3

CHAPTERCHAPTER

The System and Culture of

Academic Decision Making

W

e have learned that leadership is a complex phenomenon and is doubly so
if we seek to understand it more fully in order to exercise it more effectively.
As we have explored the literature to address these issues, we have not
found fully satisfying answers. In part because it is an interdisciplinary field, leadership
studies often has a difficult time creating an integrated set of conclusions, especially
concerning the transition from knowledge about leadership to the practice of it.

WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP

We have also discovered that interpretive methods and models produce power-
ful insights but also distort what they study. They serve as filters for what counts as
significant but only give us access to the aspects of experience that they privilege.
Models like entrepreneurial leadership, cultural leadership, organized anarchy,
garbage-can processes, and cybernetic leadership all seem to function in this way.
Empirical studies that help to produce or support the model provide valuable
knowledge about leadership, but they can only control two or three variables at
a time. As a result, their conclusions often seem to reach beyond their specific
findings, giving rise to theories that take on a life of their own. As this occurs, the
integrated aspects of human experience and leadership that do not fit the model
of analysis become distorted or lost from view.

Playfulness and Foolishness

It turns out that there is an illuminating irony in a concluding section of Leader-
ship and Ambiguity that hints at the possibility of leadership as a contextual process