Clandestine leadership: Explaining the roles of deviance and ignorance in the co-production of public value

As the world inhabited by public leaders has become increasingly complex and ambiguous (Van Wart 2013), there has been a gradual shift in the unit of analysis towards collaborations between public and particularly civil... [ view full abstract ]

As the world inhabited by public leaders has become increasingly complex and ambiguous (Van Wart 2013), there has been a gradual shift in the unit of analysis towards collaborations between public and particularly civil society actors (Ansell and Gash 2007); the ways in which civil society actors can be mobilized into action (Williams and Shearer 2011); and the ways in which public value can be democratically decided through cross-sectoral deliberations in open, public spaces (Bryson et al. 2017), and subsequently enacted through coproduced service delivery (Brandsen and Pestoff 2006). This approach to public leadership, sometimes framed as ‘integrative’ (Crosby and Bryson, 2010), is commonly seen as an antidote to overly bureaucratic models of public administration, notably new public management. Its emancipatory potential resides in bringing stakeholders together to engage in consensus-oriented decision-making (Ansell and Gash 2008). However, what were intended as analytic concepts – whose value (in terms of ‘favorable’/‘unfavorable’) could only be determined via empirical inquiry – have been too easily misinterpreted as prescriptive guidelines which delineate how public leadership – normatively speaking – ought to be performed (Cairney et al. 2016). But public leadership is necessarily practiced in the context of existing (new public management) forms of governance within and by public service organizations that are resistant to challenges to their professionalism and established ways of working (Osborne and Strokosch 2013). Equally challenging, in advanced liberal societies such as the United Kingdom (UK) public leadership involving civil society organizations (CSOs) as equal partners, must necessarily occur in tandem with existing arrangements where these organizations are treated as social enterprises through service level agreements and public sector contracts (Rees 2014). This begs the immediate question as to how public value might be realized in an era where welfare services and resources are increasingly provided beyond the direct influence of government? 

Against this backdrop, we offer an alternative account of ‘clandestine leadership’ developed over the course of a five-year qualitative longitudinal study exploring how CSOs negotiate governmental structures to create public value. We frame our research within the tradition of governmentality studies which provide an analytic frame to understand social enterprise within the context of post-welfarist governing. We develop this analytic framework to incorporate aspects of deviance and (willful) ignorance highlighted by our research. This leads us to outline clandestine leadership as a form of leadership that operates within hidden spaces, whereby CSOs mimic governmental discourse to access (mainly financial) resources, but deviate from the explicit, formal demands of government when utilizing these resources in ways that they saw as consistent with public value. However, it is dangerous to assume that such ‘deviance’ is indicative of the failure of governing, as the outcome is consistent with broader governmental objectives. Following an approach of theory elaboration (Fisher and Aguinis 2017) we outline three scenarios of clandestine leadership, each assuming a distinct inter-relationship between deviance and government’s willful ignorance thereof. In concluding we discuss how future research might probe the hidden spaces within which clandestine leadership occurs.