Mark Learmonth – författare

This book brings together public services policy and public services management in a novel way that is likely to resonate with academics, policy makers and practitioners engaged in the organization of public services delivery as it is from a perspective that challenges many received ideas in this field.

Starting from the perspective of critical management studies, the contributors to this volume embed a critical perspective on policy orthodoxy around critical public services policy and management studies (CPPMS). In so doing the authors bring together previous disparate fields of public services policy and public services management, but more importantly, debate and present what ‘critical’ constitutes when applied to public services policy and management. This edited collection presents chapters from a broad range of public services domains including health, education, prisons, local and central government and deals with a range of contemporary issues facing public services managers are examined, including regulation of professions, risk management, user involvement, marketing and leadership.

This book brings together public services policy and public services management in a novel way that is likely to resonate with academics, policy makers and practitioners engaged in the organization of public services delivery as it is from a perspective that challenges many received ideas in this field.

Starting from the perspective of critical management studies, the contributors to this volume embed a critical perspective on policy orthodoxy around critical public services policy and management studies (CPPMS). In so doing the authors bring together previous disparate fields of public services policy and public services management, but more importantly, debate and present what ‘critical’ constitutes when applied to public services policy and management. This edited collection presents chapters from a broad range of public services domains including health, education, prisons, local and central government and deals with a range of contemporary issues facing public services managers are examined, including regulation of professions, risk management, user involvement, marketing and leadership.

Within contemporary culture, ‘leadership’ is seen in ways that appeal to celebrated societal values and norms. As a result, it is becoming difficult to use the language of leadership without at the same time assuming its essentially positive, intrinsically affirmative nature. Within organizations, routinely referring to bosses as ‘leaders’ has, therefore, become both a symptom and a cause of a deep, largely unexamined new conceptual architecture. This architecture underpins how we think about authority and power at work. Capitalism, and its turbo-charged offspring neo-liberalism, have effectively captured ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ to serve their own purposes. In other words, organizational leadership today is so often a particular kind of insidious conservativism dressed up in radical adjectives.

This book makes visible the work that the language of leadership does in perpetuating fictions that are useful for bosses of work organizations. We do this so that we – and anyone who shares similar discomforts – can make a start in unravelling the fiction. We contend that even if our views are contrary to the vast and powerful leadership industry, our basic arguments rest on things that are plain and evident for all to see.

Critical Perspectives on Leadership: The Language of Corporate Power will be key reading for students, academics and practitioners in the disciplines of Leadership, Organizational Studies, Critical Management Studies, Sociology and the related disciplines.