2014-07-22

From Leadership to Leading-ship: a personal responsibility model for organising work

The paper From Leadership to Leadingship a personal responsibility model for organizing work is now published in the journal Practising Social Change. The author, Rune Kvist Olsen, is educated in Social Science from the University of Tromsø, Norway. He expresses his idea of a distinction between leadership and leading-ship, and advocate a personal responsibility model for organising work to facilitate creativity, productivity and efficiency amongst people. An idea that might be useful for the arts and arts management as well and which helps to reflect on company structures also in the creative industries.

We find the first examples of the conceptualisation of leading in the late 19th century. During this period of industrialisation, the leader-centred model emerged on the workplace stage, and was referred to as leadership. The term leadership was then adopted into common usage and incorporated into the English language. The core element in leadership was the concept of command and control between leaders and followers. The leader should lead and followers should be led. This autocratic line of force was strictly based on a downward relationship between master and servant, and was characterised by a culture of domination, obedience and subservience from top to bottom. During the post-industrial period of the 20th century, numerous subsidiary leadership theories emerged, and books on leadership became popular. One such was the enormously influential Scientific Management by Fredrik Taylor (1911). In the years that followed, the concept of leadership was further developed and interpreted. Rune Kvist Olsens paper can be downloaded here: http://www.ntl-psc.org

Abstract by Rune Kvist Olsen