Investigating an extreme case: national interventions to develop public service leaders

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter outlines the large-scale qualitative research that the authors conducted in England during the mid-2000s on three of the national leadership development interventions from the suite constituting our extreme case: for school education, healthcare, and higher education. The investigation focused on perceptions and motivations framing the actions of elite groups across the administrative system, including their uses of persuasive power to shape the culture of senior staff from public service organizations. The scope of data generation and analysis is summarized, entailing critical discourse analysis of policy documents and interviews with policy makers, senior officials responsible for the interventions and commissioned trainers, senior officials of representative bodies for senior staff, and senior staff themselves. The key heuristic concept of leaderism is defined, capturing the ideological discourse of leadership comprising an emergent offshoot of managerialism. One key research focus was on the linkage forged by government elites between leaderism and implementing regulated marketization reforms.