Table of Contents
‘Leadership’ often gets talked about in the world of politics and the public sphere at large. It is routinely admired, vilified, ridiculed, invoked, trivialised, explained and speculated about in media discourse and in everyday conversation. Yet, despite all this talk, there is surprisingly little consensus about how to answer some of the basic questions, for example, about the nature, place, role and impact of leadership in contemporary society. The idea of this project is to bring together academics from a broad array of social science disciplines in Australia and its near abroad who are interested in, and are contributing to, our understanding of (civic, political, bureaucratic) leadership in the public domain in Australia and beyond. We want to take stock of what we know and explore what we need to know about public leadership. In particular we want to explore — and put into a broader international perspective — the Australian ‘state of the art’ with regard to several key questions in the leadership perspective on social and political processes:
Public leadership as an object of study: How do we know ‘leadership’ when we see it in different contexts? How we can conceptualise and study (public) leadership in a systematic fashion from the perspective of various social science disciplines and theories? What key questions ought to be addressed, what key insights have been obtained so far with regard to these questions, and which theories and methods have been employed to obtain them, and what research challenges lie ahead?
Leadership as a democratic design issue: How can the three main forms of public leadership discerned here — civic, political, bureaucratic — be exercised, institutionalised and constrained in democratic polities? How do these various spheres of public leadership intersect, reinforce and/or conflict with one another and how can the ‘creative tension’ between them best be governed and utilised?
Leadership as a solution and a problem: Pleas for ‘more’, ‘better’, ‘genuine’, ‘transformational’, ‘authentic’ or otherwise socially desirable public leadership are often heard in many different areas of politics and government. But what do people mean when they say that? How realistic are these pleas? Who should heed them? For example, what leadership philosophies and practices are able to accommodate the twin challenges of innovation and conservation of public institutions, policies and values in an epoch of pervasive, yet complex, socio-technological changes and creeping crises? The widely perceived ‘hollowing out’ of classic nation state-centric politics under the twin forces of globalisation and individualisation implies that public leadership roles, such as agenda-setting and coalition-building, are increasingly being played by new, more fluid and boundary-less entities such as new social movements, think tanks, international government organisations and transnational alliances. What does this mean for the democratic accountability and legitimacy we have come to expect from those who ideas and actions govern our lives?
In the discussion that follows, we first demarcate the key phenomenon of interest: public leadership. We distinguish between political, administrative and civic spheres in which public leadership is exercised. Each of these spheres entails a number of specific leadership challenges awaiting holders of public offices as well as others aspiring to exercise leadership in the public sphere. Then we briefly survey different academic approaches to studying public leadership, identifying their general thrust and highlighting some key international as well as contributors to each. We conclude by asking some general questions about public leadership in Australia and beyond that we hope will stimulate further reflection as readers attend to the debates and discussion shaped by the contributors to this book.