Beyond culture as ethnicity

Interrogating the empirical sites

for leading scholarship
Anita Basrah

English Applied Linguistic Study Program

Postgraduate of State University of Medan
Indonesia

Chapter II

Summary

The point of this chapter is to examine what emerges when culture is oriented as a
legitimatised reality. We consider the lessons to be learnt about leadership practices and research
when culture becomes the lens through which deliberations of leadership quality are undertaken.
Taken from the view of intersectionality (between culture as socially constructed and leadership
as practised within socially constructed sites), leading should become fashioned as a set of
humanizing and democratic relationships amongst people in organisations in time and place, and
re-defined as a notion of ‘power with’ rather than ‘power over’.
the notion of culture in leadership be extended beyond the social narratives of race and
include experiences of class, gender, religion, sexual orientation and nationhood, to name but a
few (Parker, 2010). Given global movements these are fast becoming spaces of subjugated
knowledges. An interrogation of subjugated knowledges in leadership brings to the forefront the
“power-knowledge critique [and] enables a new kind of research program” that there is no right,
absolute or complete image of difference as expressed through culture. Culture is nuanced;
it is organised and symbolic. Yet its dynamic and negotiated features allow it to escape
predictability and universality, although it can be argued that it retains some elements of national
predictability. Despite this, culture invoked as an organising mechanism for leadership and
leading relationships attains a nuanced difference when implicated within organisational cultures
The challenge of culture in leadership is the need for sensitivity and a critical awareness of the
historical sensitivities of oppression. This is a sensitivity that is beyond the stamp of political
correctness; it is not a sensitivity of image management. Rather it requires a disposition for
leadership criticality that is open to conversation that is vulnerable to the interrogation of socio-
historical understandings and the peculiarities of social experiences constructed in complex
political and economic arrangements.
Leadership and culture must move beyond culture as a unitary or binary opposite force
where leadership/leading is measured against more than being Black, being white, being Asian
or being female. The relationship between leadership and culture must begin to reflect the full
complexity of social phenomena, such that the understanding of leadership and the doing of
leading is measured against
The challenge of culture in leadership, a turn of phrase that is as ambiguous as it is clear,
as it can refer to the cultural categories that the leader occupies (class, race, gender, ethnicity), as
well as to the culture that the leader in his or her practice of leading interacts with, that is, both
societal and organisational culture. The challenge of culture in leadership is its propensity to be a
reference point for unitary social constructs such as race or some other single social category
The challenge of culture in leadership is the need for sensitivity and a critical awareness of the
historical sensitivities of oppression. This is a sensitivity that is beyond the stamp of political
correctness; it is not a sensitivity of image management. Rather it requires a disposition for
leadership criticality that is open to conversation that is vulnerable to the interrogation of socio-
historical understandings and the peculiarities of social experiences constructed in complex
political and economic arrangements. This is particularly so when it comes to the role that
educational leaders play in the promotion of educational access, the management of educational
outcomes and the drama of school improvement initiatives for social advancement.