Event Details

With great pleasure, we have Dr Simon Mollan with us for a seminar on the 5th of March between 1100 and 1200. This is going to be an in-person event. There is also an online access link below for remote access.

The American historian and political scientist James MacGregor Burns’ (1918-2014) academic research on leadership helped to develop Leadership Studies as a field. His publication of Leadership, originally in 1978 (Burns 2005) was one of the seminal publications in the field, establishing the basis for concepts such as Transforming Leadership (later extended as “transformational leadership” by Bass (Bass 1985)) and Transactional Leadership. These studies, alongside his substantial historical work focusing on American presidents and the American Presidency (Burns 1960, 1966, 1976, 1984), established his reputation as “the most important founder of leadership studies” (Goethals 2016, 1), and through his associations and collaborations with figures such as presidential historians Michael Beschloss and Edward Larson, and leadership writers such as Jack Pelatson, Thomas Cronin, Susan Dunn, and Georgia Sorenson, Burns has had considerable long-term influence. His institutional importance can be seen in the creation of the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership that was originally based at the University of Maryland, College Park and is now based at the University of Cambridge in England. And when the journal Leadership was launched in 2005, Burns provided a two page endorsement for the publication, writing that the new journal would become ‘an indispensable tool for understanding leadership as a central force in human affairs, as well as an often baffling causal factor in history’ (Burns 2005, 11). Unlike other notable management theorists, however, Burns has not yet been the subject of critical re-assessment, or placed into historical, political, or theoretical context. Burns is therefore of interest to the history of business and management in two principal ways. First, in terms of the contribution of his ideas to the field of Leadership Studies, and second with reference to the ways in which he used history as a means to develop leadership theory (i.e., a form of management knowledge/theory).

In this paper I explore how Burns used historical research–both his own and that of others–– as a means of establishing an empirical base from which conceptual insights and theoretical advances could be established. As such, his methods have an analogue in the recent move to develop management theory from historical inquiry, sometimes referred to as ‘historical organization studies’ (Maclean, Harvey, and Clegg 2016). As such, the historiographical and theoretical operations performed by Burns will provide insights into how management and leadership scholars may proceed with the task of rendering theory from history, itself an potentially important contribution. The paper uses primary data collected via archival research using the personal papers and research materials of Burns at Williams College in Massachusetts (where he spent his working life). A close reading of Burns’ working notes, draft manuscripts, and especially his use of diagrams, allow us to discuss Burns’ method, providing insight into the process of conceptualisation and theorisation.