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Reimagining Moral Leadership in Business

Image, Identity and Difference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

David H. Fisher  and
Sarah B. Fowler
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Abstract:

In this paper we explore challenges facing leadership in a culture of “all consuming images” from a perspective which claims that images have a moral or normative dimension. The cumulative effect of contemporary image saturation is increased resistance to the normative power of an image. We also suggest that in a culturally diverse global economy, it is necessary to expand the moral aspects of good business leadership beyond providing a basis for productive, coherent group identity within a firm at the expense of seeing outsiders as “others.” We also explore what imagining leadership in business might be like in a world in which visual images shape our understandings of individual and group identity. While our focus is on leadership in business, we also use examples from the political arena. We also suggest that imagining business leadership in the ways we propose may be helpful to women, providing them with an image of business leadership more closely reflective of their experience of corporate culture, its limits, and possibilities.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 1995 , pp. 29 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1995

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References

Notes

1 Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988), pp 158–159; see also Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) and Mark Crispin Miller, Boxed In: The Culture of TV (Northwestern University Press, 1988) for further development of Ewen’s suggestive thesis. Noted leadership theorist Joseph C. Rost acknowledges the power of surface styles, while criticizing them as a basis for leadership development. He says: “The idea that varying styles with different situations is a mature, deeply human, and civilized approach to leadership development is ludicrous.” “Leadership Development in the New Millennium,” The Journal of Leadership Studies, vol. 1 no. 1 (1993), p. 95. He argues that we must move away from an understanding of leadership as management of people to understanding leadership as a process that includes both leaders and followers. While only tangentially related to the issues of identity, recognition and difference that forms the basis of our argument, his article reflects the changing nature of corporate America.

2 We do not mean that either rules or principles are unimportant in the moral life; only that reflection, in both cases, begins with images, either via narratives or visual representations. There is corroboration of our position in recent analyses of leadership. See Peter B. Smith and Mark F. Peterson, Leadership, Organization and Culture (SAGE Publications, 1988), p. 42. The authors argue that recent research seems to indicate that people think of leadership in terms of images, rather than in terms of any specific acts of leadership.

3 William Connolly summarizes how identity and difference are related to one another in social and political life in Identity and Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991):

An identity is established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognized. These differences are essential to its being…Entrenched in this indispensable relationship is a second set of tendencies…to congeal established identities into fixed forms… When these pressures prevail, the maintenance of one identity… involves the conversion of some differences into otherness, into evil, or one of its numerous surrogates. Identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its self-certainty, (p. 64) See also William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Cornell University Press, 2nd ed. 1993).

4 See Sally Helgesen, The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership (New York: Doubleday Currency, 1990). Helgesen proposes that the confluence of a larger number of women entering corporate America (bringing their values with them) and the pressures on corporate structure and styles of leadership from “global competition and a fast-changing technology characterized by flexibility and innovation” has made the business world ripe for a change in how leadership is understood, (pp. xviii-xx) We will examine other aspects of this phenomenon later in our discussion.

5 Clifford Geertz, “Religion As A Cultural System,” in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 90.

6 See Terranee E. Deal and Allen A. Kennedy, Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1982) pp. 37–57 and passim.

7 See W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), Chapter 1, “What is an Image?,” pp. 9–31, for a discussion of the relationship between different members of the “family” of images.

8 The original negative and prints of the photo are owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. See Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present Day. Revised and enlarged edition (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1978), p. 109.

9 This phenomenon was first discussed by Marshall McLuhan, in The Guttenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962).

10 In Douglas Collins, Photographed by Bachrach: 125 Years of American Portraiture (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), p. 158.

11 See Robert N. Bellah and his co-authors, in Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), for a discussion of a “lifestyle enclave” concerned only with private life, especially leisure and consumption.

12 By explicitly joining dimensions of leadership and ethics, we reject the postmodern perspective made popular by Richard Rorty (in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity [Cambridge University Press, 1992]), in which public and private moralities are sharply distinguished as separate enterprises.

13 This brief characterization of the shift from traditional to postmodern culture is not intended as a complete representation of the growing, disputed literature on the phenomenon of “postmodernism.” For a recent discussion of this topic, see Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991).

14 In Western medieval thought, work (as a necessary but cursed activity) was contrasted with prayer (as meaningful, redemptive activity). In modern culture, work became the primary source of individual or class identity, with leisure understood as a time to restore one’s energy for (meaningful) work. In postmodern culture, however, images such as those of the AT&T ad blur boundaries between work and leisure. Meaning becomes diffuse, distributed somewhere between the “world of work” and the “world of play.”

15 Neil Postman, op. cit., Chapter 7. Postman discusses this phenomenon, rooting its origins in the invention of the telegraph, which enables us to transmit information apart from its context.

16 For a discussion of the relationships between images and their sources as effects of power, see the works by Ewen and Jameson cited in Notes 1 and 11.

17 Carol Becker, “Private Fantasies Shape Public Events: And Public Events Invade and Shape Our Dreams,” in Arlene Raven, ed., Art in the Public Interest (UMI Research Press, 1989) pp. 231–253. Whether an iconic image of this kind can be formed in the culture of images described by Ewen, Becker argues that the artist should have known that a painting depicting Washington in this manner would polarize the community in a way that was not sensitive to the importance of “difference” in Chicago. We shall return to this point shortly. A February 1994 U.S. Court of Appeals decision, denying official immunity to the aldermen who seized the painting from the Art Institute, has returned the incident to the public’s attention. It has also resulted in the painting having a longer life than it might have had on its own merits.

18 B.F. Skinner. Walden II (New York: MacMillan, 1948). Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Knopf, 1972)

19 See the discussion of Taylor’s theories in Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), pp. 85–138.

20 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the “Politics of Recognition,” ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton University Press, 1992).

21 Charles Taylor, op. cit., pp. 25–26.

22 See Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice’,” Women Studies International Forum, v.6 no. 6 (1983), pp. 573–581, for a discussion of the importance of issues of difference for feminists.

23 Helgesen, op. cit., pp. 152, 174.

24 See Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1978); and Robert N. Bellah et. ai, op. cit.

25 0ne of many discussions of these issues can be found in John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation/Penguin Books, 1972:

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted confined space, into the keeping of men…How she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life…Men survey women before treating them. Consequently, how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated, (p. 46)

26 See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Harvard University Press, 1982). A “cottage industry” has sprung up around her initial discussion. Further explorations will be found in Kittay and Meyers, eds. Women and Moral Theory (Totowa, NJ:Rowman and Littlefield, 1987), Mary Jeanne Larrabee, ed., An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), and Gilligan’s recent Remapping the Moral Domain eds. Gilligan et. al. (Harvard University Press, 1988).

27 Catharine MacKinnon, “Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination” in Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Harvard University Press, 1987) pp. 38–39.

28 There are many other reasons given by feminists and social analysts as to why the traditional voice does not see the power structure. For example, see Marilyn Frye’s essay “On Oppression” in her The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1983), pp. 1–16.

29 Helgesen’s research would support such an inference. See also Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 29. Hill Collins contrasts western “either/or thinking” with the “both/and” of black feminism. She acknowledges a way of thinking about difference that is compatible with Gilligan’s research. To combine the two voices is only possible as an alternation. This is difficult because to switch back and forth between either/or and both/and thinking [as many women are forced to do] is to switch between world views defined in terms of exclusion and inclusion respectively.

30 Postman, op. cit., Chapter 9. According to Postman this “production” has taken the form of television commercials. In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial…By substituting images for claims the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. (pp. 126–128.)

31 The visual image of a handshake between Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn in September 1993 both images the kinds of leaders they are becoming and enables their followers to grant each other the recognition they need to accept difference as difference instead of seeing the other as enemy.

32 Martha Nussbaum, “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral Imagination,” in Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 148–167.

33 We would like to thank the anonymous referees for this journal and the editor of this issue, Dr. David C. Smith, for their helpful comments on style and content. The remaining infelicities are ours.