David Collinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 267670 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Collinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Collinson |
| SIGNATURE | COLLINSON D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0884-9960 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1104 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
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…
You Just Had to Get on with It: Exploring the Persistence of Gender Inequality through Women's Career Histories
This article examines the career histories of the first generation of UK women to enter professional employment in the 1970s and 1980s in comparatively large numbers. In so doing, it contributes to the sparse literature on older women's working life histories. Presenting empirical research on women's experiences in the legal and HR sectors, it reveals how women pioneers were often silenced by requirements to conform with male-dominated norms, val…
Introduction to the Special Issue
Critical leadership studies: A response to Learmonth and Morrell
This article re-states the value of a dialectical approach to critical leadership studies: one that explicitly uses the ‘language of leadership’ to examine and illuminate workplace power and identity dynamics. Outlining an alternative view of what it means to be ‘critical’, this response questions the dichotomizing tendency in Learmonth and Morrell’s arguments and highlights their misrepresentation and misinterpretation of my 2014 article. Learmo…
No More Heroes: Critical Perspectives on Leadership Romanticism
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…
Dichotomies, dialectics and dilemmas: New directions for critical leadership studies
This article builds on Fairhurst and Connaughton’s proposals for future research agendas in leadership studies by critically examining three key themes in the leadership literature: dichotomies, dialectics, and dilemmas. The first section argues that mainstream leadership research frequently relies on conceptual dichotomies which are often multiple, inter-related, and proliferating. Critiques of dichotomization are suggestive of more dialectical …
Prozac leadership and the limits of positive thinking
This article critically examines excessive positivity in leadership dynamics. It argues that the tendency for leader positivity to become excessive is a recurrent but under-researched medium through which power and identity can be enacted in leadership dynamics. Drawing on the metaphor of ‘Prozac’, it suggests that leaders’ excessive positivity is often characterized by a reluctance to consider alternative voices, which can leave organizations an…
In search of the perfect manager? Work-life balance and managerial work
Work-life balance debates continue to proliferate but give relatively little critical attention to managerial workers. This article draws on research into the experiences of managers in a local government organization revealing an intricate, multifaceted and heterogeneous picture of fragmentation, conflicting demands, pressures and anxieties. The study highlights the importance of paid work for public sector managers; the concomitant difficulties…
Blended Leadership: Employee Perspectives on Effective Leadership in the UK Further Education Sector
This article explores employee perspectives on effective leadership in UK Further Education (FE). Studies on leadership effectiveness typically seek either to specify the individual qualities of `heroic' leaders or, increasingly, to highlight the collective nature of `post-heroic' leadership. While these discourses are frequently seen as dichotomous and competing, our research found that FE employees often value practices that combine elements of…
What Do We Mean by Communication? Responding to Mumby and Ashcraft
Discussion of Thomas and Davies: Refuting Romanticism: The Value of Feminist Perspectives for Understanding Resistance
Questions of Distance
Dialectics of leadership
Mainstream leadership studies tend to privilege and separate leaders from followers. This article highlights the value of rethinking leadership as a set of dialectical relationships. Drawing on post-structuralist perspectives, this approach reconsiders the relations and practices of leaders and followers as mutually constituting and co-produced. It also highlights the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that typically characterize these shif…
Identities and Insecurities: Selves at Work
This article explores the growing interest in selves and subjects at work. In particular, it examines the analytical importance of insecurity for understanding the subjective power relations and survival strategies of organization. Insecurity in organizations can take many different, sometimes overlapping forms. Highlighting how these insecurities can intersect in the reproduction of workplace selves and organizational power relations, the articl…
Managing Humour
This article examines the under‐explored relationship between humour, power and management. Critically analysing the functionalist influence on workplace humour studies, it addresses the reproduction of humour through power relations and of management control through joking relations. In particular, the following argument considers how, in different social and organizational contexts, the management of humour is implemented through the practices …
A response to Wray-Bliss: Revisiting the Shopfloor
A Response to Wray-Bliss: Revisiting the Shopfloor
PREVIOUS ARTICLEAbstract Ethics, Embodied Ethics: The Strange Marriage of Foucault and Positivism in Labour Process Theory
Over the Pond and Across the Water’: Developing the Field of ‘Gendered Organizations’
This article is concerned with the development of gendered organizations as a field of study. It begins by exploring some of the factors that militate against integrating organization studies and gender studies and gendered organizations scholarship over national/continental divides. Increasingly doubtful about whether traditional (mainstream and critical) organization theories will or can adequately address gender, we contend that scholars of ge…
Surviving the Rigs': Safety and Surveillance on North Sea Oil Installations
This article examines the politics of accident reporting on North Sea oil installations. In the context of an all-pervasive safety culture and performance assessment system, offshore workers restricted the reporting of accidents. Other studies suggest that workers often respond to increased monitoring by engaging in defensive practices that manipulate performance information. Accordingly, a central contention of this article is that performance a…
Shift‐ing Lives”: Work‐Home Pressures in the North Sea Oil Industry
Peu d'études ont été faites sur les rapports entre travail et vie privée dans l'industrie pétrolière en mer du Nord. L'auteur étudie les rapports de force asymétriques et les inégalités de fait qui caractérisent l'industrie du forage en mer. Prenant le cas des travailleurs à contrat des deux sexes, l'auteur examine les pres‐sions économiques et les contraintes d'espace et de temps aux‐quelles ces employés sont soumis, sur le lieu de travail et da…
Men as Managers, Managers as Men: Critical Perspectives on Men, Masculinities and Managements
Delayering Managers: Time-Space Surveillance and its Gendered Effects
This article seeks to extend the growing interest in time-space issues within social and organizational theory (Giddens, 1984, 1987; Harvey, 1990) by focusing on management and gender in the workplace. It examines the impact of what we have termed `time-space surveillance' on managers who have survived delayering and also addresses the gendered conditions and consequences of these processes. Drawing on research from the UK insurance industry, we …
Men as Managers, Managers as Men: Critical Perspectives on Men, Masculinities and Managements
It's Only Dick: The Sexual Harassment of Women Managers in Insurance Sales
Most studies of sexual harassment in organizations have used quantitative methods to measure the incidence of cases. Less attention has focused upon the qualitative dynamics of workplace sexual harassment. Drawing upon detailed qualitative and quantitative data, this paper explores the complex organisational interactions and interrelationships through which the vicious circles of sexual harassment can be reproduced. Highlighting women managers' e…
Having Fun: Humour as Resistance in Brazil
Highlighting the under-researched interrelationship between workplace humour and resistance, this paper examines employee opposition in a Brazilian telecommunications company. Much of the literature on corporate culture and humour has emphasized the way that 'having fun' can facilitate production. Functionalist in perspective, such studies treat organizational joking both as a means by which employees can 'let off steam' and as a flexible tool fo…
Identities and Insecurities: Selves at Work
This article explores the growing interest in selves and subjects at work. In particular, it examines the analytical importance of insecurity for understanding the subjective power relations and survival strategies of organization. Insecurity in organizations can take many different, sometimes overlapping forms. Highlighting how these insecurities can intersect in the reproduction of workplace selves and organizational power relations, the articl…
Naming Men as Men: Implications for Work, Organization and Management
This paper seeks to contribute to the growing interest in naming men as men as part of a critical analysis of gendered power relations in organizations. The paper highlights the way in which men and masculinities are frequently central to organizational analysis, yet rarely the focus of interrogation. They remain taken for granted and hidden. Examining recent studies that contribute to a critical analysis of gendered power relations, we consider …
Engineering Humour: Masculinity, Joking and Conflict in Shop-floor Relations
The focus of this paper is on the organizational significance of shop-floor humour and in particular its relationship to gender identity and working-class resistance. A brief review of the literature on organizational humour is followed by a more detailed examination of the illuminating analysis by Willis of school/shop-floor counter-culture. Although his research provides a strong basis for the case study presented below, it is criticized for a …
Dialectics of leadership
Mainstream leadership studies tend to privilege and separate leaders from followers. This article highlights the value of rethinking leadership as a set of dialectical relationships. Drawing on post-structuralist perspectives, this approach reconsiders the relations and practices of leaders and followers as mutually constituting and co-produced. It also highlights the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that typically characterize these shif…
It's Only Dick: The Sexual Harassment of Women Managers in Insurance Sales
Most studies of sexual harassment in organizations have used quantitative methods to measure the incidence of cases. Less attention has focused upon the qualitative dynamics of workplace sexual harassment. Drawing upon detailed qualitative and quantitative data, this paper explores the complex organisational interactions and interrelationships through which the vicious circles of sexual harassment can be reproduced. Highlighting women managers' e…
Managing the Shopfloor: Subjectivity, Masculinity and Workplace Culture
Having Fun: Humour as Resistance in Brazil
Highlighting the under-researched interrelationship between workplace humour and resistance, this paper examines employee opposition in a Brazilian telecommunications company. Much of the literature on corporate culture and humour has emphasized the way that 'having fun' can facilitate production. Functionalist in perspective, such studies treat organizational joking both as a means by which employees can 'let off steam' and as a flexible tool fo…
No More Heroes: Critical Perspectives on Leadership Romanticism
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…
In search of the perfect manager? Work-life balance and managerial work
Work-life balance debates continue to proliferate but give relatively little critical attention to managerial workers. This article draws on research into the experiences of managers in a local government organization revealing an intricate, multifaceted and heterogeneous picture of fragmentation, conflicting demands, pressures and anxieties. The study highlights the importance of paid work for public sector managers; the concomitant difficulties…
Prozac leadership and the limits of positive thinking
This article critically examines excessive positivity in leadership dynamics. It argues that the tendency for leader positivity to become excessive is a recurrent but under-researched medium through which power and identity can be enacted in leadership dynamics. Drawing on the metaphor of ‘Prozac’, it suggests that leaders’ excessive positivity is often characterized by a reluctance to consider alternative voices, which can leave organizations an…
Over the Pond and Across the Water’: Developing the Field of ‘Gendered Organizations’
This article is concerned with the development of gendered organizations as a field of study. It begins by exploring some of the factors that militate against integrating organization studies and gender studies and gendered organizations scholarship over national/continental divides. Increasingly doubtful about whether traditional (mainstream and critical) organization theories will or can adequately address gender, we contend that scholars of ge…
Dichotomies, dialectics and dilemmas: New directions for critical leadership studies
This article builds on Fairhurst and Connaughton’s proposals for future research agendas in leadership studies by critically examining three key themes in the leadership literature: dichotomies, dialectics, and dilemmas. The first section argues that mainstream leadership research frequently relies on conceptual dichotomies which are often multiple, inter-related, and proliferating. Critiques of dichotomization are suggestive of more dialectical …
You Just Had to Get on with It: Exploring the Persistence of Gender Inequality through Women's Career Histories
This article examines the career histories of the first generation of UK women to enter professional employment in the 1970s and 1980s in comparatively large numbers. In so doing, it contributes to the sparse literature on older women's working life histories. Presenting empirical research on women's experiences in the legal and HR sectors, it reveals how women pioneers were often silenced by requirements to conform with male-dominated norms, val…
Critical leadership studies: A response to Learmonth and Morrell
This article re-states the value of a dialectical approach to critical leadership studies: one that explicitly uses the ‘language of leadership’ to examine and illuminate workplace power and identity dynamics. Outlining an alternative view of what it means to be ‘critical’, this response questions the dichotomizing tendency in Learmonth and Morrell’s arguments and highlights their misrepresentation and misinterpretation of my 2014 article. Learmo…
Questions of Distance
Shift‐ing Lives”: Work‐Home Pressures in the North Sea Oil Industry
Peu d'études ont été faites sur les rapports entre travail et vie privée dans l'industrie pétrolière en mer du Nord. L'auteur étudie les rapports de force asymétriques et les inégalités de fait qui caractérisent l'industrie du forage en mer. Prenant le cas des travailleurs à contrat des deux sexes, l'auteur examine les pres‐sions économiques et les contraintes d'espace et de temps aux‐quelles ces employés sont soumis, sur le lieu de travail et da…
Blended Leadership: Employee Perspectives on Effective Leadership in the UK Further Education Sector
This article explores employee perspectives on effective leadership in UK Further Education (FE). Studies on leadership effectiveness typically seek either to specify the individual qualities of `heroic' leaders or, increasingly, to highlight the collective nature of `post-heroic' leadership. While these discourses are frequently seen as dichotomous and competing, our research found that FE employees often value practices that combine elements of…
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…
Job Redesign: Critical Perspectives on the Labor Process
Engineering Humour: Masculinity, Joking and Conflict in Shop-floor Relations
The focus of this paper is on the organizational significance of shop-floor humour and in particular its relationship to gender identity and working-class resistance. A brief review of the literature on organizational humour is followed by a more detailed examination of the illuminating analysis by Willis of school/shop-floor counter-culture. Although his research provides a strong basis for the case study presented below, it is criticized for a …
Managing the Shopfloor: Subjectivity, Masculinity and Workplace Culture
Mismanaging Sexual Harassment: Protecting the Perpetrator and Blaming the Victim
The EC has recently ratified a code of practice on sexual harassment in the workplace. Drawing on case study material, argues that initiatives designed to formalize the procedures for dealing with sexual harassment are necessary but by no means sufficient for its effective management. Presents case studies which outline how sexual harassment can be mismanaged both by professional managers and by trade union representatives
Virile Capitalism
Naming Men as Men: Implications for Work, Organization and Management
This paper seeks to contribute to the growing interest in naming men as men as part of a critical analysis of gendered power relations in organizations. The paper highlights the way in which men and masculinities are frequently central to organizational analysis, yet rarely the focus of interrogation. They remain taken for granted and hidden. Examining recent studies that contribute to a critical analysis of gendered power relations, we consider …
Managing the Shopfloor: Subjectivity, Masculinity, and Workplace Culture
Having Fun: Humour as Resistance in Brazil
Highlighting the under-researched interrelationship between workplace humour and resistance, this paper examines employee opposition in a Brazilian telecommunications company. Much of the literature on corporate culture and humour has emphasized the way that 'having fun' can facilitate production. Functionalist in perspective, such studies treat organizational joking both as a means by which employees can 'let off steam' and as a flexible tool fo…
Men as Managers, Managers as Men: Critical Perspectives on Men, Masculinities and Managements
It's Only Dick: The Sexual Harassment of Women Managers in Insurance Sales
Most studies of sexual harassment in organizations have used quantitative methods to measure the incidence of cases. Less attention has focused upon the qualitative dynamics of workplace sexual harassment. Drawing upon detailed qualitative and quantitative data, this paper explores the complex organisational interactions and interrelationships through which the vicious circles of sexual harassment can be reproduced. Highlighting women managers' e…
Delayering Managers: Time-Space Surveillance and its Gendered Effects
This article seeks to extend the growing interest in time-space issues within social and organizational theory (Giddens, 1984, 1987; Harvey, 1990) by focusing on management and gender in the workplace. It examines the impact of what we have termed `time-space surveillance' on managers who have survived delayering and also addresses the gendered conditions and consequences of these processes. Drawing on research from the UK insurance industry, we …
Shift‐ing Lives”: Work‐Home Pressures in the North Sea Oil Industry
Peu d'études ont été faites sur les rapports entre travail et vie privée dans l'industrie pétrolière en mer du Nord. L'auteur étudie les rapports de force asymétriques et les inégalités de fait qui caractérisent l'industrie du forage en mer. Prenant le cas des travailleurs à contrat des deux sexes, l'auteur examine les pres‐sions économiques et les contraintes d'espace et de temps aux‐quelles ces employés sont soumis, sur le lieu de travail et da…
Men as Managers, Managers as Men: Critical Perspectives on Men, Masculinities and Managements
Surviving the Rigs': Safety and Surveillance on North Sea Oil Installations
This article examines the politics of accident reporting on North Sea oil installations. In the context of an all-pervasive safety culture and performance assessment system, offshore workers restricted the reporting of accidents. Other studies suggest that workers often respond to increased monitoring by engaging in defensive practices that manipulate performance information. Accordingly, a central contention of this article is that performance a…
Managing Humour
This article examines the under‐explored relationship between humour, power and management. Critically analysing the functionalist influence on workplace humour studies, it addresses the reproduction of humour through power relations and of management control through joking relations. In particular, the following argument considers how, in different social and organizational contexts, the management of humour is implemented through the practices …
A response to Wray-Bliss: Revisiting the Shopfloor
A Response to Wray-Bliss: Revisiting the Shopfloor
PREVIOUS ARTICLEAbstract Ethics, Embodied Ethics: The Strange Marriage of Foucault and Positivism in Labour Process Theory
Over the Pond and Across the Water’: Developing the Field of ‘Gendered Organizations’
This article is concerned with the development of gendered organizations as a field of study. It begins by exploring some of the factors that militate against integrating organization studies and gender studies and gendered organizations scholarship over national/continental divides. Increasingly doubtful about whether traditional (mainstream and critical) organization theories will or can adequately address gender, we contend that scholars of ge…
Identities and Insecurities: Selves at Work
This article explores the growing interest in selves and subjects at work. In particular, it examines the analytical importance of insecurity for understanding the subjective power relations and survival strategies of organization. Insecurity in organizations can take many different, sometimes overlapping forms. Highlighting how these insecurities can intersect in the reproduction of workplace selves and organizational power relations, the articl…
Discussion of Thomas and Davies: Refuting Romanticism: The Value of Feminist Perspectives for Understanding Resistance
Questions of Distance
Dialectics of leadership
Mainstream leadership studies tend to privilege and separate leaders from followers. This article highlights the value of rethinking leadership as a set of dialectical relationships. Drawing on post-structuralist perspectives, this approach reconsiders the relations and practices of leaders and followers as mutually constituting and co-produced. It also highlights the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that typically characterize these shif…
What Do We Mean by Communication? Responding to Mumby and Ashcraft
Blended Leadership: Employee Perspectives on Effective Leadership in the UK Further Education Sector
This article explores employee perspectives on effective leadership in UK Further Education (FE). Studies on leadership effectiveness typically seek either to specify the individual qualities of `heroic' leaders or, increasingly, to highlight the collective nature of `post-heroic' leadership. While these discourses are frequently seen as dichotomous and competing, our research found that FE employees often value practices that combine elements of…
In search of the perfect manager? Work-life balance and managerial work
Work-life balance debates continue to proliferate but give relatively little critical attention to managerial workers. This article draws on research into the experiences of managers in a local government organization revealing an intricate, multifaceted and heterogeneous picture of fragmentation, conflicting demands, pressures and anxieties. The study highlights the importance of paid work for public sector managers; the concomitant difficulties…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (18 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Gender Diversity and Inequality (10 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Public relations (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works)