Global South, the environment). In other
words, the construal of crisis as ‘in’ a system reinforces the regular and administered
authority of pre-existent power structures. Figure 2 in contrast, points to the mutual
implications of broader social forces such as the interdependency of the global North on
processes which underdevelop the global South4.
The complexity represented in Figure 2 also indicates the potential multiply-tendential
effect of crises on authority and leadership. On the one hand, systematic crises undermine
the legitimacy of those in authority and potentially undermine their normal modes of
regular and administered authority. Such situations, where both the administrators and
subordinates receive less direction, allow the possibility for hidden transcripts to emerge
and solidify and for the creation of new coalitions and concepts of leadership. On the
other hand, systematic crises may also lead to what Grint (2005b) calls the irony of
leadership (leadership that is inquiry- and collaboration-based) – a crisis situation tends to
favour a command mode of positional authority, because while the authoritative
leadership mode of asking questions and seeking collaboration may be most apt, it is also
the most difficult mode to pursue in times of crisis, at least by those in positions of formal
authority, precisely because crises threaten the beliefs that support their position of
authority.
There is one further observation to be made from comparing Figure 1 and 2. One aspect of
imaginaries, or at least the aspects of imaginaries that involve explicit ideas and
discourses, is that part of their utility is that their representations simplify or reduce the
complexity of everyday phenomena, and as such enable people to ‘carry on’. Formalized
concepts and ideas are themselves commonly subject to a degree of frugality – that is
concepts and theories are partly evaluated in accordance with their degree of parsimony.
Parsimonious representations or theorizations of systems or phenomena, however, have a
tendency to omit less visible processes – precisely those variables that will re-occur at
some later stage as crisis-inducing reverse- deus ex machinae. As such, even if the
representation of Figure 2 is a more ‘accurate’ construal of the inter-relationships of
leadership, authority and crisis, there is a tendency to prefer the construal in Figure 1 – as
it absolves those in authority of blame, and puts the onus on their powers of crisis
management and resolution.
To review, the key arguments put forward in this paper are as follows. Firstly, the
processes of social construal (the semiotic representation of a state of affairs) and social
construction (the actualisation of a social construal into a social fact) (Sayer, 2000) is
clearly crucial to all three concepts of leadership, authority and crisis, and in particular
the construal and construction of any one of these has ramifications for the other two.
Secondly, the role of leadership in establishing, supporting or resisting modes of authority,
in particular, in the construal or construction of crises (Grint, 2005b) is brought to the
foreground as the primary agency in these processes, but it is an agency that operates
within and between already sedimented and stratified semiotic, material and power
structures. Moreover, while much mainstream leadership literature is leader-centric we
point to the possibilities of mutual and collaborative leadership, even if we acknowledge
4
We acknowledge the reduction of complexity entailed in using these spatial terms (imaginaries), while
referring to the differentiated generative powers embedded within these spatial regions that result from their
‘differentiated regional locations within the circuits of global accumulation’ (see McNally 2012 for a discussion
of regional imaginaries)
the often fleeting nature of such modes of social co-ordination. Thirdly, we argue for the
importance of crises as potential turning points in the unfolding of social processes - that
is their potentiality for change and revolution (Harvey, 2010), or conversely, as a means
for legitimating extended domination (Wright Mills, 1956, Kerr, 2008). In particular,
construals that focus upon crisis ‘in’ a system or on ‘accidental’ causes tend to be
reproductive of forms of regular and administered authority, and even construals of crisis
‘of’ a system that is form-determined result in the irony of inquiry- and collaborativebased leadership – that is, that such a mode of leadership is often the most difficult to
pursue in times of crisis. Finally, we have also pointed to the potential bias of the mode of
representations of theories and concepts – namely that the explanatory power of theory is
partly based on their parsimony, yet precisely this parsimony tends to favour
representations of crisis that omit the cyclical, tendential, historically-embedded and
contested nature of their construal and construction, and thus tend to favour systems and
modes of regular and administered authority.
A future research agenda
Engagement with alternative discourses of leadership (Mabey and Morrell, 2011) and
considering the centrality of processes of construal and construction shows the complex
relationships between crisis, authority and leadership. Should we move away from
individual models of leadership to the joint, distributed and enacted leadership of the
interpretive discourse, the discursively accomplished, temporary and fragile leadership of
the dialogic discourse and the socially, historically and politically mediated leadership of
the critical discourse, it becomes apparent how leaders are themselves constructed
through their construction of crisis, as their narratives and performances interact with
contending accounts of followers, other members of ‘elite groups’ (Kerr and Robinson,
2011, Riaz et al., 2011), researchers (Hargie et al., 2010) and further stakeholders (Riaz et
al., 2011). These ante-narratives of crises, leadership and authority allow for unexpected
‘twists’ to occur. They can move the locus of crises in ways that leave audiences startled
and bemused (Morgan et al., 2011) and can, even, account for failure while maintaining
faith in the system (Whittle and Mueller, 2012). As Mabey and Morrell (2011) note, within
such spaces leaders are able to influence developments by co-constructing accounts of the
crisis that legitimate a certain form of authority. Of course, self-representation in the
construction of crisis will have implications for self-representation in other contexts
(Tourish and Hargie, 2012). In this light, the fluidity and vulnerability of leadership in its
becoming is revealed, and further research on these processes is warranted. Leadership
and authority emerge as relational phenomena that take their form through continuous
and tense interaction between individuals, groups, organisations and institutions. Crises,
as a locus for potential research, open up spaces where the taken-for-grantedness of
established forms of leadership and authority is revealed and scrutinised and become the
sites where the alternative present becomes accessible, by reflecting on the past and
imagining a future. Whether these new forms of order are imaginatively identified and
adequately explored remains an open question – the contribution of past leadership
towards this direction remains a more contentious one (Boin and 't Hart, 2003, Zahariadis,
2013), justifying further investigation into resistance leadership or other emergent
phenomena of leadership, and/ or re-orientations by those in positions of authority.
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