Fictional Leaders by Jonathan Gosling & Peter Villiers

Author:Jonathan Gosling & Peter Villiers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

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A Wild Sheep Chase: Haruki Murakami

Chris Land, Martyna Śliwa and Sverre Spoelstra

Introduction

In Book III of the Laws, Plato (1997) lays out a series of qualifications that make a leader fit to rule. The first four of these relate to traditional forms of authority through birth and social status: the right of the noble to rule the serf, the parent the child, the master the slave and the old the young. The fifth relates to the authority of those with a superior nature, over the weak. This indeterminate, ‘superior nature’ parallels the trajectory of trait theories of leadership as well as Great Man theories of leadership, both of which posit a nature (sometimes of divine origin)—‘leadership’—then set out in pursuit of this nature. Plato’s sixth qualification is knowledge or expertise and the power of those who know over those who do not. Here we find the precursors for the second major tradition in leadership studies: the idea that the right to lead derives from mastery of a set of skills that can be taught and learned. As the French political philosopher Jacques Rancière (2001) notes, however, there is a seventh qualification: the paradoxical qualification of having no qualification but, by chance or lottery, being thrown into a position of leadership.

In this chapter we explore these ‘qualifications’ to lead through a reading of Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase. We first introduce the novel and then explore four distinct, but not exclusive, perspectives on leadership: Great Man theories, knowledge-based theories, attribution theories and, finally, what we shall refer to as the ‘Weak Man’ theory of leadership. While these different perspectives appear sequentially in the novel, giving a suggestion of theoretical development and progress towards our final perspective—the Weak Man theory of leadership—this linear narrative is undercut throughout the novel by its lack of adherence to the genre conventions of the realist novel. In the same way, the structure of our chapter in one sense follows that of a sequential line of inquiry in which a series of perspectives on leadership is explored through the novel, then rejected, building to a final resolution in the Weak Man theory of leadership. However, it is our contention that the real contribution that a novel like A Wild Sheep Chase can make to our understanding of leadership is through its refusal to offer an unambiguous resolution to what leadership is and how it works. The power of the novel as a vehicle for organisational studies is not so much in its ability to represent the ‘reality’ of organisation, however messy, subjective and contradictory that reality may be, but in its opening up of the entire matrix of intelligibility, within which ‘organisation’, or leadership in this case, takes place (Land and Sliwa, 2009). In seeking inspiration for our thinking of leadership, we use the imagery and events from the novel—in both metaphorical and representational senses—to challenge and restructure dominant understandings of the leadership phenomenon (cf. Sliwa and Cairns, 2007).

Chasing wild sheep

In his text, Murakami does not follow the conventions of a realist novel.

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