Journal articles
Antonacopoulou EP, Bento R, Edward G, Hawkins B, Moldjord C, Rigg C, Sklaveniti C, Soh WG, Stokkeland C (2023). Collaborative Inquiry Fuelled by Reflexive Learning: Changing Change. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 59(4), 740-777.
Chittenden C, Dinh P, Hawkins B, Freathy R, Vukusic P (2021). A partnership approach to pandemic policy: building student confidence in the wake of Covid-19. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education(22).
Hawkins B, Morillas M, Taylor SS (2021). Bringing back the Manager into Management: the Role of Reflexivity in Leadership Practice. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2021(1).
Edwards G, Hawkins B, Sutherland N (2021). Problematizing leadership learning facilitation through a trickster archetype: an investigation into power and identity in liminal spaces.
Leadership,
17(5), 542-559.
Abstract:
Problematizing leadership learning facilitation through a trickster archetype: an investigation into power and identity in liminal spaces
This study uses the archetype of a ‘trickster’ to reflect back on, and hence problematize, the role of the educator/facilitator identity in leadership learning. This is based on the view that a trickster is a permanent resident in liminal spaces and that these liminal spaces play an important role in leadership learning. Our approach was based on the reading of the trickster literature alongside reflective conversations on our own experiences of facilitation of leadership learning, development and education. We suggest that paying attention to the trickster tale draws attention to the romanticization of leadership development and its facilitation as based on a response to crisis that leads to a further enhancement of the leader as a hero. Hence, it also offers ways to problematize leadership learning by uncovering the shadow side of facilitation and underlying power relations. We therefore contribute by showing how, as facilitators, we can use the trickster archetype to think more critically, reflectively and reflexively about our role and practices as educators, in particular, the ethical and power-related issues. In our conclusions, we make recommendations for research, theory and practice and invite other facilitators to share with us their trickster tales.
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Antonacopoulou EP, Bento RF, Rigg C, Hawkins B, Soh WG, Taylor SS, Vouzas F, Mavromati M, Moldjord C, Nizamidou C, et al (2020). The Return to Reflexivity in Management and Leadership Practice: Seeing More, Seeing Differently. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2020(1).
Edwards G, Hawkins B, Schedlitzki D (2019). Bringing the ugly back: a dialogic exploration of ethics in leadership through an ethno-narrative re-reading of the Enron case.
Human Relations,
72(4), 733-754.
Abstract:
Bringing the ugly back: a dialogic exploration of ethics in leadership through an ethno-narrative re-reading of the Enron case
In this article, we adopt a dialogic approach to examining narratives on ethics in leadership. We do this through an ethno-narrative re-reading of writing on the Enron case informed by Bakhtin’s ideas on dialogue. Employing concepts such as beautyism, aesthetic craving and recent writing around disgust and abjection in organizations helps us to develop a deeper relational interpretation of written accounts of leadership and ethics in organizations. We identify two underlying and interrelated social tensions exemplified in existing narratives on this popular example of ‘unethical’ leadership practice. Both tensions, we conclude, are linked to denigrating the ugly in favour of the beautiful, and we have labelled them ‘suppressing the ugly’ and a fetish for ‘looking good’. We go on to suggest that these two tensions then combine in the stories about this case to ultimately beautify a toxic masculinized persona. We suggest therefore that our dialogic perspective on ethical leadership narratives helps to uncover how accounts about Enron are developed through an intricate interplay between seeking to ‘look good’ and the suppression of moral judgment by leaders of the organization.
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Hawkins BC, Pye A, Correia F (2016). Boundary Objects, Power and Learning:. The matter of developing sustainable practice in organisations.
Management Learning, 1-19.
Abstract:
Boundary Objects, Power and Learning:. The matter of developing sustainable practice in organisations.
This article develops an understanding of the agential role of boundary objects in generating and politicizing learning in organizations, as it emerges from the entangled actions of humans and non-humans. We offer two empirical vignettes in which middle managers seek to develop more sustainable ways of working. Informed by Foucault’s writing on power, our work highlights how power relations enable and foreclose the affordances, or possibilities for action, associated with boundary objects. Our data demonstrate how this impacts the learning that emerges as boundary objects are configured and unraveled over time. In so doing, we illustrate how boundary objects are not fixed entities, but are mutable, relational, and politicized in nature. Connecting boundary objects to affordances within a Foucauldian perspective on power offers a more nuanced understanding of how ‘the material’ plays an agential role in consolidating and disrupting understandings in the accomplishment of learning.
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Hawkins BC (2015). Ship-Shape: Materializing Leadership in the British Royal Navy.
Human Relations,
68(6), 951-971.
Abstract:
Ship-Shape: Materializing Leadership in the British Royal Navy
In this article I contribute to posthumanist, actor-network influenced theories of leadership, drawing empirically on qualitative data collected at a Royal Navy shore establishment in Great Britain. I demonstrate how a fluid network of hybridized relationships between people and things affords shifting and multiple possibilities for making leadership matter. As configurations of actants evolve these affordances are altered, and the blackboxing processes hiding the material actants co-generating leadership effects are uncovered. A detailed explication of the politicised affordances within actor networks contributes to knowledge about how hybridized relationships co-enable possibilities for action that bring to life, reinforce, and call into question the human-centred, gendered, colonialist web of assumptions and practices through which Royal Naval personnel understand and enact leadership.
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Naidoo R, Gosling J, Bolden R, O'Brien A, Hawkins B (2014). Leadership and branding in business schools: a Bourdieusian analysis.
Higher Education Research and Development,
33(1), 144-156.
Abstract:
Leadership and branding in business schools: a Bourdieusian analysis
This paper explores the growth of corporate branding in higher education (HE) and its use by academic and professional managers as a mechanism for not only enhancing institutional reputation but also for facilitating internal culture change. It uses Bourdieu's framework of field, capital and habitus to analyse case studies of branding in two English business schools from the perspectives of academics, management and professional staff and students. The findings reveal a number of tensions and inconsistencies between the experiences of these groups that highlight the contested nature of branding in HE. In an era of rankings, metrics and student fees, it is suggested that branding has become an important means through which HE leaders and managers (re)negotiate the perceived value of different forms of capital and their relative positions within the field. Whilst branding operates at a largely ideological level it has a material effect on the allocation of power and resources within institutions. This is an important development in a sector that has typically privileged scientific capital and contributes towards an understanding of the ways in which leadership is 'distributed' within universities. © 2014 © 2014 HERDSA.
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Hawkins BC, Edwards G (2014). Managing the Monsters of Doubt: Liminality, Threshold Concepts and Leadership Learning.
Management Learning,
46(1), 24-43.
Abstract:
Managing the Monsters of Doubt: Liminality, Threshold Concepts and Leadership Learning
In this article we argue that management and business undergraduate students who are engaged in learning about leadership occupy a liminal space or state of between-ness. Drawing on anthropological conceptualizations of liminality in which those undergoing liminal rituals must grapple with symbolic monsters, we point to the experience of doubt and uncertainty as ‘monsters’ with which students must come to terms. We link this to scholarship that characterises dealing with uncertainty as a central element of leadership practice. Drawing on notions of ‘threshold concepts’, we suggest that students experience the monster of doubt as they progress in their learning experience and that there are a number of potential ways students might ‘think like a leadership scholar’. We set out some opportunities for leadership educators to engage students with threshold concepts as they seek to become familiar with ‘doubt’ as central to the study and practice of leadership. Applying a liminality framework to the understanding of threshold concepts helps to identify threshold concepts as crucial to learning, infused with cultural assumptions, and situated within an understanding of the student experience.
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Correia F, Howard MB, Pye A, Hawkins B, Lamming R (2013). Low Carbon Procurement: an Emerging Agenda. Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management(19), 58-64.
Hawkins B (2012). Gendering the Eye of the Norm: Exploring Gendered Concertive Control Processes in Two Self‐Managing Teams.
Gender, Work & Organization,
20(1), 113-126.
Abstract:
Gendering the Eye of the Norm: Exploring Gendered Concertive Control Processes in Two Self‐Managing Teams
This article is the result of an ethnographic research project exploring the workplace interactions of two self‐managed teams of recruitment consultants. I use data from participant observation and recorded interviews to show the gendered nature of what Barker terms concertive control: the social processes by which team members regulate each others' conduct in line with negotiated team values. My analysis examines how team members negotiate core team values, translate these into specific actions and regulate these actions through concertive control interactions. I then set out three ways in which gender acts as a resource for these concertive control processes. These are: team members' assumptions about men's and women's relative skills and capacities, the ‘tough’ masculinity of the haulage industry in which one of the teams operates and the regulation of performances of heterosexuality during customer interactions. Building on research by others, I show gender to be not only embedded in the values and managerial style associated with teamwork but also integrated into the collaborative process of team‐working itself. I emphasize that social categories like gender become resources in the regulation of conduct at work and can reify hierarchies even in so‐called participative practices like self‐managed teamwork.
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Hawkins BC (2008). Double Agents: Gendered Organizational Culture, Control and Resistance.
Sociology,
3(42), 418-435.
Abstract:
Double Agents: Gendered Organizational Culture, Control and Resistance
This article presents ethnographic data showing how recruitment consultants negotiate managerial attempts to control workforce culture. I suggest the values which senior managers encourage consultants to embody prioritize so-called`masculine' attributes over `feminine' ones. I attempt to demonstrate the limits of cultural control by outlining three ways in which the consultants engage with this imposed culture: defiance, parody and ritual. These activities contain gendered assumptions similar to those embedded in corporate culture. I discuss the potential such practices have for resisting corporate culture and the gender within it, suggesting that one source of ambiguity within workplace `control' and `resistance' practices is that they employ overlapping cultural resources and assumptions.
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Author URL.
Hawkins BC, Brannan MJ (2007). London calling: selection as pre-emptive strategy for cultural control.
Employee Relations,
2(29), 178-191.
Abstract:
London calling: selection as pre-emptive strategy for cultural control
Abstract: Purpose – This article seeks to explore forms of selection practice, focusing on role-play techniques, which have been introduced in many organizations in an attempt to “objectivize” the selection process by offering a means of assessing task-specific aptitudes.
Design/methodology/approach – This article draws upon an ethnographic study of a call centre in which the researcher underwent the recruitment and selection process to secure work as a precursor to conducting fieldwork within the organization. Whilst there is little precedent for the employment of ethnographic techniques in researching recruitment and selection, we argue such techniques are appropriate to explore the social processes involved in practices such as role-play. The discussion draws upon fieldwork which was conducted at “CallCentreCo”, who continuously recruit customer service representatives (CSRs) to work in their call centre. CallCentreCo uses role-playing exercises extensively in the selection of all grades of staff and are argued by CallCentreCo's Human Resource Manager to be essential in the recruitment of CSRs to ensure the selection of suitable candidates and minimize initial attrition rates.
Findings – This article makes two contributions: first it provides empirical evidence to explore the basis of structured interviews by revealing how the view that role-play can “objectivize” the selection process is potentially built upon false assumptions. Second, the article argues that supposedly “objective” practices such as role-play seek to legitimize the overwhelmingly subjective interview process in order that it may serve purposes beyond initial selection: namely the control of future employees before they even enter the organization.
Research limitations/implications – Although we make no attempt to generalize from such a limited case study, this article raises issues that are likely to be relevant to organizations as they increasingly search for more “effective” selection procedures, and to academic endeavors to critically theorize the purpose and effects of selection for the employment relation.
Originality/value – the originality of this approach lies in the ethnographic study of the interview as a social interaction, the richness of which may be lost in the quantitatively dominated approach to analyzing selection.
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Chapters
Searle R, Sealy R, Hawkins B (2019). 'Don't you know that it's different for girls': a dynamic exploration of trust, breach and violation for women en route to the top. In Antoniou A-S, Cooper C, Gatrell C (Eds.) Women, Business & Leadership: Gender and Organisations, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 232-246.
Hawkins BC (2013). James Bond and Miss Moneypenny: the silhouette of leadership. In Gosling J, Villiers P (Eds.) Fictional Leaders: Heroes, Villains and Absent Friends, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Hawkins B (2012). The silhouette of leadership: James bond and miss moneypenny. In (Ed)
Fictional Leaders: Heroes, Villans and Absent Friends, 125-138.
Abstract:
The silhouette of leadership: James bond and miss moneypenny
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