Institutional leadership—the historical case study of a religious organisation

In Harald Askeland, Gry Espedal & Beate Jelstad Løvaas (eds.), Understanding Values Work Institutional Perspectives in Organizations and Leadership (2020)
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Abstract

In this chapter, I discuss institutional leadership vis-à-vis the value of poverty. To do so, I analyse how poverty has been conceptualised within a Catholic religious organisation, the Jesuits. The chapter shows that, in the Jesuit case, poverty is not strictly defined. Instead, poverty results from the constant dialogue between the individual Jesuit and their leader. This means that the understanding of what constitutes poverty is neither explicit nor implicit. The chapter contributes to our understanding of institutional leadership as the promotion and protection of values, as per Selznick’s classical definition. However, we discuss a less known part of Selznick’s work in which the ambiguous character of values is highlighted. In this sense, and after the Jesuit case, we advance the possibility that the promotion and protection of institutional values by institutional leaders does not necessarily imply the definition of what a value is. As values are not defined beforehand but the result of a constant dialogue between the leader and their followers, institutional leadership can be revisited and freed from the heroic view that has long characterised it.

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References found in this work

Thinking, Fast and Slow.Daniel Kahneman - 2011 - New York: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Economy and Society.Max Weber - 2013 - Harvard University Press.
The Ethics of Authenticity.Charles Taylor - 1991 - Harvard University Press.
The nature of human values.Milton Rokeach - 1973 - New York,: Free Press.

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