Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemThe possibility of democratic leadership: towards a naturalistic conception( 1994)Despite its long history, the phenomenon of leadership remains a theoretical enigma. Its vague, ambiguous, perplexing, and paradoxical nature is generally believed to be the main reason for this. Consequently, along with current perceptions of crisis in our institutions, a parallel sense of crisis also infects the domain of leadership theory. In spite of this general sense of malaise, there nevertheless appears to be a new sense of conviction and confidence in some quarters of contemporary or neoteric thinking on the subject. This is due in part to the incorporation of ideas and concepts that derive from an earlier, but significant, theoretical contribution to leadership studies made by the political theorist James MacGregor Burns, whose psychological conceptualisation of transformational leadership overhauled many traditional assumptions about the phenomenon. In particular, his formulation emphasises the moral and educative nature of the relationship between leaders and followers, which Burns believes is also consistent with contemporary democratic norms. However, critical examination of Burns' account uncovers a number of philosophical and technical difficulties with some of his central claims, including those upholding the theory's democratic credentials. Many of these problems occur because Burns derives some of his key concepts from assumptions and preconceptions about the nature of human motivations and values from influential theories in Humanistic Psychology, which under the weight of critical scrutiny are also found to be wanting. Since some of the most prominent contemporary conceptualisations of leadership in education look to Burns' theory as a source of ideas - for example, Caldwell and Spinks (1992), and Hodgkinson (1991) - similar problems are manifested in these formulations too. Because the notion of leadership is itself so problematic, the argument here is that the quest for a democratic conceptualisation has to begin not with conventional assumptions about the democratic process or the human condition generally, but with a thoroughly scientific understanding of the phenomenon instead. Hence, in pursuit of this end, a naturalistic-coherentist approach to knowledge is adopted, which requires that any account of the leadership phenomenon must be consistent with established knowledge derived from our best existing natural sciences. Implicit in this argument is the belief that by drawing on such knowledge, a better theoretical explanation and understanding of the phenomenon is rendered. The conceptual understanding that arises from this approach generates a representation of the leadership phenomenon that is quite different from anything offered in neoteric formulations. Furthermore, along with developments in social choice theory, the revisions that a scientific account forces on our comprehension of the phenomenon also points to possible means for resolving the democratic question in administrative and leadership theory.