Crisis – the Cradle of Civil Society (?) and the Challenging Art of Leadership

• In Event: Leadership

Abstract

We currently live in a time of crises. Conflicts, war, people seeking refuge. Vulnerability due to these types of crises, or other challenges. After decades of ‘positive steps forward’, e.g. meritoriously acknowledged by Hans Rosling, MD and professor in international health, and known for entertaining presentations of the ‘state of the world’. But now, the perception of crises and ‘steps backwards’ is imminent. Since Rosling passed away in 2017, the number of refugees in the world has risen from 68 to 110 million according to UNHCR, conflicts have burst into open wars, totalitarianism increases, austerity collides with humanitarianism. The idea of what Antonio Gramsci and Zygmunt Bauman refers to as Interregnum is pervasive – a time when the old system is dying and new cannot be born when morbid symptoms appear, and we cannot yet determine what will replace it.

This situation means tremendous challenges for civil society. Needs change and increase. Resources patterns quake and call for adaption. All these aspects are real and deserve attention. However, in this paper we want to dwell on a thought that has bothered our somewhat management biased rationale for some time. Are crises always a threat to civil society, or is a crisis even the cradle for civil society? A cradle where anomalies become unrelenting and give rise to perception of the necessity to act (Spinosa et al. 1997; Gawell, 2006, 2013). This is the opposite of a call to see needs and misery as opportunities for civil society, but to instead elaborate on what might be the core of civil society – care for fellow human beings, and engagement taken into action.

The accumulated knowledge about civil society, and how it is organized and led has grown significantly. In the field that has been established in academia during the last half a century, management studies, organizational governance and lately also entrepreneurship studies have contributed with knowledge of managing stakeholders, resources, descision making, governance and much more. Most of these approaches, with some contributions (see e.g. Bauman et al. 2015) as exception, are to a large extent framed by organizations response to surrounding established institutions and structures. How would it be possible to think beyond current settings or current identified scenarios? Pondering over this question, we recall a conversation many years ago, with a philosophically inspired collogue about management and leadership (see e.g. Bay, 2006). It brought our attention to the Old Norse term for ‘to lead’ – leiða – which semantically means both ‘leda’ [to lead others], and ‘leta’ [to search for] in today’s Swedish. In this paper, we will revisit studied civil society cases with our minds set to the understanding of leiða, and what aspects of leadership that brings to the search of what it is to be a human and a fellow human being in civil society - in the midst of crises and times of polycrises.

References

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Spinosa, C., Flores, F. and Dreyfus, H. (1997). Disclosing New Worlds. Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Authors

• Malin Gawell, Södertörn University

• Monika Kostera, University of Warsaw, Poland; Södertörn University, Sweden; l'Université Évry Val-d'Essonne, France