Profaning the sacred in leadership studies: A reading of Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase

The leadership literature is full of stories of heroic self-sacrifice. Sacrificial leadership behaviour, some scholars conclude, is to be recommended. In this article we follow Keith Grint's conceptualization of leadership as necessarily pertaining to the sacred, but-drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notion of profanation-we highlight the need for organization scholars to profane the sacralizations embedded in leadership thinking. One example of this, which guides us throughout the article, is the novel A Wild Sheep Chase, by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami. By means of a thematic reading of the novel, we discuss how it contributes to profaning particular notions of sacrifice and the sacred in leadership thinking. In the novel, self-sacrifice does not function as a way of establishing a leadership position, but as a way to avoid the dangers associated with leadership, and possibly redeem humans from their current collective urge to become leaders. Inspired by Murakami's fictional example, we call organization scholars to engage in profanation of leadership studies and, in doing so, open new vistas for leadership theory and practice. © The Author(s) 2012

Accountability in the East Asian economic miracle, crisis and recovery

Despite claims that accountability enables 'good governance' proper, its specific origins, character and limitations are not yet fully clear. In order to explicate the nature of accountability better this paper will, therefore, formulate and apply its own comparative framework to the case of the East Asian economic miracle, crisis and recovery in particular. In so doing it finds that, even when accountability emerged as a mid-crisis issue that was dramatically reconfigured for any due recovery later, it was not itself then sufficiently explicated for all the implications and consequences to be realized fully. Once it is explicated more fully, however, the further implications and consequences of changing accountability for economic governance question precisely what is to be expected from accountability per se