Exploring a relational account of third sector leadership

During this seminar, Dr Rob Macmillan from the Third Sector Research Centre at the University of Birmingham, discusses third sector leadership. The seminar, organised by the Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership, took place at the OU's main campus in Milton Keynes on 2 May 2017 (video below).

Much public conversation on leadership, including in the third sector, tends to focus on individual leaders, despite a range of efforts to develop a broader perspective. We are still encouraged to think of leaders as exceptional, noble, and inspiring, and in the third sector, as somehow distinctive. And yet we are also encouraged to worry about purported leadership ‘deficits’, particularly in a third sector context. Empirical research and many training and development opportunities are still seemingly centred on proclaimed or would-be leaders of third sector organisations. It appears to be hard to avoid the translation of leadership into what identifiable leaders do, or more accurately should do.

Concentrating on developments in the third sector in the UK, and in line with efforts to discuss leadership as a broader set of social processes, this seminar seeks to develop a relational, field-based conception of leadership. This approach aims to be attentive to the complex, varied and dynamic contexts in which the very idea of leadership operates. In this view, leadership involves a collective pursuit of multiple and always provisional field-defining and field-shaping projects. In developing this line of thought, the seminar draws variously on ideas from research and scholarship in field theory, framing and social movements. To illustrate the argument, the discussion involves a comparison between two recent movement-like campaigns across the third sector in the UK, one deploying a narrative of ‘necessity and adaptation’, whilst the other invokes a narrative of ‘jeopardy and loss’.

Biography

Rob Macmillan is a Research Fellow in the Third Sector Research Centre at the University of Birmingham. He has been researching aspects of voluntary and community action for around 20 years in collaboration with other academics and researchers, policy makers and funders, and with numerous voluntary and community organisations. His main research interests are around the long term qualitative dynamics of voluntary action, the sustainability of voluntary and community organisations, the relationships between markets and the voluntary sector, and the changing field of capacity building and voluntary sector infrastructure. From June 2017 he will take up a position at the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University.