Leadership in Post-Compulsory Education by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Technologies of Leadership: The Medium and the Message

Most organizations are littered with technologies of various kinds: they appear to be essential to everyday organizational life and our observations revealed that colleges are no different in this respect. There are, however, very few studies that consider the ways in which these technologies are implicated in leadership work. This chapter is, therefore, concerned with the topic of leadership and its relationship with technology. It considers the role of ‘technologies of leadership’, that is, the technologies that regularly assist leaders, college principals in this case, as they go about their daily work. We document some of the complexities and difficulties involved in the provision of management information, and the utilization of the information furnished by these ‘leadership technologies’ in support of decision-making, managing and motivating. In our discussion we draw attention to the different forms of work that leaders achieve through the technologies they use and the different ways that technologies are woven together and into the work of being a leader. The suggestion we make here is that, much like other forms of routine, oft-neglected and under-emphasized aspects of leadership work, routine expertise in and exploitation of these technologies can be understood as part of the work of being ‘a good leader’.

Given the hype surrounding new technology and the heralded transformations it will bring it is, perhaps, surprising that the focus of this chapter is what we refer to as ‘mundane technologies’ (Dourish et al., 2010) – e-mail (e.g. Microsoft® Outlook), word-processing applications (e.g. Microsoft® Word), spreadsheets (e.g. OpenOffice.org’s Impress) and presentation (e.g. Apple’s Numbers) software. By mundane technologies we mean technologies and applications that are commonplace in FE colleges, that just about everybody uses, precisely the kinds of technologies that have become the fabric of the workplace through ‘their capacity to be unnoticed, to quietly mediate, that is reproduce, what have become the commonalities of everyday life’ (Hillman and Gibbs, 1998). These are not novel technologies but are:

… technologies which are now fully integrated into, and are an unremarkable part of, everyday life. To study mundane technologies is thus to explore how they mediate and reflect everyday life, how they serve in the reproduction of local technosocial configurations. (Michael, 2003:129)

In this case the ‘mediation and reflection of everyday life’ and the ‘technosocial configurations’ are those concerned in the everyday task of leadership in an FE college. In attending to how these kinds of technologies are positioned in different streams of work and placed in the workplace we examine exactly how information is disseminated and activity is coordinated and controlled or ‘articulated’. Thus this chapter extends the notion of ‘control through communication’ (Yates, 1989) to consider how technology is routinely implicated in ‘team management’ as an aspect of both the ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, 1983) and ‘emotional intelligence’ (Goleman, 1998) of leaders.

While the technology we are concerned with is everyday, mundane, simple even, this is not a simple story and we particularly want to avoid any simple, or simplistic, conclusions about the benefits, or failures of technology.

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