Worldly Leadership in Pakistan Seth Organizations: An Empirical Challenge to the Concept of Global Leadership

Abstract

In the introduction to this volume, it was suggested that one way of differentiating between global and worldly leadership would be to be more appreciative of indigenous leadership constructs and narratives. By way of making a modest contribution to research and scholarship that engages with worldly leadership in this sense, we report on preliminary findings from an empirical study of indigenous organizations in Pakistan. We attempt to elicit both continuities and discontinuities between Anglo- American forms of organization and large-scale family-run firms in Pakistan. It is important to acknowledge from the outset the influence which Anglo-American organizational thinking and practice has had in Pakistan. Both the British colonial legacy and contemporary management education in Pakistan result in hybrid organizational cultures which display distinct signs of modernity while, simultaneously, preserving traditional ways of leading and organizing that are rooted in kinship relationships. Our empirical enquiry is thus intended to shed critical light on the question of global versus worldly leadership by exploring the admixture of modern and local cultural practices which characterize what we shall shortly define as the Pakistan Seth organization.