Robert A. Campbell - Governance and Social Leadership

Governance
and Social
Leadership

Governance
and Social
Leadership

Robert A. Campbell

CAPE BRETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
SYDNEY, NOVA SCOTIA

Copyright 2014 Robert A. Campbell

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Cape Breton University Press recognizes fair dealing uses under the Copyright Act (Canada). Responsibility for the research and permissions obtained for this publication rests with the authors.

Cape Breton University Press recognizes the support of the Province of Nova Scotia, through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage and the support received for its publishing program from the Canada Council for the Arts Block Grants Program. We are pleased to work in partnership with these bodies to develop and promote our cultural resources.

Cover image: Miama Night, by Erin MacKeen, Toronto. NS

Cover design: Cathy MacLean Design, Pleasant Bay, NS

Layout: Mike Hunter, Port Hawkesbury and Sydney, NS

eBook development: WildElement.ca

First printed in Canada.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Campbell, Robert A. (Robert Arthur), 1952-, author

Governance and social leadership / Robert A. Campbell.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-897009-70-3 (pbk.).-- ISBN 978-1-927492-64-2

(pdf).--ISBN 978-1-927492-65-9 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-927942-66-6

(mobi)

1. Leadership. 2. Leadership--Social aspects. I. Title.

HM1261.C34 2014 303.34 C2014-900508-3

C2014-900509-1

Cape Breton University Press

PO Box 5300, 1250 Grand Lake Road

Sydney, NS B1P 6L2 CA

www.cbupress.ca

Governance and Social Leadership

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Preface

The ideas expressed here reflect my personal struggles over the past few decades to understand governance and leadership. My experience working in industry and the nonprofit sectors combined with my academic background in sociology, both as a student and as a faculty member, have provided me with a great deal of exposure to a variety of manifestations and understandings of these phenomena. The net result of this exposure, however, has been an increasing frustration over how little we actually know about these critical areas of public concern and how often both are abused to facilitate the pursuit of personal interest.

The actual work of trying to articulate my position on these matters emerged out of my experience developing and teaching an advanced course on leadership for students in the MBA program in community economic development, for the Shannon School of Business at Cape Breton University, in Sydney, Nova Scotia. My use of the word advanced is meant to capture two things. First, students taking the course have already completed the core business courses, including courses in organizational behaviour, leadership and community economic development. Second, the course provides the opportunity to expose students to a theoretically more challenging exploration of issues related to governance and leadershipone that raises as many questions as answers, but also develops their skills in analysis and synthesis.

That being said, this is not a textbook. It does not attempt to provide a systematic and comprehensive coverage of leadership or governance in an objective and sterile manner, with specific learning goals, sidebars, illustrations, glossaries, questions for reflection and cases for review and application. Nor is it an academic monograph, grounded in a specific theoretical framework, following a particular methodology in an attempt to prove, or at least support, some hypothesis, through the collection and analysis of data. Similarly, it is not a trade book aimed at the presumed intelligent and interested general reader, written in a familiar, if not journalistic, style, providing enthusiastic, if not particularly deep, insight into some phenomenon of interest, anchored in current events, while keeping notes and references to a minimum. Rather it has a bit of all three . Because I am an academic, and because I am concerned that all readers understand the sources of my ideas and are provided with ample direction to pursue their own interests in a more systematic and informed manner, it is somewhat pedantic in its method of presentation. At the same time, I hope that I have managed to write it in a manner that will appeal, and be of some use, to students, academics, practitioners and the general reader. More than anything else, however, it is a guidebook based on my own journey toward understanding the relationship between leadership and governance and developing the notion of social leadership.

Governance and leadership are distinct but inseparable aspects of organizational life. Regrettably, the concept of leadership has been overused to the extent of rendering it almost meaningless. Governance, most often equated with government, is well on its way to suffering the same fate. Despite our misunderstanding of these concepts, governance structures provide the environment in which leadership can emerge. The idea of social leadership captures two critical elements beyond this. First, it draws attention to the fact that the process of carrying out leadership must be one that is social. In other words, it must involve constructive interaction among those involved. Second, the product of the exercise of leadership must be social. It must contribute to social wellbeing in a substantial and sustainable way.

I want to thank the many students who have taken leadership courses from me over the last couple of decades, both in university classrooms and in other venues, for allowing me to subject them to various experiments in pedagogy, course content and ways of thinking. Thanks also to Brittany Erickson, Catherine Leviten-Reid, Jacke Scott and Janice Tulk for their helpful comments and suggestions throughout the writing process.

Robert Campbell, Sydney, Nova Scotia, May 2014

1. Setting the Stage

Briefly stated, there are three reasons for you to read this book. First, rather than providing another theory of leadership, I am offering a new model of how to understand leadershipone that hinges on a particular interpretation of the word social. Second, I dare to explore not just one of the most overused and least understood concepts in the organizational studies vocabulary (leadership), I also tackle the increasingly used but equally misunderstood concept of governance. Third, I am making a deliberate effort to be troublesome.

One of the ways that I mean to be troublesome is through the introduction of disparate ideas from a variety of academic disciplines (arts, humanities, natural and social sciences) and realms of experience (family, school, work, play and community), many of which are not frequently used in discussions of leadership. Some of these ideas should immediately seem germane to the subject matter at hand, while others may appear to be trivial or superfluous. I learned long ago not to underestimate the power of anecdote as an aid to understanding (see Solway 1991); I prefer to interpret trivial in the outdated scholastic sense of foundational, rather than in the newer unfortunate sense of superfluous, or irrelevant.