Management theory and application Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Management theory and application - Essay Example Invisible Management is an attempt to approach the subject of leadership in a more theoretically precise and useful way by grounding it in a social constructionist framework. The book is an edited volume consisting of thirteen chapters, eleven of them empirical. It draws on a tradition of scholarship--particularly in sociology, anthropology, social psychology, and neo-Freudian psychology--that emphasizes the role of society in the construction of leadership. To turn these pages is to be reminded again of the critical importance that the classical sociologists, Weber and Simmel, as well as psychologists such as Freud and Erickson, placed on developing a useful theory of leadership, especially one that recognized the social dimensions of leadership as opposed to simplistic hero worship. The book also reminds one of the narrowness of the approach to executive leadership taken by contemporary American scholarship, with its emphasis on social demography and statistical work at the expense of theory development and field data. In many ways, the contributors to this volume are suggesting that the way to go forward in leadership scholarship is to take a step back toward these earlier theoretical and empirical traditions. The first two chapters lay out the books basic theme of the role of social constructionism in leadership studies. My understanding of the argument that links the various chapters is as follows. Leading and following are social processes that are mediated through language and other forms of symbolization.