Management research has traditionally assumed that leaders play an essential role in both public and private organizations and are required for a business to run smoothly. However, more recently, a vein of critical research has claimed that leaders can do more harm than good, creating confusion and putting their reputation before production and employee wellbeing. This book asks the question - what would happen if there were no leaders? Would employees be better off without formal (or informal) leaders? And even if such a utopia were desirable, would it be realizable in practice?

Power without Glory demonstrates the use of Foucault's conception of power in organizational analysis. It does this in two ways: first by developing a method for studying power in organizations, namely genealogy; and secondly by conducting a case study according to the principles in this method. The purpose is to highlight some aspects of Foucault's conception of power, which has not been sufficiently explored in organizational analysis. Most studies using a Foucauldian framework have focused on the relations between power and surveillance in organizations. This book takes a different approach and claims that a sufficient understanding of power is only possible by exploring the links between archaeology, genealogy, and power. This is supported by the fact that Foucault claimed that his conception of power was not really a theory of power, but the analytics of power, where the aim was to show how power works in practice. This point is crucial in that the most exciting aspects of Foucault's concepts and methods have to do with the ways in which they allow one to gain new understandings of reality. Such new understandings depend on showing how power works both in constructing truth and in excluding other truths. The book discusses how a decision made in a bank is subjected to genealogical scrutiny. The research presented covers change processes over a period of more than six years. The defining moment of these changes is when management decides to implement a new functional and a new geographical division of labor. The case study unravels the history of this decision and its effects on the workforce. The case study also shows how the change process evolved, the feelings and actions of those involved at the various stages, and the different ideas, concepts, strategies, and techniques.

While organisations have become central for thinking and structuring contemporary social action, existing perspectives on what they are and how to deal with them are still rooted in modern ideas about the foundations of society. The chapters in this volume take critical narrative inquiry -- inspired by post-modern or post-human approaches to organisations -- as a broad range of research and development strategies that challenge the dominant perspectives prevalent in the organisational literature. The purpose of the volume is three-fold. Firstly, a critical reading of organisations foregrounding notions of power and ethics is presented. Secondly, a new framework for understanding and analysing organisational action based on critical notions of storytelling and sustainability is unfolded. Thirdly, the framework is deployed through innovative concepts and learning methodologies for leadership, organisational, or community development. The authors engage in philosophical and theoretical reflections on the ways contemporary organisations work. They also present and analyse case studies of power, storytelling and learning in organisations. As a whole the book provides examples of what can be done to make organisations work in more appropriate ways in the future.

This book contains chapters on education leadership, management and governance in relation to schools in South Africa supplemented with a chapter on gender issues in Zimbabwe. It has been fifteen years since a new Constitution dawned, which promised a society based on the people of South Africa, that recognised the injustices of the past and would be built on fundamental human rights and justice for all no matter their race, ethnicity, or economic power. South Africa has moved a long way in developing a democratic society. The emergence of this book is the result of a collaborative effort of people with diverse cultural, social and ethnic roots, who share a common belief in the development of a just and equal society, and who share a specific interest in developing schools as a fundamental element in developing this equal and just society.

"This book is a contribution to the development of theory and method on organisational change through interactions with real people in real organisations. Grounded in a theory of reality, based on a particular conceptualising method, and illustrated with reference to real case studies, the authors explicate how to do both theory and method on organisational change in a novel, concise and very readable way."