Keith Grint
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 208235 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Keith Grint |
| PRENOMES | Keith |
| SOBRENOME | Grint |
| ASSINATURA | GRINT K |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Warwick |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5796-8990 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 56 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 312 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 56 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1988 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Is there an elective affinity between political leadership and violence? The case of the English regicides, 1649
Political leaders are often associated with violence. There does not seem to be a century when political leaders have not unleashed violence on their external or internal enemies or have themselves been attacked. But is there an affinity between political leadership and violence, and if so what kind of relationship is that affinity? Are all political leaders prone to violence all the time or just some of them some of the time? This article poses …
Whole system change and the English New Model Army’s General Council meetings 1647-49
This paper concerns an early whole system approach to change. Between 1647 and 1649 a series of civil wars across England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland eventually led to the execution of the king, Charles I, and the only period of republican government under Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector. That military and political maelstrom turned the world upside down and produced an attempt by parliament’s New Model Army to generate an alternative const…
Situating and progressing resistance leadership research
Resistance leadership is a vital concept that gets to the heart of the power dynamics of organizations and societies. This interview, conducted by one of the special issue editors, Owain Smolović Jones, with two key figures in critical leadership studies, Keith Grint and David L. Collinson, provides readers with an orientation to this area of research. It does so through offering definititional clarity, expanding on the concept’s value and summar…
Leadership as a Relational and Discursive Process
Building on an ontological and epistemological shift away from the essentialization of leadership (Grint, 2000), the works in this issue expand the understanding of leadership as a discursive, co-constructed, and materially influenced phenomenon.The concept of discursive leadership challenges traditional views that focus on individual characteristics or static organizational structures.Instead, it emphasizes leadership as an ongoing process shape…
What’sApp to Sunak
This article features a leaked WhatsApp message to the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. It was written by Mark E Avelli, a political consultant who sets out what has happened recently in the UK and how he suggests Sunak should act if he wants to remain unsuccessful. That sounds counter-intuitive but not when framed by the revolutionary political theory embraced by the consultant: success is rooted in understanding that victory is not to be ac…
Closing ranks
Using examples from military history, this paper takes Alvesson and Sveningsson’s ‘Extraordinarizaton of the Mundane’ article and inverts it. They suggested that what counted as ‘leadership’ was not the acts of formal leaders but the interpretive work of subordinates, who rendered mundane actions by leaders – such as chatting to employees – as extraordinary. Here, I suggest that the reverse process also occurs – the mundanization of the extraordi…
Habitual Leadership Ethics
This paper is about the relationship between leadership, organisational morals, and temporality. We argue that engaging with questions of time and temporality may help us overcome the overly agentic view of organisational morals and leadership ethics that dominates extant literature. Our analysis of the role of time in organizational morals and leadership ethics starts from a virtue-based approach to leading large-scale moral endeavours. We ask: …
Letter to Putin
This letter sets out to provide helpful advice to President Putin following the recent mutiny of the Wagner Group. It suggests he has made a catastrophic mistake in invading Ukraine and needs to read the history of previous Russian mutinies to understand how they happen and what is likely to happen next. This is a story that starts in Ukraine and ends in chaos
Is leadership the solution to the wicked problem of climate change
This media review piece considers the climate change emergency as an example of a Wicked Problem, a problem type which has no clear solution but requires the collective to address, if we are to save the planet. It also provides a mechanism to link the media debates about climate change to leadership. It first sets out a typology of problems and decision styles, and then explores the cultural theory of Mary Douglas as a way of understanding why we…
Leadership, incrementalism and the repetition of history
Leadership is often associated with a particular form of decision-making: being decisive. This paper reflects on the limits of decisiveness and the role of incrementalism in the Russian decision to invade Ukraine and the role of the West and NATO’s decision-making over the prior 10 years. It suggests that incrementalism is both a legitimate mode and a significant problem in such scenarios, and focuses on the historical context to explain the deci…
Critical Essay
We are, apparently, living in unprecedented times, an Age of Uncertainty, when wicked problems whirl all around as we struggle to cope with Covid-19, environmental catastrophe and the right-wing populism that threatens to unravel all kinds of international agreements. In this personal reflection, 15 years after I wrote an article on wicked problems and the social construction of leadership, I take a look back, and forward, to see whether there ev…
Mutiny and Leadership
Abstract Mutiny is often associated with the occasional mis-leadership of the masses by politically inspired hotheads or a spontaneous and unusually romantic gesture of defiance against a uniquely overbearing military superior. In reality it is seldom either, and usually it has far more mundane roots, not in the absolute poverty of the subordinates but in the relative poverty of the relationships between leaders and led in a military situation. U…
Mutiny and Leadership
Understanding sovereign leadership as a response to terrorism
This study seeks to better understand how notions of sovereign power as a response to terrorism are built and bolstered through use of the signifier ‘leadership’. Through a post-foundational analysis of the speeches, press conferences and writings of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, we theorise ‘sovereign leadership’ as the deployment of the signifier leadership in ways that foreclose language so as to normalise the discourse and acts of sove…
Power and the poisoned chalice
Power, however defined, is something we usually consider as indelibly linked to leadership, as something all leaders and followers seek to obtain, retain, and deploy for good or ill, for themselves or others. But there are occasions when power might be something to avoid, especially when it comes tainted with deleterious consequences, rather like the Christian fable of the poisoned chalice. In this brief provocation, I provide examples where this…
Leadership, management and command in the time of the Coronavirus
The Covid-19 pandemic that swept through the world in late 2019 and through 2020 provides a test not just for all societies and their leadership, but for leadership theory. In a world turned upside down, when many conventions are disposed of, it is clear that things will not return to the status quo ante any time soon, if ever. In the light of these challenges, this short paper suggests we might reconsider the way governments and their leaders ac…
The Gender-Technology Relation
Part One Theoretical Developments in Gender-Technology Relationship: Feminist Sociology and Methodology: Leaky Black Boxes in Gender/Technology Relations On Some Failures of Nerve in Constructivist and Feminist Analyses of Technology. Part Two Case Studies of Gender- Technology Relation: Gender is Calling: Some Reflections of Past, Present and Future Uses of Telephone Configuration of Domestic Practices in Designing of Household Appliances New Re…
The interplay of the Dirty Hands of British area bombing and the wicked problem of defeating Nazi Germany in the Second World War – A lesson in leadership ethics
The British area bombing of Germany in the Second World War has provided for enduring ethical controversy. Eschewing conventional approaches, we present area bombing as a Dirty Hands leadership response to the Wicked Problem of Britain’s wartime strategic predicament. Using historical methodology, we establish two distinct phases in area bombing: 1942–1944, when this was ethically contentious but politically necessary; and 1944–1945, which lacks …
No More Heroes
This paper revisits Meindl et al's (1985) 'romance of leadership' thesis and extends these ideas in a number of inter-related ways. First, it argues that the thesis has sometimes been neglected and/or misinterpreted in subsequent studies. Second, the paper suggests that romanticism is a much broader and more historically rich term with wider implications for leadership studies than originally proposed. Arguing that romanticism stretches beyond le…
Dirty Hands and Clean Heels
The paper discusses 21 days of political leadership in the UK following the EU referendum, the publication of the Chilcot Report on the Iraq War, and the appointment of a new cabinet by the new Prime Minister, Theresa May. It begins by modelling four possible approaches to political decision-making by taking into account the intent of the decision-maker, their acceptance or avoidance of responsibility, and the nature of the consequences. It sugge…
Agonistic governance
This article expands organization theory about Wicked, Tame and Critical problems and their associated decision-making styles, Leadership, Management and Command, by offering a framework that spans across all three which we call ‘Agonistic Governance’: an approach to decision-making that is premised on the acceptance that complexity generates paradoxes and contradictions and, to be successful, organizational actors must have the agency to positiv…
Agonistic Governance
This article expands organization theory about Wicked, Tame, and Critical problems and their associated decision-making styles, Leadership, Management, and Command, by offering a framework that spans across all three which we call ‘Agonistic Governance’: an approach to decision-making that is premised on the acceptance that complexity generates paradoxes and contradictions and, to be successful, organizational actors must have the agency to posit…
The Hedgehog and the Fox
On 6 June 2014, it will be 70 years since D-Day. This article, drawn from my book on the topic (Grint, 2008), reconfigures the operation as a contest between two different approaches to war that embody different assumptions about the importance of leadership, management and command. Taking Archilocus’ phrase – ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’ – I suggest that the success of the Allies was dependent upon their grea…
The case of the noble savage
The presumption of American’s noble savage provides the foundation for the creation of one of the world’s most recognizable stereotypes – the American Indian. The stereotype, lodged in the minds of most Americans as the Plains Indian warrior, contributed to decades of misunderstanding about leadership in traditional American Indian societies and governance in contemporary American Indian tribes. Review of both indigenous leadership styles and gov…
Leading questions
This paper concerns the apparent decentralization of decision-making in the UK that has accompanied the new coalition government. In particular, we are interested in the rise of Prime Minister Cameron’s public services initiative: ‘Big Society’, and one of its antecedents, ‘Total Place’. We suggest that while these remain sites of political contest, they provide an opportunity for rethinking why the leadership of change might be linked to a chang…
Problems, problems, problems
The invasion of Iraq was premised upon accounts of the situation that have proved unsustainable, but that has not generated a change in the strategy of the coalition forces. Conventional contingency accounts of leadership suggest that accurate accounts of the context are a critical element of the decision-making apparatus but such accounts appear incapable of explaining the decisions of those engaged. An alternative model is developed that adapts…
No More Heroes
This paper revisits Meindl et al's (1985) 'romance of leadership' thesis and extends these ideas in a number of inter-related ways. First, it argues that the thesis has sometimes been neglected and/or misinterpreted in subsequent studies. Second, the paper suggests that romanticism is a much broader and more historically rich term with wider implications for leadership studies than originally proposed. Arguing that romanticism stretches beyond le…
On Some Failures of Nerve in Constructivist and Feminist Analyses of Technology
Whereas many constructivist and feminist approaches to the social study of technology share an antipathy to technological tietenninism, they offer an insufficiently radical critique of technolagy. Three main problems in "anti-essentialist" critiques of techno logical determinism are identified, all of which mean that such critiques remain committed to a form of essentialism. These characteristics recur in many recent feminist arguments about tech…
American Indian Ways of Leading and Knowing
Having drawn some brief historical lines for our research, we suggest that significant differences exist between American Indian and western approaches to, and perspectives on, leadership, and we illustrate some of these differences drawing particularly upon Indian educational leadership. American Indian leadership was often interpreted by non-indigenous observers as an inability to lead rather than a different ability to lead. Western models are…
Consumption and Identity at Work
The Machine at Work
Black Self-Organization in Trade Unions
This paper considers the significance of self-organization for black and minority workers in trade unions. It embodies a review of the theoretical and empirical evidence in support of black self-organization within unions; that is, a strategy of relative autonomy rather than separatism or submersion within a race-blind union. The theoretical support is derived from arguments concerning identity, participation and power. Much of the empirical mate…
Computers, Guns, and Roses
Rob Kling's article (this issue), written in response to our previous critique of his work (Woolgar and Grint 1991) and to an earlier analysis of constructivist arguments in studies of technology (Woolgar 1991), is stimulating and provocative. Kling raises issues of particular importance for the current convergence between the work of computer and scientists: The increasing interest in social questions of many based within the computer sciences c…
Critical Essay
We are, apparently, living in unprecedented times, an Age of Uncertainty, when wicked problems whirl all around as we struggle to cope with Covid-19, environmental catastrophe and the right-wing populism that threatens to unravel all kinds of international agreements. In this personal reflection, 15 years after I wrote an article on wicked problems and the social construction of leadership, I take a look back, and forward, to see whether there ev…
Leadership, management and command in the time of the Coronavirus
The Covid-19 pandemic that swept through the world in late 2019 and through 2020 provides a test not just for all societies and their leadership, but for leadership theory. In a world turned upside down, when many conventions are disposed of, it is clear that things will not return to the status quo ante any time soon, if ever. In the light of these challenges, this short paper suggests we might reconsider the way governments and their leaders ac…
The Hedgehog and the Fox
On 6 June 2014, it will be 70 years since D-Day. This article, drawn from my book on the topic (Grint, 2008), reconfigures the operation as a contest between two different approaches to war that embody different assumptions about the importance of leadership, management and command. Taking Archilocus’ phrase – ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’ – I suggest that the success of the Allies was dependent upon their grea…
Computers and the Transformation of Social Analysis
There is no question that Kling is one of the foremost pioneers in exploring the dimensions of computing. For twenty years, he and his colleagues have insisted that the study of computing must extend well beyond the technical design of computers. Starting with a concern for the of computers on society, Kling and his colleagues have begun to explore various perspectives for revealing the dimensions of computer systems. This trend happily coincides…
Leading questions
This paper concerns the apparent decentralization of decision-making in the UK that has accompanied the new coalition government. In particular, we are interested in the rise of Prime Minister Cameron’s public services initiative: ‘Big Society’, and one of its antecedents, ‘Total Place’. We suggest that while these remain sites of political contest, they provide an opportunity for rethinking why the leadership of change might be linked to a chang…
Business process re‐engineering in theory and practice
This article examines the hype surrounding BPR from a historical, theoretical and empirical perspective. It delineates three ways in which politics are critical to understanding BPR and uses findings on BPR practice, including from case study work and a 1994/5 UK survey conducted by the authors, to locate and explain BPR's appeal and also the less radical outcomes of BPR practice
Is leadership the solution to the wicked problem of climate change
This media review piece considers the climate change emergency as an example of a Wicked Problem, a problem type which has no clear solution but requires the collective to address, if we are to save the planet. It also provides a mechanism to link the media debates about climate change to leadership. It first sets out a typology of problems and decision styles, and then explores the cultural theory of Mary Douglas as a way of understanding why we…
Learning to Lead
Leadership, incrementalism and the repetition of history
Leadership is often associated with a particular form of decision-making: being decisive. This paper reflects on the limits of decisiveness and the role of incrementalism in the Russian decision to invade Ukraine and the role of the West and NATO’s decision-making over the prior 10 years. It suggests that incrementalism is both a legitimate mode and a significant problem in such scenarios, and focuses on the historical context to explain the deci…
Placing leadership
Situating and progressing resistance leadership research
Resistance leadership is a vital concept that gets to the heart of the power dynamics of organizations and societies. This interview, conducted by one of the special issue editors, Owain Smolović Jones, with two key figures in critical leadership studies, Keith Grint and David L. Collinson, provides readers with an orientation to this area of research. It does so through offering definititional clarity, expanding on the concept’s value and summar…
Power and the poisoned chalice
Power, however defined, is something we usually consider as indelibly linked to leadership, as something all leaders and followers seek to obtain, retain, and deploy for good or ill, for themselves or others. But there are occasions when power might be something to avoid, especially when it comes tainted with deleterious consequences, rather like the Christian fable of the poisoned chalice. In this brief provocation, I provide examples where this…
Dirty Hands and Clean Heels
The paper discusses 21 days of political leadership in the UK following the EU referendum, the publication of the Chilcot Report on the Iraq War, and the appointment of a new cabinet by the new Prime Minister, Theresa May. It begins by modelling four possible approaches to political decision-making by taking into account the intent of the decision-maker, their acceptance or avoidance of responsibility, and the nature of the consequences. It sugge…
Women and Equality
While gender-related inequalities at work remain common, examples of their elimination, though rare, do exist. This paper provides an empirical examination of the acquisition of equal pay by women in the Post Office between 1870 and 1961. Using the dual theoretical axes of strategic action and structural constraint, it focuses upon the collective action of social groups, and the structural constraints within which they acted. Arguing that structu…
Computers and the Transformation of Social Analysis
There is no question that Kling is one of the foremost pioneers in exploring the dimensions of computing. For twenty years, he and his colleagues have insisted that the study of computing must extend well beyond the technical design of computers. Starting with a concern for the of computers on society, Kling and his colleagues have begun to explore various perspectives for revealing the dimensions of computer systems. This trend happily coincides…
Organizations in Society
Computers, Guns, and Roses
Rob Kling's article (this issue), written in response to our previous critique of his work (Woolgar and Grint 1991) and to an earlier analysis of constructivist arguments in studies of technology (Woolgar 1991), is stimulating and provocative. Kling raises issues of particular importance for the current convergence between the work of computer and scientists: The increasing interest in social questions of many based within the computer sciences c…
Reengineering History
Reengineering has rapidly become the business buzzword of the early 1990s. This examination of the reengineering phenomenon sets out to consider the extent to which it is a new model for organizational change and offers some suggestions as to why it appears to have become so popular. It disputes some claims to novelty and internal coherence and argues that explanations for reengineering's popularity might be sought through an externalist rather t…
Craft, Class and Control
This book charts the decline of the British shipbuilding industry from 1930 to the present. Concentrating on Wearside, it describes how the town had its livelihood extinguished by Conservative government policy in 1988. It looks at the craft division of labour and the ways in which both capital and labour have defended this system of production in the past. Dealing with questions of changing identity, community, orientations and values of shop fl…
Black Self-Organization in Trade Unions
This paper considers the significance of self-organization for black and minority workers in trade unions. It embodies a review of the theoretical and empirical evidence in support of black self-organization within unions; that is, a strategy of relative autonomy rather than separatism or submersion within a race-blind union. The theoretical support is derived from arguments concerning identity, participation and power. Much of the empirical mate…
The Concept of Work
Business process re‐engineering in theory and practice
This article examines the hype surrounding BPR from a historical, theoretical and empirical perspective. It delineates three ways in which politics are critical to understanding BPR and uses findings on BPR practice, including from case study work and a 1994/5 UK survey conducted by the authors, to locate and explain BPR's appeal and also the less radical outcomes of BPR practice
On Some Failures of Nerve in Constructivist and Feminist Analyses of Technology
Whereas many constructivist and feminist approaches to the social study of technology share an antipathy to technological tietenninism, they offer an insufficiently radical critique of technolagy. Three main problems in "anti-essentialist" critiques of techno logical determinism are identified, all of which mean that such critiques remain committed to a form of essentialism. These characteristics recur in many recent feminist arguments about tech…
A Further Decisive Refutation of the Assumption That Political Action Depends on the "Truth" and a Suggestion That We Need to Go beyond This Level of Debate
Gill (1996 [this issue]) raises some important questions about the basis for political intervention. We are grateful for the opportunity to sharpen and clarify our argument (Grint and Woolgar 1995). In bare outline, the thrust of our argument was that many avowedly anti-essentialist arguments turn out to depend on a form ofessentialism. Consequently, rather than just continuing the program to specify antecedent conditions (gender or race bias, so…
Fuzzy Management
Leadership
What is leadership? Are leaders made or born? Are the characteristics and challenges of leadership the same across time and cultures? Do leaders `pull' or are they `pushed'? Are leaders driven by needs that may be dysfunctional to the organizations they lead? Do women leaders behave differently from men? Should we look for models of business and organizational leadership in military organizations? These are all just some of the questions posed in…
Fuzzy management
Introduction
In whatever direction a ship moves the flow of waves it cuts will always be noticeable ahead of it ... When the ship moves in one direction there is one and the same wave ahead of it, when it turns frequently the wave ahead of it also turns frequently. But wherever it may turn there always will be the wave anticipating its movement. Whatever happens it appears that just that event was foreseen and decreed. Wherever the ship may go, the rush of wa…
Managing Change Through Commitment
In examining management styles during the 1990s, there are three fundamental features that need to be analysed: endeavours made in changing the operations of organizations; the fact that these endeavours mostly resulted in failure; and the fact that most organizations may be characterized with risk aversion. As has been seen in previous chapters, organizations and managing organizations in the Western World is accompanied by a continuous state of…
Leadership
The Machine at Work
Consumption and Identity at Work
The Gender-Technology Relation
The Machine at Work
Technology, Work and Society
Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl and Michael Stack (eds.), Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution, London: Verso, 1997, paper £15.00, vii+304 pp.Giovanni Dosi, David J. Teece and Josef Chytry (eds.), Technology, Organization and Competitiveness: Perspectives on Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, £45.00, ix+345 pp.Michael Dunkerley, The Jobless Economy? Computer Technology in the World…
History of Management
Leadership
Problems, problems, problems
The invasion of Iraq was premised upon accounts of the situation that have proved unsustainable, but that has not generated a change in the strategy of the coalition forces. Conventional contingency accounts of leadership suggest that accurate accounts of the context are a critical element of the decision-making apparatus but such accounts appear incapable of explaining the decisions of those engaged. An alternative model is developed that adapts…
Sociology (39 obras) · Political science (35 obras) · Law (27 obras) · Epistemology (22 obras) · Politics (20 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Computer Science (14 obras) · History (14 obras) · Psychology (13 obras)