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Destructive Management Leadership: a review essay Destructive Leadership and Management Hypocrisy: Advances in Theory and Practice, by Selin Metin Camgöz & Özge Tayfur Ekmekci ISBN: 9781800431812 Bingley, Emerald Publishing Limited, 320 pp., €87.90 £ 70.- (hbk.), 2021 Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer Some might argue that leadership is – by definition – destructive (Kropotkin, 1902; Piven & Clowad, 1971; Parker et al., 2020). And there is plenty of evidence for that in our world, from Russia’s Putin to America’s Donald Trump, from India’s Modi to Brazil’s Bolsonaro, from Hungary’s Orban to Italy’s Meloni – the list goes on. And this does not even include super-destructive leaders like Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Pinochet. Yet, in management studies things are different – here managerial leadership is great. The field of management studies – while pretending to be academic – is mostly about legitimising the domination of management over workers, local communities, and the environment (Klikauer & Simms, 2021a). And for that, management studies depends on ideology, as virtually all ideologies provide highly valuable functions for a ruling elite. One can safely argue that management studies not only operates with ‘fraud and deception’ (Tourish, 2020) – perhaps ever since Taylor’s so-called ‘Scientific Management’ (Lepore 2009) – but it also depends on ideology to legitimise management as an institution and it does this for at least three reasons: 1) to camouflage contradiction such as that between workers and managers or those that might be called corporate apparatchiks (Klikauer & Simms, 2021b); 2) to justify domination; and 3) to eliminate – as much as possible – the emancipation of workers from the domineering structures of, for example, management. For that the subject of management studies has invented plenty of ideological justifications for one of management’s favourite institutions: managerial leadership. As a consequence, there is an ideology of managerial leadership, or what Bolchover (2005) calls the great corporate leader. Yet, and this happens only on extremely rare occasions, some academics within the body of management studies are game enough to issue some mild critique of managerial leadership. In general, such a critique – when it comes at all – comes from those on the fringes of management studies and not from established business school professors.
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It also does not come from those who publish in what the ideologues of management studies call reputable, top, and A-star journals (Parker, 2002). In other words, you either publish in career-advancing top management studies journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, etc. (Nyberg & Wright, 2022:717), or you are confined to the periphery of management studies. Cunningly, some of the ideological apostles of management studies have invented their very own version of critique. This critique of management studies is system stabilising and not system challenging. This stabilising critique is often framed using the terminology of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (Klikauer, 2011). Writers in management studies and the related field of organisation studies call their system-conforming invention ‘critical management studies’, or CMS (Klikauer, 2015a). CMS pretends to be critical while supporting management studies. Perhaps a good way to understand the difference between both is to return to none other than the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (February 1848) in which both write, ‘Socialism was, on the continent at least, “respectable”; communism was the very opposite’ (Marx & Engels, 1848). This clarifies CMS. Today, the critique of CMS is respectable – it is welcomed in mainstream management studies journals, in management conferences, and even more so in organisation studies conferences. Real critique is the very opposite (Horkheimer, 1937). Real critique is not found in the mainstream journals of management studies or organisation studies. This publication edited by Selin Metin Camgöz & Özge Tayfur Ekmekci falls into the category of a system-stabilising critique. The collection has three parts: (i) definitional issues and conceptual clarifications; (ii) how can anyone be like that? – systematising; and (iii) emerging issues in destructive leadership: a special concern about measures and remedies
Destructive Management Leadership: a review essay Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer
vol. 64, no. 2, 2022