Abstract
This article draws from the fields of political science and of organisational studies to explore the short-term and long-term impact of New Labour’s party management on the quality of party processes as well as on party reputation. It is based on the long-term ethnographic participant observation of the Labour Party at local and regional levels, as well as national events such as annual conferences. The article starts by identifying the distinctive features of New Labour’s party management. It then examines the “unintended consequences” of this brand of party management, showing this model to be mainly self-defeating. The final section provides a general assessment of the impact of New Labour’s party management from the perspective of organisational learning and innovation. Overall the article stresses the long-term poisonous effects of this brand of leadership and management on political organisations and on politics in general.
Highlights
In most models successful leadership is equated with winning and with holding onto office, longevity in power cannot be the only variable used in assessing leadership, especially in a country such as the UK where the Prime Minister is a party leader and where, as a consequence, there exists a powerful dialectical relationship between internal and external consequences of individual leadership
This article seeks to analyse the issue of political leadership in its interaction with party management, which, according to Buller and James’s statecraft model (2012), constitutes one of the five criteria by which to assess leadership
This analysis of the practice of party management under New Labour has shown the benefits of an approach drawing together the fields of political science and organisational studies to study the evolution of Labour Party power structures and processes under the leadership of Tony Blair. This approach is further bolstered by the fact that New Labour explicitly sought to emulate the private sector, with Blair trumpeting his admiration for management thinkers such as Charles Handy and Charles Leadbeater
Summary
In most models successful leadership is equated with winning and with holding onto office, longevity in power cannot be the only variable used in assessing leadership, especially in a country such as the UK where the Prime Minister is a party leader and where, as a consequence, there exists a powerful dialectical relationship between internal and external consequences of individual leadership. McAnulla’s (2011) analysis of Blair’s leadership draws the “toxic triangle” model of destructive leadership from management studies experts Padilla, Hogan and Kaiser (2007), while Tim Heppell (2011) borrows from business academic Lipman-Blumen (2004) to test the applicability of the concept of “toxicity” to the study of five controversial political leaders, including Tony Blair. This coincides with the recent rise of critical approaches to leadership which emphasize destructive leaders’ behaviour, underlining the destructive dimension of charismatic leadership (Collinson, 2012; Kellerman, 2012). Seeking to understand how and why the New Labour party management generally seemed to negate its own objectives, this article opens with a definition of New Labour’s brand of party management, analyses its (often) unintended effects and impact on the organisation, leading to a more general assessment of the relationship between party management and organisational learning, so as to draw lessons from the New Labour experiment on change management in political parties
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