Abstract
The democratic leadership literature emphasises those leadership practices that involve dialogue and communication within the frame of reference of existing organizational structures, discourses and hierarchies. Our contribution is to problematise this approach to democracy from the perspective of the work of Jacques Rancière, which highlights the importance of dissensus, that is to say a breaking away from organizational structures and hierarchies. We argue that this allows us to conceptualise collective leadership in a postfoundational way that connects a critique of individual and organization-bound leadership to a democratic logic, in particular through Rancière’s analysis of the myth of the murder of the shepherd. This also enables us to study radically disruptive, non-hierarchical and pre-dialogic dimensions of leadership that may destruct as well as construct. Two democratic leadership practices are outlined: contingent acts of leadership and the practice of radical contestation. Our argument is that both practices of democratic leadership can be deployed as radical ruptures and disruptions of organizational orders, beyond dialogue.
Highlights
A nascent body of research has started to explore the overlapping concerns of collective and democratic forms of leadership, seeking to theorise the possibility of leadership that is more participative and egalitarian
In this study we heed the call of scholars in this area (e.g. Smolović Jones et al, 2016) to theorise in a more focused and in-depth way the capacity of conflict and radical challenges to the status quo to provide an alternative form of collective democratic leadership
We theorise an important act of collective democratic leadership as the generation of ruptures with the status quo and common sense of organizational hierarchies, an assertion of equality that holds the promise of radically altering the direction of organizations
Summary
A nascent body of research has started to explore the overlapping concerns of collective and democratic forms of leadership, seeking to theorise the possibility of leadership that is more participative and egalitarian. .] [B]ecause the foundation is riven, democracy implies a practice of dissensus, one that it keeps re-opening and that the practice of ruling relentlessly plugs’ (Rancière, 2010: 54) From this basis, we can read hierarchy and upward communication within leadership, as seen in Grint (2005) and Tourish (2014), as largely irrelevant to the practice of dissensual forms of democratic leadership, as it concerns less keeping a senior leader in check than it does asserting a more fundamental equality: no one individual, no matter whether they are adopting a temporary, rotating (Sutherland et al, 2014) or facilitative leader identity (Fryer, 2012) would have a privileged position over others. Leadership actors respond spontaneously and in unpredictable ways, destabilising the status quo and its assumptions of hierarchy and privilege Such acts reject an order of police within an organization through radical forms of challenge and through enacting within the boundaries of the group a prefiguration of equality (Rancière, 1999, 2006). Contradictions in the prefigurative practices of the latter may undermine the longer-term integrity and capacity for disruption of the dissenting organization, suggesting that an important aspect of dissensual leadership may be the cultivation and modelling of dissensual practices amongst resisters, as well as in relation to antagonists
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