Jameson, Jill ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9545-8078 (2022) Stoic leadership of dialogic engagement: expressionist reflections that scream against toxic higher education management. In: Samier, Eugenie A., (ed.) Existential Crises in Educational Administration and Leadership: Existential Anxiety and Loss of Meaning in the Gaze of Munch’s ‘The Scream’. Routledge Research in Educational Leadership, 1 . Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, pp. 170-188. ISBN 978-0367702564 ; 0367702568 (doi:10.4324/9781003145288-13)

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Abstract

This chapter reflects on stoic leadership enabled through dialogic engagement amongst higher education staff. Largely unrecognised resilient leadership is quietly supported in confidential talk embodying agentic resistance amongst staff experiencing toxic management. Such staff collaborate discreetly to cope with inner existential angst that symbolically echoes the anxiety and pain expressed in Munch’s ‘The Scream’. An initial consideration of the painting’s representational texture of psychological pain is followed by an analysis of ‘the scream’ as a metaphorical expression of resistance, releasing toxic feelings. Staff may gain liberation from feelings of entrapped academic autonomy eroded by the symbolic violence of micro-managerialism. The chapter captures stoic leadership fragments supported by and expressed through dialogic engagement. An expressionist narrative method is applied, based on phenomenological critical realist perspectives. This method selects expressions from a palate of longitudinal qualitative data collected from survivors who withstood darker sides of management, emerging unscathed. The narrator reflects on instances of stoic leadership survival captured over thirty years from interviews, a forum, and surveys. Through personal expressive glimpses, like painterly chinks of light, moments of stoic leadership emerge, opening towards freedom from toxic management. The chapter reflects on deteriorating academic working conditions evoking ‘screaming’, proposing such leadership heals the moral fabric of organisations through dialogic resilience: a ‘mobilisation of support’ (Reed and Reedman, 2020: 6) against darker forces causing emotional suffering.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	leadership; toxic leadership; stoic; higher education
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management H Social Sciences > HM Sociology L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Education, Health & Human Sciences Faculty of Education, Health & Human Sciences > Institute for Lifecourse Development Faculty of Education, Health & Human Sciences > Institute for Lifecourse Development > Centre for Professional Workforce Development
Related URLs:	Publisher
Last Modified:	11 Apr 2022 12:58
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/35781

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