Conceptualizing Forms and Elements of City Leadership: Agenda for Research and Practice

• In Event: Sustaining Leadership Systems From the Local to the International Stage

Short Description

This presentation will offer a theoretical framework for conceptualizing city leadership that defines the different forms of city leadership (political, managerial, business, and civic) and the different elements of city leadership (actors, structures, processes, and followership patterns). Implications for theory development, research and practice will be examined.

Detailed Abstract

City leadership in a world of cities
The urban population of the world is growing significantly, with 54 per cent currently living in urban area: a proportion that is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050 (UN, undated). The importance and the impacts of cities and of urbanization in our current world is widely recognized; for example, cities are major contributors to climate change: although they cover less than 2 per cent of the earth’s surface, cities consume 78 per cent of the world’s energy and produce more than 60% of all carbon dioxide (Acuto, 2016). We could list many other examples in different areas; what it is clear is that some of today’s grand societal challenges will depend very much by what is happening in and around cities (e.g. Barber, 2013).The relevance of the role of cities and of city leadership is widely recognized also from an academic, policy and political perspective. To name just few examples, from an academic point of view universities such as Harvard and the University College London have launched centers on city leadership, respectively ‘The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative’ and ‘The City Leadership Laboratory’; from a policy point of view, the Rockefeller Foundation has launched a network on resilient cities implicitly recognising leadership as an antecedent and a key factor for achieving resilience; from a political point of view, Barber (2013) has pointed out the potential role of the Mayors in “ruling the world”.

The challenge of conceptualizing city leadership
Understanding leadership in places is much more complex than understanding leadership in organizations. There is an important distinction to be made between leadership in cities and leadership of cities (Collinge et al., 2010). Our framework highlights in particular the different forms of leadership in cities and the actors, structures, processes and followership patterns. The concept of city leadership can be operationalised in two ways. On the one hand, we may distinguish sub-types of city leadership (e.g. Hambleton & Howard, 2013; Hartley, 2002) and in particular: managerial leadership, which deals with the public services (e.g. housing, health care, education, regeneration, leisure, etc.) delivered within a place; political leadership, which deals with the democratic processes and decisions affecting a place and its citizens; civic leadership, which deals with all the processes provided by the community and its actors operating outside the traditional realm of the public and private sector; business leadership, which deals with the processes of creation of value provided by the private sector. On the other hand, responding to the four related questions (who; what; how; why) which concern how leadership in places (e.g. Grint, 2005) is established and coordinated, we can identify four elements of city leadership: the actors (who), the structures (what), the processes (how) and the followership patterns (why).

Aim and structure of the paper
The paper aims to define the constructs of city leadership providing definitions and examples of each of the form and element of city leadership above identified. Hence we populate with definitions and topical examples drawn from cities across all the world a 4x4 table crossing forms and elements of city leadership. Beyond this scope, the paper also discusses how leadership theories (Dihn et al., 2014; Crosby & Bryson, 2010) can inform research on city leadership proposing a research agenda. The paper aims to foster a discussion particularly suited for streams on sustainability leadership and public leadership, but it also contributes more widely to the leadership literature giving back the important role of places as a locus where leadership is framed, enacted, constrained, implemented and co-created by followers. We believe that focusing on the role of places in leadership research is nowadays particularly needed considering the increasing role that geographic and cultural differences are playing in our turbulent globalized – indeed glocalized - world.

Participant

• Alessandro Sancino, The Open University