Is it Laissez-Faire Leadership or Delegation? A Deeper Examination of an Over-Simplified Leadership Phenomenon

Characterized simply as “the absence of leadership,” scholars have generally written off “laissez-faire leadership” as the inaction of poor managers disinterested in their followers and organizational outcomes. In this study, we question whether this simple understanding of the construct is always true, arguing that delegation, a conceivably positive behavior, is sometimes perceived as laissez-faire leadership by subordinates. We examine how perceived leader competence and subordinate gender determine how delegation affects perceptions of laissez-faire leadership and, indirectly, dysfunctional subordinate resistance. Our test of this model reveals a significant three-way interaction between delegation, perceived leader competence, and gender in influencing perceptions of laissez-faire leadership and dysfunctional resistance. We conclude that laissez-faire leadership is a more complex phenomenon than is often assumed in research. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in this study.

Power, Resistance, and Slavery in the United States

In this article, we build on prior sociological theory pertaining to power as well as historical research on antebellum slavery to offer an integrated framework of subordinate resistance – a framework that incorporates a matrix of potential responses ranging from collective action, to symbolic resistance, to projective agency, and even quiescence. Using text networks as an index, we then analyze a rich collection of antebellum slave narratives (n=128) to investigate such response possibilities. These thematic networks, consistent with a large body of historical research on American slavery, demonstrate central domains of enslavement in the United States and the diverse resistance strategies that the enslaved employed. Moreover, our more qualitative immersion into these thematic patterns and the narratives themselves—narratives that have been largely overlooked by sociologists—uniquely highlight how particular resistance strategies are deployed in specific everyday contexts and sometimes resolve into what seem, at first glance, to be quiescence. We discuss these findings, and conclude more broadly by highlighting how the sociological study of inequality and power would benefit from attention to the variety of resistance strategies subordinate actors in their everyday lives and in the uneven and sometimes dangerous contexts they traverse.

City government in an age of austerity: Discursive institutions and critique

Austerity is an increasingly important feature of urban society in Western countries, both as a site interwoven with the crisis tendencies of capitalism and as spaces mitigating austerity programmes instigated by nation states. Cities have therefore become key spaces in the mediation of ‘austerity urbanism’, but where such processes involve deliberation, making the production of consensus highly problematic. Such tendencies require far greater intellectual sensitivity towards the practices of agents as they seek to enact social control and coordination, as well as subordinate resistance and critique. ‘Pragmatist Sociology’ is utilised in this paper to examine the construction and deployment of discursive institutions seeking to control the behaviour of actors, including reducing critique, with the intention of legitimising austerity programmes. Such discursive institutions establish semantic links between the discursive aims of those seeking to control and the pragmatics of the everyday lives of those subject to such institutions. The paper seeks to examine, first, through a case study of an English city, how key decision-makers construct discursive institutions in the implementation of austerity and subordination of resistance and, second, the actual practices of resisting austerity. In conclusion, the paper finds that austerity governance is characterised by discursive austerity institutions based on market and bureaucratic values, where large-scale critique has been marginalised, resulting in minor forms of critique in the everyday, and compounded by constant efforts at the reconfirmation of discursive institutions.