Italy on Leadership

Editor: Antonio Marturano (marturanoa@luiss.it) LUISS Guido Carli, Rome (Italy)

Italy has had an amazing fabric of leaders and ideas on leadership since the Romans: Italy indeed did not only provide all kinds of leaders (from Machiavellian-amoralist leaders to saint and value-centred leaders) but also many Italian scholars have helped us to think about leadership. From Marc Aurelius, Machiavelli, Gramsci, to Agamben, today, Italian scholars have provided tools with which to understand the leadership phenomena. On the other hand Caesars, the Church, the Renaissance, the Mafia, Mussolini and Fascism, leftist movements in the ‘70s, the Agnelli Family and today’s Berlusconism provide key features useful to understand leadership, leadership culture, followership and leaders’ behaviours.

Such immense reservoir of leaders and leadership ideas, provide conceptual contradictions that are even challenging established paradigms in leadership studies. Leadership studies indeed is a quite multidisciplinary field as it takes lessons from history, politics, narrative, philosophy, management, law, psychology, sociology and many other fields. Therefore Italy, with its own history, social complexity and contemporary political muddles, is a good field to test, rethink and improve leadership studies concepts and theories. Moreover Italy is a sort of laboratory to understanding social trends. Where are societies going? Which kind of leadership is likely to emerge worldwide? Which kind of national culture has encouraged Berlusconism? Which leadership concepts and theories have been changed through Italian history and how has this happened?

The role of ethics in leadership studies, for example, went through different periods in which its weight in the field continuously changed. In Marc Aurelius ethics and responsibility was a fundamental ingredient for a would-be-leader; while in Machiavelli, apparently, amoralism was a fundamental characteristic for a leader whose only aim was to keep governing a nation. In more recent times Italian political individuals such as Giulio Andreotti or, in business field, Eni’s founder Enrico Mattei, based their leadership performances on crude cynicism, though they were living in a society based on a welfare state economy. Moreover, in the recent climate, the rise of Berlusconism (understood as a leadership model in both business and politics based on the ideal of self-made man) is accompanied by a leadership crisis in left parties and in alternative (that is, based on different values) leadership models in business.

Organizations such as the Catholic Church and Mafia have provided paradoxical examples of leadership phenomena. The Church itself provides complex instances of leadership processes that have contributed to the development and institutionalisation of the central leadership concept of Charisma since St. Paul. To what extent has the Church provided models for everyday organization and to what extent can religious Charisma be a useful tool to clarify modern Charisma? Is religious Charisma a normative notion asking for a true leader to behave ethically? On the other hand the Mafia is the archetypal secret organization: not only because of its hidden membership and its still ancestral initiation rites and secrecy laws (such as omertà code of silence), but also because of its hidden and variable hierarchical structure enable it to create merciless and eccentric leaders. The Godfather or The Sopranos provide a fictional characterization of Mafia leaders’ authoritarian style and personal characteristics. According to G. Debord (in Comments on the Society of Spectacles, 1988), “The Mafia is not an outsider in the world; it is perfectly at home in it. At the moment of the integrated spectacular, it in fact reigns as the model for all the advanced commercial enterprises”. To what extent have corporations in recent times copied the Mafia model to protect their business and their own organization?

Moreover, authors such as Gramsci, Pareto and Mosca offered tools to understand leadership, which are today fundamental tools of leadership analysis. Notably, Gramsci offered the notion of hegemony that, far from becoming an obsolete concept in post-communist societies, represents a crucial concept to understand how leading forces in organisations keep control over followers. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintain control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting against it. Impression management is a powerful technique for a leader to exercise his or her hegemony over the group; Benito Mussolini built his image through media such as cinema and radio, and today Silvio Berlusconi has built his image through television; these both created a popular consensus around themselves. How important is the role of mass media in building hegemony and shaping a leader’s image? Will the Internet change the way in which a leader’s image is created and perceived? Will the way in which hegemony is created, change through the use of new media (or, rather than be imposed will it emerge from followers)?

Attached to this concept there is another key concept offered by Gaetano Mosca, namely elite theory. If we start from the layered pyramids Gramsci describes, we can understand Mosca’s definition of modern elites in term of their superior organisational skills. These organisational skills were especially useful in gaining political power in modern bureaucratic society. Nevertheless, Mosca's theory was more liberal than the elitist theory of, for example, Vilfredo Pareto, since in Mosca's conception, elites are not hereditary in nature and peoples from all classes of society can theoretically become the "elite". He also adhered to the concept of "the circulation of elites," which is a dialectical theory of constant competition between elites, with one elite group replacing another repeatedly over time. These concepts are still used in leadership studies as leadership takes place within social structures and also it shapes these social structures. Elites shape leaders directly and indirectly, and leaders shape elites too sometimes simply by rising to pre-eminence and sometimes more directly by shaping that elite, in composition, number wealth and reputation and so forth. Some leadership scholars claim the Leader-Member Exchange theory, in particular, bears a close resemblance to elite theory. In such theory groups can be split into in-groups and out-groups depending on the followers’ particular relationship with the group’s leader. To what extent can this theory be paralleled by elite theory and how can the latter help to theoretically enrich the former? Furthermore, actual organizations, especially those taking place in the Internet, tend to be more and more hierarchically flat: how will the elite theory change in order to fit better the organisational changes around us and how will it be reflected in Leader-Member Exchange theory?

Articles are invited which address these and similar topics. Papers can be of a theoretical or empirical nature, or investigate practical concerns. They can be drawn from any research tradition; contributions of both a quantitative and a qualitative nature are invited.

Enquiries, expressions of interest and submission of abstracts (500 words maximum) should be sent to the Guest Editor shown at the address above. Abstracts should arrive by 1 April 2010. Completed articles of between 6,000-8,000 words should be submitted by 31 January 2011 at the latest for review. Articles will be double blind reviewed. The issue will be published in Summer 2012.

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