The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Inﬂuence, and Power

6
Crafting a sense of us

Leaders as entrepreneurs of identity

In the previous two chapters we have argued that, in order to be effective, leaders need to be representative of the groups that they seek to lead and also to advance those groups’ interests. In the course of making these points we also presented quite a large amount of empirical evidence to back up our claims. Before we continue, two points are worth making about this process. The first is that—particularly within the practitioner literature—there is a tendency for the strength of commentators’ claims to be negatively correlated with the strength of the data they present to back them up. Like the set of a Hollywood film, the grander the façade, the less there is of substance behind it. Indeed, in the case of many of the leadership books that line the shelves in airport bookstores, the main form of evidence is often simply the conviction of a well-known and successful leader that his (or, occasionally, her) views are correct. Against this, the second point is that—particularly within the academic literature—there is a tendency to stick to a very narrow understanding of what constitutes legitimate evidence. Some researchers insist that the gold standard is provided by controlled experimentation, while others argue that progress can be made only on the basis of rich descriptions of real-life phenomena.

In contrast to both of these tendencies, our approach assumes that the type of data that one requires in order to advance our understanding of leadership necessarily depends on the question that is being asked. Thus far, our examination has focused on one particular type of question. In general terms, we have been interested in exploring the consequences that flow from particular definitions of groups in the world—specifically, how leaders’ ability to represent and advance a group’s identity affects the amount of influence they exert over followers. In exploring such questions it makes sense to conduct controlled studies that measure the effect of a given manipulation (e.g., of leader prototypicality) on a relevant outcome (e.g., influence). However, in this chapter and the next we turn to consider a different type of question: how particular definitions of the world are themselves created. Here, our focus will be on the unbounded, idiosyncratic, and slippery process of meaning-making. Such intricacies are not immediately amenable to experimentation and so now it makes much more sense to analyze what people do in practice.

As we move into these chapters, there will thus be a shift in the type of evidence we present. This is not because we are less capable of producing strong scientific evidence to support the claims we want to make. Rather, as we have suggested, it is because good science involves using methodologies that are appropriate for the precise phenomena that one is trying to understand. Moreover, there is a danger that unless one adopts such an approach, only certain forms of truth will be uncovered—leading to very partial understanding. Indeed, it can be argued that the leadership literature has itself been plagued by precisely this problem: so that many of the limitations of theory (e.g., as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2) are a product of researchers’ limited empirical imaginations. Certainly, if researchers confine themselves to experimentation, they will tend to produce evidence like that which we have presented in the previous two chapters and thereby come to see leadership as a relatively passive, follower-driven process; whereas if they are only interested in biography, this will draw them towards conclusions in which the agency of leaders predominates and the role of followers is muted (Haslam & Reicher, 2007a).

Ultimately, then, a satisfactory psychology of leadership must be informed by the use of multiple research methods, and it must combine multiple insights within an integrative theory. So, having made the case for a new form of data, let us consider some.

The complex relationship between reality, representativeness, and leadership

Consider two true stories.

Story 1

On November 11, 1981, the leader of the British Labour Party, Michael Foot, stood beside the Cenotaph at Britain’s annual commemoration for war dead. It was a cold winter’s day, and he was wearing a short black coat bought from Herbie Frogg in Jermyn Street (see Figure 6.1a). According to Foot, the Queen Mother rather liked the garment, describing it as “a smart sensible coat for a day like this.”¹ He also revealed that his wife Jill thought: “I looked reasonably respectable although she often didn’t think I did.”² However, Foot was lambasted for his attire in the right-wing press the next day. He was described as wearing a donkey jacket—a rough working jacket that is symbolic of the British manual worker and that is the antithesis of formal wear. Supposedly, even one of his fellow Labour MPs described Foot as looking like an “unemployed navvy”.³

Foot never got beyond the incident. He himself was consigned to political oblivion while the jacket itself was catapulted into immortality. It was voted one of the most important items of late 20th-century Labour history and Foot offered to donate it to the People’s History Museum in Manchester (much to the delight of its staff). Over a quarter of a century later, its significance is still discussed. On April 6, 2007, the Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts wrote of the jacket and its owner that: “It suggested that this celebrated non-combatant did not understand the importance of demonstrating respect to the war dead and their families.”⁴

Story 2

On May 1, 2003, the American President George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. The ship was within helicopter range of the California coast, but Bush chose to fly in on a Lockheed S-3 Viking jet. He alighted in a full flying suit and flight helmet (see Figure 6.1b). Still wearing the suit, he then spoke to the ship’s crew and (more significantly) to a world-wide television audience. Against the backdrop of a giant banner bearing the slogan “Mission Accomplished,” Bush began by declaring: “In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” He finished by telling the troops: “Thank you for serving our country and our cause. May God bless you all, and may God continue to bless America.”⁵

It was, according to Jennifer Loven, an Associated Press writer, one of Bush’s “most indelible war-related images”⁶—an image of a warrior President speaking simultaneously for the nation to the military and as the military to the nation. It served to fuse the individual with the troops and with the country and, because of this, was highly effective. At the time of the speech, Bush’s approval rating stood at 70%.⁷ In the longer term, however, as the mission came to seem less and less accomplished, the President’s premature confidence came to work against him. On the fifth anniversary of the speech in May 2008, Bush’s disapproval rating stood at 71%, higher than that of any other US President.⁸

Four points arise out of these two stories.

First, they provide further illustration of how important it is for a would-be leader to be seen to be representative of the group that he or she seeks to lead and to embody the distinctive qualities and values of that group. The solemnity of a national occasion must be reflected in the solemnity of the would-be leader. And on military occasions, where the troops stand as a metonym for the country, the leader must be suitably martial.

The stakes involved could not be higher. Being seen to be representative is an important element in being chosen as a representative, even for the highest office in the land. It is a key element in the achievement of social power—the power to shape social reality. Foot got this wrong—or at least, he artlessly gave ammunition to others who wished to portray him as getting it wrong— and, for all his manifold talents, he was consigned to the dustbin of history. The artful Bush got it right—or at least, he provided a temporary image of martial success before the enduring images of continuing turmoil in Iraq tarnished his performance—and, for all his manifold limitations, he was able to make history.

Figure 6.1 The importance of leaders’ dress as a dimension of identity entrepreneurship.

Second, as the word “performance” implies, the relationship of the leader to the group is not something natural or written in stone. Political animals do not simply allow themselves to be measured against the group and concede defeat if they don’t measure up. Rather, they actively present themselves and choreograph events in order to be seen as prototypical. Thus Bush did not allow his lack of combat experience (and suggestions that he had actively avoided conflict in Vietnam) to stand in the way of his self-construction as a war leader.

As in any successful performance, no element is too trivial to ignore. Defining oneself as prototypical is not simply a matter of what one says, it is a matter of what one does, how one looks, and even (as we have just seen) what one wears. The critical thing, however, is not the nature of any single element in itself. There is no absolute “right” or “wrong” way of doing things. What counts is the way in which the various elements fit together to tell a coherent story about the speaker and the group. As an illustration of this point, the second author remembers listening in 1981 to a debate on disability policy connected to the United Nations “International Year of Disabled Persons.” The speaker was hard to understand, he slurred his words. He jumbled his sentences. He violated virtually every known rule of formal rhetoric. Yet this made him all the more influential, for it established him as a disabled person able to speak on behalf of other disabled people.

Returning to Bush, we commented in previous chapters on his tendency to speak ungrammatically and incoherently. As the plethora of “Bushisms” demonstrate, this made him an easy target for opponents’ ridicule (e.g., see Weisburg, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2007). Yet these attacks miss the point that, even if Bushisms may not be deliberate, they fit with Bush’s more general performance as the “all-American guy”—a performance that includes his cowboy boots, jeans, and leather jackets, his plain speaking, his taste for Budweiser beer and steak.⁹ In a radio debate during the 2004 Presidential campaign on the subject “Why Bushisms aren’t hurting George W. Bush,” the New York Times writer Eric Weiner argued that:

For the President’s supporters, the Bushism is a badge of honor, evidence that he is a regular guy who trips over his words and garbles his syntax, just like the rest of us, and unlike John Kerry, who speaks with perfect syntax but has a hard time connecting with voters on an emotional level.¹⁰

That is why, according to another contributor, Bush was not at all unhappy to see his Bushisms publicized. When asked about them, the President chuckled and replied “No, I’m glad, I like that, I play up to that.” Indeed, according to Jacob Weisberg (the editor of the “Bushisms” books and also part of the radio debate), the real danger was not to Bush himself, but rather to his Democratic detractors who, as we noted in Chapter 3, by attacking the imperfect language of an “ordinary guy,” allowed themselves to be portrayed as distant intellectuals who were unrepresentative of the population as a whole and therefore unfit to lead it (see also Drum, 2004). As Weisberg (2004, para. 5) observed at the time: “elitist condescension, however merited, helps cement Bush’s bond to the masses.”

Third, as is apparent in this discussion of Bushisms, aspirants to leadership rarely have a free run at defining themselves as representative of the group. They will nearly always find their claims challenged by their rivals who, in turn, claim representativeness for themselves. That is, self and group definitions are generally a matter of argument. Or, to put it the other way round, much political argument centers on who best represents the group that the contenders are vying to lead. Democrats seek to represent Bush as too incompetent to represent the nation, Republicans re-present this as an attack on ordinary Americanism by people whose values and tastes reveal themselves to be unAmerican. To quote from a conservative advert during the primary campaign for the 2004 presidency, they are, amongst other things: “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving.” In short, their tastes and comforts are not ours, but those of an elite that has the tastes of other groups.

Argumentation is at the heart of all our examples. The episode of Foot’s donkey jacket was initiated by his rivals in order to undermine the Labour leader’s claims to respectability and representativeness. Foot tried to fight back using the symbolic authority of the Queen Mother to buttress his claims to respectability, despite his deep republican sympathies (Morgan, 2007). The episode of Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech was initiated by the President himself, but came to be used by his opponents to indicate his lack of concern for the troops and for the American people. Thus, five years later, three Democratic senators, Frank Lautenberg, Robert Menendez, and Jim Webb, held a press conference at which they recalled the unrealized claim on the banner and then criticized Bush for placing the troops in an impossible situation—letting 3,900 of them die and ignoring the calls of the American people to let the troops come home. Bush, they claimed, did not speak for America, he acted against America. Or, as Webb put it, the President had “decreased the United States’ ability to address our strategic interests around the world and economic interests here at home.”¹¹

Fourth, leaders may make all sorts of claims about social reality, but in the end reality will catch up with them. Bush’s claim that the Iraq War was won may have been plausible in May 2003 and may have sustained his leadership, but by 2008 the claim—and the President’s standing—seemed decidedly more threadbare, both in the light of the immediate experience of military funerals across the communities of America and as reflected indirectly through media reports of the war.

All this suggests a rather rich and complex relationship between reality, representativeness, and leadership. On the one hand, as we saw in Chapter 4, the organization of social reality in a given context shapes the group prototype, which in turn shapes who is more or less prototypical and hence who has more or less opportunity to exert influence. This is a reactive process whereby social context determines leadership. On the other hand, as we have begun to intimate here, would-be leaders can actively shape the social context and the group prototype in order to render themselves more prototypical. This is a proactive process whereby leadership shapes the social context (through its capacity to shape collective action).

Put together, it is clear that we are not talking about a mechanical and deterministic relationship between these elements. Rather, as we suggested in Chapter 3 (e.g., see Figure 3.5), we are talking about a continuously evolving and dynamic process whereby reality feeds into identity, which feeds into leadership, which feeds back into reality. There is no natural starting point or finishing point to this process, and hence no element predominates over the others. For a limited time, there might even be some disjunction between the elements, where a leader projects a vision of “who we can be” that is at odds with what we currently are. As we shall see, this is a very powerful form of leadership rhetoric that has been particularly effective in mobilizing people to bring about social change (Bercovitch, 1980; Howard-Pitney, 2005). Yet if the mobilization fails, and if vision cannot be turned into reality (often due to the resistance of others who have alternative visions), then the definition of the group and the leader who offers it will fall by the wayside. These are issues we explore further in Chapter 7.

The issues we will explore in this chapter relate to the ways in which leaders construct identities so as to give themselves influence and power. Throughout the chapter—and this is where it builds on what has gone before—we emphasize the active nature of leadership. We stress that the core of this activity lies in shaping social identities so that the leader and his or her proposals are seen as the concrete manifestation of group beliefs and values. In the terminology of Reicher and Hopkins (2001), our theme is that leaders are entrepreneurs of identity. First, though, we need to explain the conceptual basis of our analysis a little more formally and systematically, and look at how it builds on our previous arguments.

Social identities as world-making resources

To recap, as we initially indicated in Chapter 3, our theoretical starting point is that social identification constitutes the psychological process that makes group behavior possible (Turner, 1982). This happens in two ways. First, when a number of people come to share a common social identity, the social relations between them are transformed so as to allow them to work together and coordinate their efforts (for reviews of relevant literature, see Haslam, 2001; Hogg & Terry, 2001; Reicher et al., 2010; Turner et al., 1987; van Knippenberg & Hogg, 2003). They expect and seek to reach agreement, they respect and trust each other, they help and support each other, they seek contact and engagement with each other. In this way, as we saw in Figure 3.2, shared social identity ensures that group members constitute a coherent social force with greater power to realize their shared goals.

However, social identity does not just facilitate collaboration, it also determines how people collaborate and what they collaborate on. Second, then, those who identify themselves as group members seek to base their behavior on the norms, beliefs, and values associated with the relevant group (and hence those with a shared social identification will act together on the basis of the same norms, beliefs, and values). Another way of putting this is to say that in the process of becoming a group its members engage in a process of self-stereotyping: that is, people ascertain the terms of the group definition (what it means to be “us”; to be American, a Catholic, a Conservative, or whatever) and then seek to conform to these norms. Of course, these terms may not always be clear—indeed, we would argue that they are never absolutely clear. Hence it becomes important to understand the process through which they become clear, since this will determine how (and whether) members act collectively. In this way, the notion of self-stereotyping—the development of a shared sense of “us”—becomes the basis for a model of influence and of leadership (Turner, 1991).

This model speaks to the three core issues of social influence. First, who is influential (the source)? Second, who is influenced (the target)? Third, what is influential (the content)?

The source of influence is anybody who can help elucidate the nature of group identity and its implications for how group members should act in context. As we argued in the previous two chapters, this will be someone who exemplifies the group identity—that is, someone who is prototypical of the in-group.

Thetarget of influence is constituted by all those who, in the given context, define themselves in terms of the relevant social identity. For example, in appealing to “my fellow Americans,” a politician is, of course, only of appeal to those who are currently thinking of themselves as American. The same goes for the appeal of any source. It will be as wide (but only as wide) as the boundaries of social identification.

Finally, the content of influence will be constrained by the meanings associated with the social identity. This goes against many models that suggest that people in a group can be made to do virtually anything so long as someone tells them what to do forcibly enough, simply enough, and often enough (for a review, see Turner, 1991). It means, for example, that an appeal to Scottish people must be seen as consonant with the values of Scottishness if it is to be effective. As we will see, this gives quite some room for maneuver, in terms both of how Scottishness is framed and how one’s proposals are described. But it doesn’t mean that anything goes. One can only persuade group members to do things that they see as the concrete manifestation of who they are and what they therefore believe in.

This much is not especially new. In order to move on, it is helpful to consider the significance of these arguments at two different levels: the personal and the social/political.

At the personal level, social identities are immensely important to individual group members. They give us a sense of place in the world: who we are, what we should do, and how we relate to others. Identities also give us a sense of connection to those who share our sense of self (i.e., other in-group members), and the group itself is typically a source of belongingness and pride. A large body of evidence indicates these factors in turn serve to enhance well-being and promote mental and physical health (for a recent review, see Haslam et al., 2009). What is more, individuals’ connection to other group members gives rise to a sense of effectiveness in shaping the world (Drury & Reicher, 1999; Reicher & Haslam, 2006b). Working together on the basis of a common social identity, we have both the perspective and the power to make our own history rather than adapt to a history determined by others. We are transformed from passive subjects into active agents (see Reicher & Haslam, 2006a).

Little wonder, then, that groups matter to people. They care about their group identity—about what it means, about its good standing, about defending it from attack. They will be joyous when they can express their shared values in action and when they achieve their collective goals (see Reicher & Haslam, 2006b). They will be well disposed towards those who help them in these endeavors. By contrast, they will be indisposed towards proposals and people that are seen to undermine these shared values. In particular, they will be hostile to anything or anyone that seems to threaten their social identity (Branscombe, Ellemers, Spears, & Doosje, 1999). As we discussed in Chapter 3, when their sense of self is bound up with group membership, people will also make personal sacrifices in order to protect the group and its future.

At the social/political level, social identities also matter, but in a rather different way. This becomes obvious when we restate what we have already said, but in a more political language that refers to collective action rather than group behavior. Two points need to be emphasized here. First, when we consider that people often identify themselves in terms of very broad social categories—national categories and religious categories to take but two—it is apparent that this collective action can be on a very large scale indeed. Here, then, we are talking about genuine mass or even societal mobilizations. Second, by “collective action” we are referring to all the ways in which large numbers of people can do things together—not just dramatic events such as strikes, rallies, and demonstrations, but also the more mundane actions that make up the contours of our daily lives. These include activities like supporting politicians, endorsing social policies, and responding to various political initiatives (e.g., to conserve energy, to reduce pollution, or to pay one’s taxes). Putting the two points together, what we are dealing with here are social forces with the potential to reshape not only whole groups and whole organizations, but also whole societies.

Applying our insights into the source, the target, and the content of social influence processes at this societal level, it follows: (1) that the ways in which category prototypes are defined will determine who is able to direct mass mobilizations; (2) that the ways in which category boundaries are defined will determine the scale of mass mobilizations; and (3) that the ways in which category content is defined will determine the direction of mass mobilizations. In this way, social identities shape the mobilizations that shape the social world. In other words, they are world-making resources (Reicher et al., 2007).

Now, we can tie the personal and political strands of the argument together, and see the implications for leadership. For individuals, there is an interest in defining social identities and in interpreting the significance of events for social identity—for this is essential to our very social being. Group members will therefore embrace those who act as interpreters and turn to them to help make sense of the world. But those who are able to provide this help do not only provide a function for individuals. They are able to harness the power of the group as a whole. The world-making resource becomes theirs. Hence, all those who have an interest in shaping the social world— politicians, activists, and other aspirants to leadership—have an equally strong interest in the interpretation of social identity. Indeed, the interpretation of social identity becomes central to their craft. All this makes the question of how social identities are defined a matter of primary importance, politically as well as personally.

In earlier chapters, we emphasized the way in which social reality (or, more technically, comparative context) shapes social identities. Now, as intimated above, we shift register and emphasize how social identities shape social reality. Or again, to be precise, we examine how leaders seek to define social identities in order to mobilize and shape collective action and thereby affect social reality. Our argument is that, precisely because definitions of identity have such important social and political consequences, leaders will seek to mould these definitions to their own purposes rather than accept them as given. They will seek to define themselves and the group so that they appear to be prototypical. They will seek to define the boundaries of the group so as to include the largest possible proportion of the audience that they seek to mobilize. They will seek to define the content of group identity and their own suggestions so that these suggestions appear as the concrete manifestation of shared beliefs and values. This matters, because it is by this means that leaders are able to mobilize the masses behind their policies and proposals.

By way of example, we can return to the hypothetical scenario we first outlined in Chapter 4 and imagine what the members of the centrist political group depicted in Figure 4.2 (see p. 86) might try to do in order to enhance their own leadership. In the first instance, those leaders who are not representative of the group in a given social context (e.g., R in Context 1) might seek to restructure that context with a view to increasing the prototypicality of their own candidature. R might do this, for example, by drawing attention to, and focusing on, the group’s disagreements with left-wing out-groups. In this context he might also make the case for a more reactionary understanding of what the in-group stands for—with a view to defining it as more positive than, and distinct from, left-wing “extremism.” Beyond this, he might also organize activities that cement this representation of the world in the minds of group members. For example, he might initiate a high-profile debate with left-wing groups or stage a public protest against its views. Going further, he might try to take legal action against some of its members or initiate all-out conflict.

Leaders, then, are not just interpreters of identity for their public. They do not simply work with an understanding of the group that is already self-evident to its members. Instead, they often need to work hard to create and promote a particular version of identity. That is why we prefer the term “entrepreneurs of identity” to “interpreters of identity” as a description of leaders. Entrepreneurs are what they are. Interpreters are how they wish to be seen—for if people accept their version of identity as self-evident, the battle for influence is all but won.

This point suggests that identity entrepreneurship actually involves a double labor. On the one hand, considerable work is involved in crafting a definition that is both plausible and appropriate to one’s purposes. On the other hand, an equal amount of work is involved in hiding all this labor and making one’s accounts of identity seem obvious, effortless, and “natural.” As Ronald Reagan (sometimes referred to as “the Great Communicator”; e.g., Strock, 1998) demonstrated, it takes considerable rhetorical skill to appear non-rhetorical. To get a sense of this, observe the way in which he turned on the oratory of his Democratic rivals when speaking in Atlanta during the 1984 election campaign:

You know those folks who are writing off the South out there in the fog in San Francisco, they were busy talking and filling the air with eloquent-sounding words; as a matter of fact, big clouds of words. But a lot of those words contained what Winston Churchill called “terminological inexactitude.” That’s a nice way of saying they said a few things that weren’t true.

(cited in Erickson, 1985, p. 120)

Taking us back to our discussion of Bush, note how Reagan here uses folksy language to position himself as the blunt man of the people up against a sophisticated but alien elite, how he plays on the theme of clarity versus mystification, of honest reality versus misleading appearance. There is much complexity in being a simple “man of the people.”

In the following three sections we will look in more detail at the various dimensions of identity entrepreneurship: first, how leaders make themselves into category prototypes; second, how leaders draw category boundaries so as to turn their audience into a homogenous band of followers; third, how leaders define category content so as to make their proposals into manifestations of social identity.

Who can mobilize us? The importance of defining category prototypes

We have just cited Ronald Reagan from his 1984 Presidential contest with Walter Mondale. We claimed that his words were an artful construction of identity posing as an artless description of reality. Lest we be accused of reading too much into his words, consider the following memo in which, at the outset of the campaign, the Assistant White House Chief of Staff, Richard Darman, sketched out Reagan’s overall rhetorical strategy:

Paint RR as the personification of all that is right with or heroized by America. Leave Mondale in a position where an attack on Reagan is tantamount to an attack on America’s idealized image of itself—where a vote against Reagan is in some subliminal sense, a vote against mythic “AMERICA”.

(cited in Erickson, 1985, p. 100; original emphasis)

This sense of the President as the personification of American identity is not limited to Reagan. One finds examples everywhere. Going backwards to the 19th century, one writer responded to the death of Andrew Jackson in 1845 by writing that “he was the embodiment of the true spirit of the nation in which he lived … [his contemporaries saw] in him their own image … Because his countrymen saw their image and spirit in Andrew Jackson, they bestowed their honor and admiration upon him” (cited by Dallek, 1996, p. 132). Going forwards to the 21st century, another example comes to light on the very day that these words are being written, August 13, 2008. In today’s edition, The Guardian reports a memo from Mark Penn, chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to be the Democratic Presidential candidate. Penn’s memo stresses the importance not only of asserting Clinton’s own prototypicality, but also of undermining the prototypicality (and hence the leadership appeal) of her rival, Barack Obama:

His roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited … Let’s explicitly own “American” in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t.

(Yonge, 2008, p. 18)

Winning, Penn realizes, is about being more prototypical than one’s opponent.

To be both broader and more systematic, in his book Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership, Howard Gardner (1996) provides an analysis of 11 prominent leaders—Presidential and non-Presidential, political and non-political, American and non-American. Gardner concludes that all the leaders he studies had a particular skill as storytellers. These stories were typically about the nature of group identity (more on this presently). Moreover, the stories were also about how the leaders and their messages embodied identity. But most of all, they were about the fusing of self and nation, self and religion, or indeed self and the particular group (political, scientific, cultural, ethnic) that the leader sought to mobilize. As Gardner puts it in a key passage (which is also picked out by David Gergen, advisor to four Presidents, in his own analysis on Presidential leadership; Gergen, 2000):

It is a stroke of leadership genius when stories and embodiments appear to fuse, or to coalesce, as in a dream—when, as the poet William Butler Yeats would have it, one cannot tell the dancer from the dance.

(Gardner, 1996, p. 37)

To broaden the argument yet further, lest it be supposed that we are referring to a distinctively modern phenomenon, it is also worth quoting from Josiah Ober’s study of mass and elite in ancient Athens (Ober, 1989). Referring to the success of the greatest of Athenian leaders, Pericles, Ober writes: “like Pisistratus before him, Pericles stressed the unity of citizens and state, and he encouraged the Athenians to see in himself the symbolic embodiment of the latter” (p. 88).

For Gardner, what marks out great leaders from ordinary ones is the fact that they don’t just repeat traditional stories of identity. They innovate. They draw on less well-known strands of group culture. They weave familiar strands into novel patterns. They are careful not to violate what we know of ourselves. Their genius is to make the new out of elements of the old and thereby to present revolution as tradition. To translate this argument into our own terms, the skill of leadership involves more than constructing a self that “fits” with a group’s social identity. It means constructing both self and social identity, sometimes using the self to buttress one’s vision of the group.

To illustrate this, we can focus on two men who are commonly considered to be amongst the greatest of American Presidents—Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. As well as being widely respected, both men were also linked by the fact that they had severe physical disabilities.

In 1921, Roosevelt was struck down with what was thought to be polio (although now this diagnosis is questioned and rejected by some in favor of Guillain–Barré syndrome; see Goldman, Scmalsteig, Freeman, Goldman, & Schmalsteig, 2003). For the rest of his life, he was largely confined to a wheelchair, he could only stand with the aid of heavy braces that locked his legs into place, and he could only walk slowly and with great difficulty. Many commentators note that Roosevelt never allowed himself to be photographed in his wheelchair or in ways that revealed his paralysis (e.g., see Gardner, 1996). This is slightly overstating the case. Nonetheless, it is certainly true that Roosevelt went to extraordinary lengths to avoid anything that suggested that he had been overcome by his condition. He insisted on delivering his public speeches while standing in his leg braces and dressed specifically to hide them. He practiced continuously so he could walk short distances to and from the podium with the aid of his cane (Chen, 2001). However, critically, the image that Roosevelt conveyed was not of someone who was able-bodied, but of someone who had overcome his affliction, not of someone who didn’t suffer, but of someone who endured and triumphed over suffering.

Chen, for instance, quotes a reporter at the 1928 Democratic National Convention who described FDR as “a figure tall and proud even in suffering, pale with years of struggle against paralysis, a man softened and cleansed and illumined with pain” (2001, p. 25). Gardner (1996) reports that this courage was known and admired. Rosenman (1952), in his account of 17 years working with Roosevelt, gives a poignant example of this from the triumphal election of 1936. Roosevelt won this election by 11 million votes. He won every State except Vermont and Maine. He won the electoral college by 528 votes to 8. His campaign inspired a remarkable level of devotion in the crowds who came to hear him: “they passed any bounds for enthusiasm— really wild enthusiasm—that I have ever seen in any political gathering” (Ambassador Breckinridge Long; quoted in Leuchtenburg, 1995, p. 141). This support came in large measure because the mass of Americans felt that Roosevelt could understand their trials and tribulations like no other candidate. The very sight of FDR on the campaign trail, as described by Rosenman, exemplifies these difficulties and the ability to rise above them:

After the speech … the President pulled himself up the long ramp to the platform of his railway car … Friend or foe, those who saw him at this moment could not help being moved at the sight of this severely crippled man making his way up with such great difficulty—really propelling himself along by his arm and shoulder muscles as his strong hands grasped the rails at the side of the ramp.

(1952, p. 122)

This connection between the President and the American people was far from accidental. It was not simply that Roosevelt actively constructed his own triumphant self-image. It was also that he actively constructed an image of America as a nation defined through its willingness and ability to fight and prevail against adversity. Leuchtenburg (1995) notes how Roosevelt drew on metaphors of war in order to portray Americans “fighting” against the Great Depression. This is seen in his first inaugural speech of March 4, 1933. Here he announced “I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack on our common problems.” Of course, that speech is best known for the famous phrase “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” It is worth, however, expanding on the relevant passage:

This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.¹²

Endurance and revival. Paralysis mastered. Vigor and victory. Roosevelt’s self-narrative is transformed into a narrative for the country. By using the self as a metonym for the nation, the President is able to both illustrate and make credible his vision of and for America.

At a personal level, this narrative could equally well be applied to Kennedy. From his youth he suffered from a range of ailments. In the first instance he suffered from Addison’s disease and this had to be treated through large doses of steroids that contributed to the deterioration of his back and to almost constant (and often agonizing) pain. During World War II he pulled strings to get these problems overlooked and to win service as a torpedo boat commander. This was about the worst posting he could have had—for the ride on the boats was so harsh and jolting that it strained even the fittest of men. Yet Kennedy didn’t only serve, he became a hero after his vessel— PT109—was sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer and he spent almost five days in the water rescuing his crew.

The difference from FDR was rather at the political level. Kennedy sought to sketch a very different vision of America. While there are links— Kennedy’s notion of a “new frontier” clearly has echoes of Roosevelt’s “new deal”—JFK’s vision was centered on the notion of a generational break, of a young cohort “born in this century, tempered by war” (to cite from the inaugural address of January 20, 1961) and ready to deal with the challenges of a new era. This idea was central to Kennedy’s electoral appeal from his first campaign to his last. The slogan in his race for Congress in 1946 was “The New Generation Offers a Leader.” In accepting the Democratic nomination as Presidential candidate in 1960, he said: “it is a time, in short, for a new generation of leadership—new men to cope with new problems and new possibilities” (Dallek, 2003, p. 275). Of course, Kennedy offered himself as emblematic of this “young America,” even if “youth” referred to an attitude of mind more than chronological age (in his introduction to Kennedy’s speeches and writings, Ted Sorensen writes that he spoke to: “the young in heart, regardless of age”; 1988, p. 14). In this, JFK’s boyish looks and languid charm were critical political tools. It is notable, for instance, that a majority of those who listened to the Nixon–Kennedy debates during the 1960 campaign for the White House thought that Nixon had won. A majority of those who saw them on television thought that Kennedy was the victor. After the election, JFK acknowledged how important television images were to his success, observing that “we wouldn’t have had a prayer without that gadget” (Gergen, 2000, p. 213; see also Atkinson, 1984).

The importance played by pictures of a radiant and healthy Kennedy is acknowledged by biographers (Dallek, 2003), demonstrated by empirical studies of the basis of Kennedy’s enduring popularity (Felkins & Goldman, 1993), and was well understood by Kennedy himself. In the run up to his inaugural speech, the cortisone he took to control his Addison’s disease made him look puffy-faced and overweight. His secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, recalls him catching sight of himself in the mirror and exclaiming: “My God, look at that fat face, if I don’t lose five pounds this week we might have to call off the inauguration” (Dallek, 2003, p. 322). Lincoln also recalls being hardly able to contain her laughter at this comment. But the vision of young America could not be represented by a sick and frail man, however heroically he endured and mastered his disabilities. A virile leader was necessary to advance Kennedy’s vision of Americanism.

To tie these points together, then, leadership prototypicality is a matter of defining the relationship between the self and group identity. Sometimes, the definition of the group has precedence in this process, and leaders seek to represent themselves in ways that fit with a predefined understanding of the group. Sometimes, as we have just been discussing, nothing is predefined and there is a balance between the way the leader is represented and the way the group is represented. At the extreme, there are also situations where the definition of the leader has precedence, where individuals have acquired an iconic status for the group and where the way in which they are represented serves to define how group identity is understood. Of many examples we could draw on to illustrate the latter process, let us focus on two leaders who are widely seen to have “foundational” status in the histories of contemporary nations: the South African President Nelson Mandela and Pakistan’s first Governor-General, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (see Figure 6.2).

In the case of Mandela, Tom Lodge describes how he became an embodiment of the South African nation “that transcends ideology, party, or group” (George Frederickson, cited in Lodge, 2007, p. 212). Indeed, Mandela himself describes his conscious use of clothing to exemplify this status as far back as his first court appearance after his arrest in 1962:

I had chosen traditional Xhosa dress to emphasize the symbolism that I was a black African walking into a white man’s court … I felt myself to be the embodiment of African nationalism.

(cited in Lodge, 2007, p. 189)

As a consequence of this iconic status, those who sought to define the nature of African nationalism—and subsequently, in the post-Apartheid era, the nature of the South African nation—could do so through the ways in which they defined Mandela himself. Lodge describes how different visions of the liberation movement were reflected in different biographies. Mary Benson, who represented a non-racial and liberal democratic strand of the movement, described Mandela as estranged from his traditional African upbringing and saw the key developments in his life as deriving from his arrival in Johannesburg and his employment as a lawyer (Benson, 1989). By contrast, Fatima Meer, who came from a more Africanist tradition that prioritized black experience and black values, argues that Mandela’s early years as a ward in the rural household of Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the Regent of the Thembu, were critical in forming his personality, together with his

Figure 6.2 Leaders whose lives came to define group identity.

understanding of leadership, democracy, and morality (Meer, 1990). For her, Mandela’s life-long quest was to recapture the ubuntu (roughly, the sense of community and solidarity) of the African kings.

In the case of Jinnah, if anything, he is more central to the idea of Pakistan than Mandela is to the idea of South Africa. In the words of Akbar Ahmed, Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University in Washington, D.C., he is viewed as “the very symbol of the state, the father of the nation, the savior of the Muslims” (1997, p. xix), such that, in him, “we are not looking at a biography but at the definition of the people” (p. 62). Even if Muhammed Iqbal was the first to moot the idea of a separate Muslim state in the sub-continent and Choudhary Rahmat Ali who first coined the name “Pakistan,” it was Jinnah who provided the conceptual underpinnings in his “two-nations theory,” Jinnah who, as leader of the Muslim League from 1934 both promoted and popularized the idea, Jinnah who launched the “Direct Action” campaign in 1946 to achieve the Pakistani state, and Jinnah who was the first Governor-General of Pakistan and President of the Constituent Assembly. He literally brought Pakistan into being and he did so symbolically as well as practically, using his own self as an emblem of the new country. Notably, he brought together the disparate peoples who made up Pakistan into a single entity through his dress. This was seen when, on August 4, 1947, Jinnah stepped out from his plane and onto the soil of an independent Pakistan for the very first time. On his head he wore the karakuli, a black sheepskin cap as worn by the Muslims of North India. On his back he wore the sherwani (a knee-length black coat as worn by the Muslims of Aligarh). On his legs he wore the shalwar (baggy trousers worn by Muslims in the west of the country). Altogether his attire thus constituted the national dress and helped constitute the nation itself—not just the meaning of Pakistan, but the very reality of a Pakistani entity (see Reicher & Hopkins, 2001).

While our emphasis in this section has been on the different forms of in-group prototypicality—that is, how self and category representations are brought into alignment—we have, in passing, also seen something of the ways in which prototypicality is achieved. Sometimes it is a matter of biography. In an anecdote that is possibly apocryphal but certainly telling, Robert Dallek (2003) remarks that John Kennedy appears to have been “confused” as to the origins of his great-grandmother: “because her son—who was the Mayor of Boston—used to claim his mother came from whichever Irish county had the most votes in the audience he was addressing at that particular time” (pp. 3–4). Sometimes it is a matter of one’s personality, sometimes it is a matter of one’s values, sometimes of one’s physical characteristics, or else of one’s appearance. Often, it is many of these, or even more.

And then of course, there is clothing. In this regard, it is hard to resist an example discussed at some length by Reicher and Hopkins (2001). Back in 1993, the Conservative politician Bill Walker was seeking to introduce legislation at Westminster that would make Scottish devolution more difficult. In order to claim that he was speaking for Scots, he made much of his dress. Walker began: “I stand before you, Madam Speaker, wearing the dress of Highland Scotland.” However, before he could get any further, his claims were punctured by the intervention of a fellow Member of Parliament, Nicholas Fairbairn:

On a point of order Madam Speaker. My honourable Friend the Member for Tayside North suggested that he was in highland dress. He is in nothing of the kind. He misled the House and I have reason to believe that he is wearing little red pants under his kilt.

(Hansard 9.2.93: 829)

Of course, Fairbairn’s interjection was an attempt to be humorous. However, by belittling an individual’s claims to prototypicality, it was humor that had a very powerful effect.

Before we leave the topic of prototypicality, there is one final point that needs to be made. It relates to an apparent paradox that lies at the core of leadership. This concerns the relationship between leaders and followers. It reflects the fact that, on the one hand, people wish their leaders to be wise, virtuous, and the sum of all good. They want leaders to be exceptional. Yet on the other hand, people want their leaders to be of them, like them, to share their experiences, and not to stand above them. They want leaders to be representative of them. Dallek (1996) makes the point that Americans want simultaneously to mythologize and to debunk their Presidents. Not just Americans. And not just Presidents. This is a general issue. As Ober (1989) relates, the ancient Greeks expressed it by asking how leaders could be both average citizens (, idiōtēs) and have exceptional qualities that legitimized their political privileges (metrios). So can the paradox be resolved?

As we intimated in Chapters 3 and 4, the important thing to understand about the notion of prototypicality is the way it differs from the notion of just being typical. To be prototypical is to be uniquely representative of the shared values, norms, beliefs, and qualities that characterize our group and make it different from other groups. To be prototypical is to be exceptional in being fully representative. The potential for a leader to be prototypical and highly untypical at the same time is enhanced if we add a temporal dimension to the definition of social identity. That is, prototypicality is not simply a product of what group members are like compared with members of other groups in the here and now. Indeed, on occasion it is possible to argue that the present generation of group members has departed from the “true” group identity as represented at some other point in time. If this is accepted, then the prototypical leader can have qualities shared by none of his or her actual followers. As we will see in discussing the content of social identity, this sort of argument constitutes a common and powerful form of leadership rhetoric. The point to reiterate here is that leaders are not like the rest of us as individuals but like the group identity that we share in common. And these are very different things.

Who is mobilized? The importance of defining category boundaries

Category boundaries, we have argued, determine who acts together, who supports each other, who cares about the group fate, and who shares in the group values. They therefore matter both for those who are categorized and for those who do the categorizing.

For those who are categorized, category boundaries can literally be a matter of life and death. Consider the following two statements:

1 What is the first Commandment of every National Socialist? … Love Germany above all else and your ethnic comrade [Volksgenosse] as your self.

(Koonz, 2003, p. 7)

2 The bill’s objective is to deprive a Bulgarian national minority of its civil rights…. Our legislature must not approve a law that will enslave one part of Bulgaria’s citizens, and leave a black page in our modern history.

(Todorov, 2001, p. 45)

The first of these statements is taken from a booklet written by Goebbels, entitled The Little ABC’s of National Socialism, and intended as a guide for Nazi speakers in the early 1930s. It stresses the importance of solidarity for fellow Germans, but the sting lies in the term “ethnic comrade.” This defines the boundaries of nationhood in racialized terms. It excludes groups such as Jewish people from the national embrace. It is the starting point for a process that ultimately led to extermination (see Reicher, Haslam, & Rath, 2008).

The second statement is taken from an appeal by the Bulgarian Writers’ Union to the Prime Minister and Chairman of the National Assembly. It was sent on October 22, 1940, and was part of a successful campaign to prevent anti-Jewish legislation—a campaign that, ultimately, prevented the deportation of Jews from old Bulgaria to the Nazi extermination camps. It is notable for the fact that the term “Jew” is not even used. Instead, the statement employs terms like “a national minority” and “one part of Bulgaria’s citizens.” It is taken for granted that Jewish people are included within the boundaries of the national in-group and therefore included in the national embrace. To put it slightly differently, in this formulation, anti-Jewish measures become an attack on “us,” not “them” and hence there is the basis for mobilizing the population against these measures (see Reicher, Cassidy, Wolpert, Hopkins, & Levine, 2006).

What is striking about these two extracts, then, is that, at a psychological level, they invoke the same processes: concern, support, even love for in-group members. However, they lead to diametrically opposed social outcomes as a function of the different ways in which group boundaries are drawn. Where the boundaries are drawn narrowly (as in the Nazi case) they are bound up with the most appalling of atrocities. Where the boundaries are drawn broadly (as in the Bulgarian case) they are bound up with the most inspiring of rescues.

It is precisely because it has such important social consequences that the definition of boundaries constitutes such an important issue for leaders—not only in terms of what they are trying to achieve but also in terms of their ability to achieve anything at all. Common categorization provides the potential for people to act in concert. Translating once more from a psychological to political terminology, categories create constituencies. Category boundaries contain and constrain those constituencies. Any mismatch between the way that boundaries are defined and the constituency one seeks to sway will lead to a failure of mobilization.

It is precisely this realization that led to the development of the “new world order” rhetoric during the first Gulf conflict of 1990–91. Immediately after Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, an advisor to President George Bush declared that: “We need the oil. It’s nice to talk about standing up for freedom but Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are not exactly democracies.”¹³ Who, then, is this “we”? It clearly excludes the oil-producing countries. They are the “other” whose oil “we” need.

Such rhetoric may have been perfectly functional when the administration was trying to mobilize a domestic constituency. However, it became problematic when a military strategy was developed that required the support of Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia, as bases for US troops. It was even more problematic for those Arab leaders who wanted to cooperate with the Americans and therefore faced popular accusations that they were dealing with the enemy. Hence, it is not surprising, as Dilip Hiro (1992) has documented, that Arab leaders themselves developed an alternative construction of the categories involved in the conflict: not (Arab) oil producers versus (Western) oil-dependent economies, but rather (Saddam’s) Iraq versus the rest of the world, Arab and non-Arab alike. Accordingly, President Assad of Syria declared that: “The world would resemble a jungle if every country were to impose its illegitimate viewpoints through aggression and the use of force” (cited in Hiro, 1992, p. 130). George Bush subsequently adopted and extended this language in his famous speech to the United Nations on October 1. Here he declared that:

The present aggression in the Gulf is a menace not only to one region’s security but to the entire world’s vision of our future. It threatens to turn the dream of a new world order into a grim nightmare of anarchy in which the law of the jungle supplants the law of nations… . Our quarrel is not with the people of Iraq. We do not wish for them to suffer. The world’s quarrel is with the dictator who ordered that invasion.¹⁴

In this new version, the categories are quite explicit. On the one hand, the in-group has been extended from the United States and the West to include the “entire world.” Correspondingly, the out-group has been pared down. It no longer includes all Arabs, it no longer includes all Iraqis. It is constituted by one man alone, Saddam Hussein. Arab peoples have thereby become as central to the rhetorical in-group as they are to the military coalition. According to this construction the massive air bombardment of Iraq that began on January 17, 1991 was not an attack on an Arab people but solely on their leader who himself was a threat to Arabs (amongst others). “Big guns open up to blast Saddam” was the headline in the British Daily Mail newspaper the next morning—even if Saddam Hussein in his reinforced underground bunker was one of the very few Iraqis who was not in danger of being blasted (see Reicher, 1991). The shift in Bush’s rhetoric, then, constitutes an expansion of group boundaries so as to include all those he seeks to mobilize as part of the same in-group. Categories and constituencies are realigned. The leader is in a position to appeal to all those from whom he seeks support (see also Reicher & Hopkins, 1996a, 1996b).

Insofar as category boundaries relate to whom it is that one is trying to mobilize, then one would expect, first, that those seeking to recruit the same constituency will employ the same categories (or at least, categories with the same boundaries), and, second, that those interested in different constituencies will use different categories (or at least, categories with different boundaries). Both of these contentions are supported by an extensive study that Reicher and Hopkins conducted into Scottish political leadership (see Hopkins & Reicher, 1997a, 1997b; Reicher & Hopkins, 2001). Scottish politics has long been centered around the question of national identity. At the time of the study, there were three main positions. The first, mainly associated with the Conservatives, believed in maintaining the Union of Scotland with England, Wales, and Ireland in the United Kingdom. The second, mainly associated with the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, also supported Union but were more enthusiastic about a devolution of powers to a new Scottish Parliament (which actually came about in 1999). The third, associated with the Scottish National Party, accepted devolution as an interim measure, but believed in Scottish independence. These last, the SNP, were and still are referred to as the nationalists. One might therefore think that they would be more likely than others to make appeals to the electorate in terms of Scottish identity and to declare their own Scottishness. Not at all. What we found was very different. In fact, members of all parties stressed their Scottish identity and expressed annoyance at the notion that the SNP were more Scottish than they were. To quote the Conservative government minister of the time, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, speaking on March 6, 1992:

Advocates of change [i.e. the SNP] have in the past been inclined to claim the emotional high-ground about the future of Scotland. They parade their Scottishness as unique to their cause. I yield to no-one in my Scottishness and believe that I do have some understanding of the needs and the aspirations of the people of Scotland. I therefore yield the high ground to none.

(cited in Hopkins & Reicher, 1997b, p. 82)

What is more, all the parties characterized the boundaries of Scottishness in the same broad terms. As many writers have emphasized, there are different ways of defining nationhood. Some stress descent and therefore exclude migrants and ethnic minorities, others stress commitment and therefore (at least potentially) include all those living on the national territory (e.g., Greenfeld, 1992). Often, nationalists are castigated on the assumption that they are advocating ethnic exclusivism, and yet in Scotland, the SNP, like their rivals, were stridently inclusive. To quote Alex Salmond, speaking as leader to his party conference in 1995:

We see diversity as a strength not a weakness of Scotland and our ambition is to see the cause of Scotland argued with English, French, Irish, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese and every other accent in the rich tapestry of what we should be proud to call, in the words of Willie McIlvanney “the mongrel nation of Scotland”.

(cited in Reicher & Hopkins, 2001, p. 164)

We should not underestimate the extent to which such inclusiveness is based on a principled opposition to racial and ethnic discrimination. But equally, we should not ignore the fact that the ability to achieve anything as a democratic politician depends on securing the support of the electorate and that in turn depends on including as many people as possible within the category to which, and through which, one appeals. Hence the SNP, like all those others contesting nationally elected office, need to promote an inclusive Scotland.

However, those who don’t seek national office and whose political aims do not rely on such inclusive mobilizations do not need to use inclusive categories. Thus a pressure group like “Scottish Watch,” which used campaigning politics and direct action to oppose migration—specifically English migration—into Scotland, was explicit in defining Scottishness in terms of birth and in characterizing “incomers” as aliens. Hence its leaders described the English as “a foreign ethnic group” and the group’s Highland Organizer argued during a public meeting that: “we are the native people of this country and we must organize ourselves to resist these new Scottish Clearances. If we don’t then there’ll be no future for the Scots in Scotland” (cited in Reicher & Hopkins, 2001, p. 158).

So, to reiterate our core contention, when it comes to the use of inclusive national categories, what counts is who one seeks to mobilize, not what one is mobilizing them for.

National politicians of whatever ideological stripe use the same categories because they are vying for the attention of the same audience. However, where ideological differences do impact on category definitions is in the content ascribed to these self-same categories. To lead people in different directions depends on telling them different things about what they value, what they care about, and what they aspire to.

What is the nature of mobilization? The importance of defining category content

Let us continue, for a moment, with the Scottish example. Conservative, Labour, and SNP may well all address the electorate as Scots, but each proposes a very different view of Scottishness. For the Conservatives, the Scots are inherently thrifty, hard working, self-reliant, and entrepreneurial. According to one of their parliamentarians who we interviewed: “If you look at Glasgow, it’s pure Thatcher-built. Pulled itself up by the bootlaces, sold itself, changed its image completely, combination of private capital and public money.” For Labour, Scots are inherently caring and communal. To quote from another one of our interviewees, a Labour parliamentary candidate:

We have a long history in Scotland … of not saying “I’m all right Jack”, we are far more concerned about caring for those who … are less fortunate, in inverted commas, than ourselves. We care more about the poor, we care more about the disabled, we put our caring into operation.

(cited in Reicher & Hopkins, 2001, p. 108)

That was achieved through what he described as “the corporate community that is Scotland” (p. 108). Many in the SNP echo this egalitarianism, but add to it two tinges: that Scots’ egalitarianism is at odds with, and threatened by, English individualism, and that Scots’ egalitarianism is tied up with independent-mindedness. In the words of an SNP parliamentary candidate:

The democracy of the Presbytery spins off and that is you, this is the questioning view. It’s the independence of it. And that is engendered and enhanced by poets particularly like Burns. It’s that view, having an independent view and not thinking you’re better than anyone else.

(cited in Reicher & Hopkins, 2001, p. 124)

While these versions of Scottish and American identity all differ, they evidently all fit with the party policy of the respective speakers. In the same way that leaders seek to define a consonant relationship between their selves and the category prototype, so they seek to define a consonant relationship between their policies and category content. This is vitally important. For in this way they are able to say “let us do what we believe in” rather than “you should do what I believe in.” Or, to draw on the Greek statesman and orator Demosthenes, the worth of a speaker lies “In his preference for the same things as the many and in his hating and loving the same things as his homeland. Having such a disposition, everything a man says will be patriotic” (Ober, 1989, p. 167). We would only add that the depiction of one’s preferences as group preferences and hence of one’s propositions as patriotism are performances rather than predispositions.

To underline this point, which is critical for our argument, let us examine one of the greatest speeches by one of the greatest speakers in American history: the 272 words that constitute Lincoln’s Address after the Civil War battle at Gettysburg. This speech has been subjected to a forensic analysis by Gary Wills in a book that he gave the subtitle The Words that Remade America (Wills, 1992). Wills argues that the power of the speech lies in the way that it reshaped how people read the Declaration of Independence and hence changed the Constitution without being seen to challenge it. This is evident in the first and last sentences of the Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and … government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.¹⁵

In both cases, Lincoln constitutes American as a united category organized around the principles of liberty and equality. This is in contrast to prior interpretations (for instance, from “states” rights advocates) of America as an aggregation of different peoples with a variety of principles. As Wills notes: “By accepting the Gettysburg Address, its concept of a single people dedicated to a proposition, we have changed. Because of it, we live in a different America” (1992, p. 147). And this, of course, is the point. Through Lincoln’s art (“the highest art, which conceals itself,” as Wills puts it) and through his (re)definition of American identity, he was able to mobilize support for potentially alienating policies such as the emancipation of slaves. As Wills observes, the Address was intended to turn the military victory of Union forces at Gettysburg into an ideological victory: “Words had to complete the work of the guns” (p. 38). Indeed, here the power of words to define identities, mobilize people, and change society was every bit as great as the physical power of the munitions.

To complete our discussion, there are two aspects of these comments that are worth dwelling on. The first concerns the indeterminate meaning of Americanism—or indeed any identity. We mentioned earlier, in our discussion of prototypicality, that the definition of group identity need not be constrained by the present reality of the group. For it is possible to argue that the present is an age of decline in which group members fail to display the true qualities of the group. Indeed, one of the most powerful forms of collective appeal is to challenge group members to live up to their “real” identity.

This point was well illustrated when, just before the 1992 election, the deputy leader of the SNP, Jim Sillars, spoke to an audience at Falkirk, the site of one of the key battles in Scotland’s fight for its independence, which culminated in victory at Bannockburn in 1314. Here he challenged his audience to rediscover the proud independent and independence-minded values of their ancestors:

Now whether we are blessed or cursed this generation, I don’t know. I believe that we should be blessed … This is an historic election and every one of us individually and collectively is on the spot in 1992. Just as in 1314 the political and military circumstances put the nation on the spot at Bannockburn. This is the modern Bannockburn. We’re not talking about crossing swords, we’re talking about crossing a ballot paper. But the essential issues are exactly the same. There was no way off the Bannockburn field in 1314. You either stood or you ran away. It’s exactly the same in 1992. We either stand up and face our responsibilities or we bow the knee to power south of the border.

(cited in Reicher & Hopkins, 2001, pp. 143–144)

According to Bercovitch (1980), a similar form of rhetoric, which he terms “the American jeremiad,” is central to political culture in the United States. Drawing on the traditions of the Puritan founding fathers, Americans are a blessed and chosen people who, by that very token, have a double obligation to stick to the righteous path and are doubly cursed if they stray. Such is the power of this rhetoric that it has been used by speakers from all parts of the political spectrum, from those who support the system to those who are struggling against systemic injustice (Howard-Pitney, 2005). It is, perhaps, best expressed in another of the great American speeches—Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” address at Washington’s Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. King starts by echoing the Gettysburg Address and referring back to the promise of emancipation and contrasting it to the present state of inequality. “In a sense,” he argues, “we have come to our Nation’s Capital to cash a check” (Howard-Pitney, 2005, p. 1)—that is, to realize the promise of equality and freedom in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. The contrast between the essence of Americanism and the state of America is drawn even more starkly as King moves into the most famous section of the speech:

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”.

(cited in MacArthur, 1996, pp. 489–490)

Identity here is clearly a challenge to, rather than a characterization of, Americans. This takes us back to the theoretical point we made about the relationship between social identity and social reality and to the fact that identities are not so much descriptions of present reality as projects for future reality. They enjoin us to do particular types of things that will bring about particular types of social world. And this point in turn takes us forward to the second aspect of the comments made by Warren Harding and his party colleague. The discrepancy they note between the indeterminacy of identity itself and the substantial consequences it brings about should not be thought of as a paradox or a problem. Indeed, it is precisely because of its indeterminacy that identity is such a useful and flexible tool that can be used to serve so many different projects in our ever-changing world. The more identity is tied to “what is” the less use it is in creating “what might be.” Or, to use a somewhat different metaphor, identity works less as an object than as a container that carries the fuel for journeys to countless different social destinations.

Conclusion: Leaders are masters not slaves of identity

In this chapter, we have shown how effective leaders need to be masters of identity, not merely slaves to it. We addressed the various elements of their craft—in defining themselves as prototypical so as to speak for the group, in defining category boundaries so as to create a unified audience for their proposals, in defining category content so as to characterize these proposals as an expression of shared values, beliefs, and priorities. We can summarize all this by saying that, if all leaders need to be entrepreneurs of identity, then all politics are identity politics. We don’t mean this in the traditional sense, whereby the assertion of a particular identity—gender, “race,” sexuality, or whatever—is seen as an end. Rather we refer to the creation of identities as a means to achieve any end at all. For it is through the construction of identities that we create social forces with the size, the organization, and the sense of direction to have an effect on society.

Our argument has been that, although the ways in which any given identity is constructed will be specific, the relationship between the various facets of identity construction and the consequences for collective action will be general. Hence we have been deliberately eclectic in our examples, flitting across place from continent to continent, across time from the immediate present to the distant past, and across social systems from liberal democracies to dictatorships.

It is therefore apposite to finish with an example that brings together present-day Africa and the Greece of antiquity. In his book An African Athens, Philippe-Joseph Salazar examines the way in which speakers like Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela lay the ground for post-Apartheid South African democracy by constructing an inclusive idea of the nation. More specifically, Salazar notes how Tutu’s funeral orations for those who died in the struggle against Apartheid were a way of invoking and celebrating the idea of a fairer “nation-to-be” (Salazar, 2002, p. 10). Going back 27 centuries to the heyday of ancient Greece, the French historian Nicole Loraux (2006) also shows how funeral orations were used to create a notion of Athenian identity that tied the living to the dead and enjoined the living to honor the dead by acting for the Athenian polis. This spirit was encapsulated by Aristotle when he observed that “Those acts that one does not perform with self in mind are beautiful … those that one performs for one’s country, in contempt of one’s own interest, are absolutely good” (Loraux, 2006, p. 151). In her reflections on the importance of such oratory, Loraux concludes that it was this shared sense of community and these shared civic norms that gave rise to “the unanimous enthusiasm that drove the small troop of Athenians to confront much larger numbers” (p. 150). In short, in both Ancient Greece and latter-day South Africa, it was by connecting identities of the present to identities of the past that leaders were able to mobilize others to contribute to identities of the future.

Throughout time, then, leaders have created and shaped identities and those identities have created and shaped institutions, organizations, and whole societies. They do this in recognition of the fact that, however small they may be, a group of people with a shared identity will always have more power than a group without it. Indeed, one of the key reasons why great leadership is so revered is that it gives proof to this simple fact: that history is made not by groups with the most resources or by those with the most numbers, but by those groups whose energies have been galvanized by leaders into the most coherent social force. As we have seen, identity is the source of this coherence and hence, for leaders, it is the most important of all resources.

6Crafting a sense of us