My name is Scott Taylor and I work at the Birmingham Business School and my current
job title is Reader in Leadership and Organisation Studies.
So it means that my specialist area of research is management, organisation and leadership.
So what interests me about this election is the ways in which leadership is being promoted
by two parties in particular – the Conservative Party and the Labour Party.
LibDems and the Greens and the SNPs seem less concerned with leadership at the moment for
some reason so I won’t talk so much about them.
This started on the day that the Prime Minister, Theresa May, called the election during her
six or seven minute speech that day, standing outside No.10 Downing Street in London, which
was obviously a really significant symbol of leadership in itself.
She referred I think four times to the fact that she thinks the Conservative Party believes
that this party needs strong and stable leadership and that phrase has become one of the most
prominent hashtags of this campaign and it’s use has been tracked by a range of different
news media and there’s been quite a lot of satirical commentary on the use and repeated
use of this phrase from specific journalists and news media.
Now I’m not really so interested in the mechanics of political slogan making, but
what I am interested in is the implicit and explicit message of this idea of strong and
stable leadership.
So there are three aspects of it which I think are really interesting.
The first thing is the promotion of leadership as a solution and this is something that we’re
prone to in politics but also in public sector organisations and in private sector organisations.
If and when we run into a problem of any kind, very often we tend to look to leaders or we
look for leadership or we make a case for better leadership.
Now all of these things imply that an individual, one single person in the position of leader,
can make a substantial difference to an incredibly large and complex organisation or social entity.
Now this is obviously true, leaders do make a difference.
Leaders take their followers in different direction depending on their beliefs or the
data that they have to act on, but the veneration of leaders in this way and the promotion of
a single individual as a change-maker or difference-maker is intrinsically problematic when you’re
dealing with, in the case of the UK, a politician, the Prime Minister, has to claim to lead more
than 60 million people.
That’s just impossible.
The second thing that’s interesting about a strong and stable leadership in particular
coming from the Conservative Party is what it implies about the other parties.
So every political message contains within it its opposite or its other – as some academics
say.
So when Theresa May promotes herself and the Conservative Party has provided a strong and
stable leadership, she implies and suggests that all of the other parties and all of the
other leaders, will provide weak and unstable leadership.
Now this is clearly something which has been identified by the Conservative Party as a
plausible message in making a case to vote Conservative, so they may have looked around
and they’ve had focus groups which have identified for example Jeremy Corbyn or Tim
Farron as being identified with less strong leadership than Theresa May in the Conservative
Party, or more unstable leadership or part of the organisation.
So in that sense it’s always [0:04:17] I think with leaderly [sic] messages of this
kind in politics in particular to ask what the implicit or other message within the slogan
is.
The third thing that’s really interesting about the idea of a strong, stable leadership
for me, speaking as someone who does a lot of research on feminism in contemporary workplaces,
is the implication again that strong and stable leadership is coming from a woman, Theresa
May.
We’ve seen this already with Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK when she
was characterised as The Iron Lady and she was often described as being more masculine
than many of the men in the Conservative Party at that time.
It seems to me that this is a direction that Theresa May and the Conservatives have decided
to continue and to extend.
Even though the Conservatives are the only party to have provided a woman Prime Minister
in the UK, they have a relatively poor record on increasing the diversity of rank and file
MPs.
The Labour Party have done much more in this respect in implementing all the shortlists
and quotas for MP selection processes.
So the Conservatives have decided to suggest that even though they have a woman Prime Minister,
even though they seem to be very proud of that, they still want to maintain a sense
of masculinity in the leadership that they’re promoting to the country at the moment.
Now this is an interesting choice because it implies that the alternative to a masculine
leader is not as credible to voters and it also implies that the other party leaders,
the other potential Prime Ministers, are less masculine and therefore less worth voting
for.
So the idea that when we think leadership we have to think ‘man’ or we have to think
‘masculine’, is something which again I think is worth questioning in this election
process.
So those are the three things that I would say are important, just in terms of my research
field which is leadership studies.