Global leadership - sustaining classic managerialism

Summary, in English

This chapter critically discusses the currently celebrated and seemingly successful trend of global leadership. We claim that part of the answer to why global leadership has become so successful lies in how it is framed and presented as an all-embracing and intuitively good discourse closely aligned with the traditional leader-centred view on leadership in general. While this makes the discourse of global leadership appealing and seductive it also maintains what the chapter suggests to be classic managerialism – emphasis on the manager as the central hub of which everything else in organizations revolves - inherent in much general leadership research. The chapter aims at problematizing this orientation and demystifying global leadership by conceptualizing much of it as an ideological project. In contrast to this the chapter offer a more practice-oriented view on global leadership that includes a much stronger focus on relations, interactions and processes. The latter also suggesting that leadership is a socially constructive influencing process involving meaning, ideas, values and feelings.

• Author: Stefan Sveningsson; Mats Alvesson
• Editor: Lena Zander
• Department/s: Department of Business Administration
• Publishing year: 2020-04-03
• Language: English
• Pages: 39-53
• Publication/Series: Elger Original Reference Series
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781782545354.00011
• Document type: Book chapter
• Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
• Topic: Business Administration
• Keywords: Global leadership; managerialism
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISBN: 9781782545354; ISBN: 9781782545347