Artificial intelligence
My academic engagement is no longer forward-looking, I do still reminisce and reflect on past academic debates and moments. Artificial intelligence (AI) became mainstream a little too late in the day to either engage or inform me. However, I do find myself asking the AI programme (Google Gemini) questions which used to fascinate me. In later years, I was obsessed with a simplistic though rarely asked question.
Why was there a shift from managing change to leading change?
I recently asked the AI programme and it invoked Professor John Kotter, Harvard Business School and change tending to fail. This rubbish answer wasn’t good for my blood pressure. However, it did confirm my concerns that change orthodoxy remains very resistant to change, it was made in Harvard and remains very acritical. AI is the future (apparently), yet it is warming up dogma from the 1990s in the name of progress. If this is the future trajectory of AI, the future is bleak. Consequently, I was very pessimistic when I asked the AI programme another question which used to fascinate me.
What is the problem with leadership studies?
I concede there was a critical assumption embedded in the question, but still pleasantly surprised that the AI programme directed me towards the critical scholar Professor Mats Alvesson. They suggested his 2019 Leadership paper which identified eight problems and his 2020 Leadership Quarterly paper which challenged upbeat leadership studies (see full references at the end). Perhaps the future isn’t so bleak.
The problems identified by Alvesson and echoed by AI include:
- Lack of relevance – Research often ignores major issues
- Unreliable results – Methodologies can produce invalid, unreliable, and unreproducible findings.
- Positive bias – Positive results with ideological bias.
- The conflation of leadership and management.
- Lack of realism – Leadership is portrayed as seductive and positive, not reflective of corporate reality.
- Fragmentation – Large and divergent studies make generalizations difficult.
The laughing scholar
I strongly recommend exploring the large body of Mats Alvesson’s work if you want to critically engage with leadership studies. I even had a bit of an Alvesson academic crush back in the day.
It was fortunate that I had left academia when the pandemic forced us into lockdown. Everyone seemed to go into online/zoom mode, but my gardening was less adaptable to going online. I decided to do some video reviews in my study and a local forest, so as not to be left out. It proved to be mischievous fun. I don’t think the 69 views to date means that I can call myself an influencer. I have just watched my Alvesson review video again. I was pleasantly surprised by how happy and energized I was whilst problematizing leadership studies. Oddly, I had forgotten how much fun I had, see for yourself below:
Questioning “upbeat” leadership studies, let’s encourage questions, rather than success recipes. (YouTube Video published August 23rd 2020)
References
Academic journal papers are invariably firewalled, so you will need library journal access to follow up on these references.
Alvesson, M. (2019). Waiting for Godot: Eight major problems in the odd field of leadership studies. Leadership, 15(1), 27-43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715017736707
Alvesson, M. (2020). Upbeat leadership: A recipe for – or against – “successful” leadership studies. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(6). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2020.101439
What is the problem with leadership studies?
Woodlanddecay 