7
Making us matter
Leaders as embedders of identity
Our arguments thus far have been premised on an assumption that leaders gain power through their ability to define group identities. Leaders who define themselves as the embodiment of the group may be no more or less able than those who do not. But the former will certainly be more able to harness the energies of the group than the latter. A proposal that is framed as realizing group beliefs may be no better or worse than one that is not. But the former will certainly be more likely to garner collective support than the latter. Our argument was that leaders who want to get things done need power. And to get power (in the sense of power through, rather than power over; Turner, 2005), they need to be entrepreneurs of identity.
Our focus previously has been on the forms that this entrepreneurship takes—and indeed we have shown that effective leaders leave no aspect of identity untouched in the course of their quest. Now, in this chapter, we want to step back. To start with, we will look more closely at the link between leadership, identity, and power. What are the different ways in which leaders can control the behavior of others, and how do issues of identity affect these forms of control? As should already be apparent from what has gone before, our aim is to demonstrate that, where leaders can establish a consonance between themselves, their proposals, and group identity, there will be a qualitative shift in their ability to control mass action.
Having done that, a further question arises. This question has hovered around the discussions of the previous chapter and now needs to be answered. It relates to the observation that if leaders gain power to pursue their projects through their ability to define identity, then, as we have already seen, different aspirants with different projects will offer different versions of identity to their audience. But what will determine which version wins out? How can leaders gain control over the meanings associated with group membership in order to gain control over group members? These are the issues that we will investigate in the second part of this chapter.
In the process of this examination we will also develop additional insights into the importance of leadership processes to social phenomena in general. For such is the power of identity, and such is the importance of gaining control over identity definitions, that a range of key social processes can be understood as arising out of this struggle. Most notably, we will see that leadership is central to the origins of intergroup hostility. This is because conflict against “them” cannot be properly understood without also addressing the intragroup conflict about who truly represents “us.”
Identity as a moderator of the relationship between authority and power
We noted in Chapters 2 and 3 that traditional theorizing suggests that a leader can only exercise power to the extent that he or she has control over resources that followers are interested in obtaining (e.g., Bacharach & Lawler, 1980). However, we have already noted on several occasions that a key difficulty with this argument is that it suggests that leadership involves working against followers’ wills rather than with them. Leadership, we have suggested, is about getting followers to want to follow rather than about forcing them to do so.
Consistent with this claim, there is abundant evidence that the most successful regimes (whether in organizations, politics, or religion) are those in which followers act willingly because they really believe in what they are doing (Haslam & Reicher, 2007b; Kershaw, 1993; Rees, 1997). Indeed, it is often when the support of these “true believers” is lost that regimes founder. As Trotsky relates, the true turning point in the Russian Revolution was not the storming of the Tsar’s Winter Palace in October 1917. It was earlier, in the so-called “July days” when Cossack forces hesitated and then refused to charge at the demonstrating workers (Trotsky, 1932/1977). Without the Cossack’s support, the Tsar’s end was only a matter of time.
The historical record contains many further examples of this process whereby leaders lose power by failing to maintain the willing followership of their lieutenants. But of all those who have gone down in history as bad leaders, there is perhaps a special place for Captain Bligh (see Figure 7.1a). His name is forever connected with a level of crass brutality that ultimately led even the most loyal and hardened of his men to mutiny on the Bounty. If we picture him, it is probably as Charles Laughton’s spluttering, bulging-eyed psychopath up against Clark Gable’s noble and stoical Fletcher Christian in the 1935 Hollywood version of the epic.
According to Ronald Reagan’s Secretary for Education, William Bennett, Bligh’s story is one that every American child should know (Dening, 1992). But what story? As the Australian historian Greg Dening suggests, it is important for us to maintain a slightly clearer distinction between Hollywood drama and historical events than Reagan himself achieved. For the record suggests that Bligh was not particularly violent for a naval captain of his time. Indeed, by some measures he was distinctively non-violent. Dening calculates that, on his two trips to the Pacific, he flogged fewer of his crew that any other captain who came into the Pacific in the 18th century: fewer than the celebrated Captain Cook, far fewer than Captain Vancouver. What is more, Bligh had hoped to get through his entire voyage on the Bounty without flogging anyone, and he was deeply disappointed when he was obliged to do so. The Charles Laughton version may be good entertainment, but it is bad history. If Bligh was not distinctively violent, then it is hard to explain the mutiny by reference to his violence. Rather, Dening puts it down to what he calls “Mr. Bligh’s bad language.”
Dening doesn’t use this term to suggest that Bligh was particularly foul mouthed. He could be insulting to his men, but not in a way that would drive the hardened 18th-century sailor to mutiny. Rather, Bligh’s problem lay in the way he positioned himself in relation to those that he admonished. His key mistake was to confuse the power he had over his men by virtue of his appointment by King’s commission and the authority he might gain through his personal qualities and relationships with them. At one point, for instance, he humiliated a man and used the Articles of War against him, not because the victim had violated any rule or common practice, but in order to enforce the man’s personal loyalty to Bligh himself. At another point, he flogged some men in contravention of navy rules and then got them to write a personal letter to Bligh thanking him for his leniency. Increasingly, he took any violation or any inefficiency as a personal affront and railed against it accordingly. To summarize: “Bligh was reducing the oppositions of the Bounty to their raw simplicity—him against all the rest” (Dening, 1992, p. 85).
Dening’s analysis is easily translatable into our analytic terms. The crew members saw themselves as sailors bound to Bligh as part of the Navy and answerable to Bligh in his capacity as a naval officer. He had a legitimate right to enforce Navy rules, and even though they might not always like it, they would both accept his discipline as an officer and respect him in his position for imposing this discipline. Yet by the same token, the crew members did not see themselves as individuals under any personal obligation to Bligh or else bound to him as an individual. Accordingly, he had no right to require them to advance his own interests, and every attempt to do so could only weaken his legitimacy and lessen their respect. So, when Bligh tried to wield power on behalf of his person (which set him apart from the sailors) rather than on behalf of the Navy (a category that included both him and the sailors), then his power was soon spent. Ultimately, then, Bligh’s failure resulted from a failure to understand that his leadership had to be rooted in the group. His “bad language” was the language of the individual. It was this that compromised his ability to impose discipline and, on April 28, 1789, lost him command of the Bounty.
At almost exactly the same time, on the other side of the world, Louis XVI of France (see Figure 7.1b) was losing his throne—and four years later he lost his head. That too can be put down to a case of “bad language,” or at least to language that had soured over the course of the preceding century.
In his book The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture, the Cambridge-based historian Timothy Blanning (2003) documents how European society underwent a profound change from the late 17th century onwards, with radical
Figure 7.1 Leaders who paid a high price for failing to understand the basis of their authority.
implications for the bases of social authority. At this time a public sphere began to emerge in which people came together to debate politics and social issues. As a result, public opinion became important for the first time and this was something that rulers had to placate and engage with. To gain support, they had to speak for the people rather than over the people. Their principal way of doing so was to try and speak as the voice of the nation.
This was a lesson that the French royal family failed to heed. For them, power was dynastic and it was personal. This idea was best expressed by Louis XIV in his famous cry “l’Etat, c’est moi” (“the State is me”). It was spelt out in more detail by Louis XV in a speech to the assembled chambers of the Parlement of Paris on March 3, 1766 (known as the “sceance de la flagellation”):
Sovereignty resides in my person alone … and my courts derive their existence and their authority from me alone. The plenitude of this authority resides with me. They exercise it only in my name and it may never be turned against me. I alone have the power to legislate. This power is indivisible. The officers of my courts do not make the law, they only register, publish and enforce it. Public order emanates exclusively from me, and the rights and the interests of the nation, which it has dared to separate from the monarch, are necessarily united with mine and repose entirely in my hands.
(cited in Blanning, 2003, pp. 379–380)
From the moment of his coronation, Louis XVI did nothing to repudiate such a view. Indeed, he omitted the one part of the ceremony in which the significance of the people was acknowledged. Previously, the congregation would be asked if they accepted the king and, after their acquiescence, the presiding Archbishop intoned: “as the people have acclaimed you, I consecrate you king” (Blanning, 2003, p. 408). In a context where the coronation was about the majesty of Louis, not that of France, then its extravagance and expense became an issue that grew throughout the reign. Louis, and still more his queen, Marie-Antoinette, were seen as hugely profligate. Indeed, Louis was viewed as a weak cuckold whose voracious wife satisfied all her various desires. This was graphically portrayed in a scurrilous popular pamphlet “L’Autricienne en gougettes” (“The Austrian Bitch on a Spree”). In this, Marie was portrayed using Louis’ body as a mattress on which she fornicates with his younger brother. The power of this propaganda lay in posing a question: why should people pay their taxes for the good of the King rather than the common good, especially when the money is liable to be squandered on things that outrage popular sensibilities?
There is one further dimension to the matter that is clear from the title of “L’Autricienne en gougettes.” That is, the Queen (and, by extension, the King who was seen as under her thumb) was portrayed as foreign and as an enemy to France. She was (falsely) accused of arranging financial subsidies to Austria. The same sexual imagery that was used to discredit her and the King was used to describe her relations with foreign powers. In a sense, then, the position of Louis was even worse than that of his predecessors (and that of his contemporary, Mr. Bligh). His own language and that of others about him not only ensured that he was not seen as an in-group member; if he was perceived as representing any national group, it was that of an enemy out-group. Hence he was in no position to influence and engage the French population, let alone to call on them as a source of power.1
So why did other European monarchies not face the same fate as that of the French? Of course, there are many answers to this question. But in cultural (and psychological) terms, it can be argued that, unlike the various French kings, the German and British rulers understood the changes brought about within the public sphere and understood the need to transform themselves into national figures. Thus in 1766, as Louis XV was proclaiming his personal authority, so George III was writing a testament for his son and heir:
I do not pretend to any superior abilities, but will give place to no-one in meaning to preserve the freedom, happiness, and glory of my dominions, and all their inhabitants, and to fulfill the duty to my God and my neighbour in the most extended sense.
(cited in Blanning, 2003, p. 345)
For the English king, unlike his French counterpart, the emphasis lies on a monarch serving the interests of country and people (at least those in England), rather than the country and people serving the interests of the monarch (an emphasis that, as we noted in Chapter 5, was also evident in Elizabeth I’s “Golden Speech” to Parliament 165 years earlier). Moreover, the emphasis on “freedom” is important, for George also understood that the notion of “interest” had to be rooted in the values of the category itself: that is, he had to understand, and be seen to uphold, what was important to the English.2 As Blanning observes:
Those interests were held to be Protestantism, prosperity (especially commercial prosperity), imperial expansion and liberty. It was George III’s achievement, especially after a long and painful political apprenticeship, to associate himself with those objectives so completely as to become their personification. The Patriot King had been found at last. Under his aegis, the British appeared to have found the political equivalent of the philosopher’s stone—the means of combining power with liberty.
(2003, p. 356)
In many ways, Blanning’s historical analysis maps perfectly onto our survey of the psychological literature. Leaders who fail to appeal as in-group representatives are seen as illegitimate, their attempts at control are experienced as oppressive and generate opposition. Leaders who succeed in becoming personifications of the group (i.e., in-group prototypes) are legitimate, their control is seen as liberating, and they generate support. On the psychological level, the “philosopher’s stone” that creates rather than expends power, is precisely the ability to represent oneself, one’s actions, and one’s policies as representing group identity.
Here, then, it is pertinent to repeat a point made in the previous chapter. Those who can present their version of identity as valid, and themselves as an embodiment of it, do not just change their psychological relationship with followers. They are in a position to shape how groups of people act and to use them as a source of social power. Once one appreciates that we are not talking here of the small groups that have predominated in social psychological research, but of mass categories such as nations, religions, and ethnicities, then it becomes clear that we are talking of the power to shape whole societies. And as we suggested in the previous chapter, to control the definition of society is to have a world-making power: something of political and historical as well as psychological importance.
For precisely that reason, different actors who wish to use the same population in order to create different types of society will seek to offer different versions of identity: are we a communal people who should create a strong welfare state or an entrepreneurial people who need to set businesses free from regulation? Are we a traditional people who need to preserve our culture against an influx of outsiders or a tolerant and diverse group who benefit from their presence? Yet awareness of the link between embodying identity and generating collective power raises the key question that we posed at the start of this chapter: which version of identity, and hence which would-be leader, ultimately wins out?
We suggest that there are three levels at which this question can be answered. Or rather, to build on our own terminology, there are three dimensions of successful identity entrepreneurship. The first primarily involves the use of language in order to create a compelling vision of identity and its implications for action: leaders need to be artists of identity. The second involves structuring the action of the group (e.g., its meetings, rituals, celebrations, and commemorations) so as to reflect the norms and values of shared social identity: leaders need to be impresarios of identity. The third involves using the energies of the group to reshape the structure of society at large so that it comes to reflect group norms and values—what we refer to as collective self-objectification (Drury & Reicher, 2005, 2009; see also Reicher & Haslam, 2006c): leaders need to be engineers of identity. In the remainder of this chapter, we shall examine each of these dimensions in turn.
Leaders as artists of identity
We have suggested that the creation of a compelling vision of identity is achieved primarily through language—and if there is one thing that characterizes many of those commonly considered to be amongst our greatest leaders, it is their attention to, love of, and respect for the use of words. Winston Churchill is emblematic in this respect. The website of the Churchill Society prominently displays his famous assertion that: “Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king.”3 The quote continues: “He is an independent force in the world.” Later, when bestowing honorary American citizenship on Churchill, Kennedy turned the quote round as praise of its author:
In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone—and most men save Englishmen despaired of England’s life—he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. The incandescent quality of his words illuminated the courage of his countrymen.4
Churchill’s skill with words (and, as we will see later, Kennedy’s as well) was something that he worked at and honed over many years—not least in his work as a journalist and then as an author. This obsession with language is encapsulated in the claim that: “Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant.”5 It is especially noteworthy that Churchill was a keen poet both as a boy and man. This he shared with an equally famous statesman and orator, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln may have given up his attempts at poetry fairly early, but, according to Douglas Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, he retained his ear for cadence and rhythm and this was to play a key role in his greatest speeches.
Lest Churchill and Lincoln seem too ancient and too white to make a general point, consider another pair—very different in terms of background and politics, but united in being two of America’s greatest 20th-century orators. First, Kennedy, a man whose favorite school subjects were English and History (Dallek, 2003), a classically trained scholar who would scour classic and modern texts to find resources for his important speeches. For instance, in an address given in New Orleans on May 4, 1962, he drew on Cicero’s famous “Civis Romanus Sum” to declaim:
Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was to say, “I am a citizen of Rome”. Today, I believe, in 1962, the proudest boast is to say “I am a citizen of the United States”.
(cited in Daum, 2008, p. 152)
A year later—this time to a different audience—he recycled the quote into what is possibly the most famous line of his entire Presidency:
Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was “civis Romanus sum”. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner”.
(cited in Daum, 2008, p. 224)
If Kennedy’s record abroad remains unsullied, his record at home, especially over the issue of civil rights, is much more ambivalent. His refusal to prioritize rights for black people was one of the factors that encouraged a new wave of radical black militancy and earned him the hostility of one of the most militant black leaders, Malcolm X. Malcolm denounced Kennedy as a “trickster,” and as “fiddling while Birmingham [Alabama] is burning.” When Kennedy was assassinated, he described the event as “chickens coming home to roost.” But while, in many ways, Malcolm X was the antithesis of JFK, both men shared a common eloquence that derived from a common interest in the mastering of words. Certainly Malcolm did not have a classical education or go to Harvard. Indeed, at about the time Kennedy was being elected a Congressman and then a Senator, Malcolm was serving 7 years of an 8–10-year sentence for burglary. But, during this incarceration, he was transformed from a criminal into an activist by discovering and then studying language. This started on the most basic level: vocabulary. Malcolm’s epiphany lay in a dictionary, one provided by the Norfolk Prison Colony School:
I spent two days just rifling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying … Between what I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words … Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge.
(Malcolm X, 1980, pp. 266–267)
The effectiveness of leaders, then, is enhanced by their mastery in using one of the basic tools of leadership: language. Let us be careful in our usage, however. There are many forms of language, not all of them involving words. We are all well aware of non-verbal communication. There can even be a language of physicality and silence: men of action who convey their strength through doing, not speaking. The images of Mussolini working the fields— stripped to the waist to display his barrel chest—are a case in point (Falasca-Zamponi, 2000). Another telling example relates to another fascist figure from the same era, the Romanian Corneliu Codreanu. Codreanu led the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a mystical religious movement that aimed for spiritual resurrection of the nation through rigid application of the Romanian Orthodox faith. Codreanu was a tall, striking figure, but a notoriously poor public speaker. So, one of his campaigning tactics was to appear in villages astride a white horse, to remain for a moment in silence, and then ride on. The power of this performance was precisely as a silent tableau, evoking familiar images of Michael and hence eliding Codreanu with an icon of the nation and its faith (Payne, 1996; Wasserstein, 2007). In this way, the Legion was able to sidestep the leader’s rhetorical weakness and, using its cultural knowledge, found another way of linking him to the categories whose members he sought to mobilize. Nevertheless, while a lack of verbal dexterity is not the death knell of leadership, it clearly limits one’s options as this is one of the most potent tools a leader can have.
But still we need to be more precise. We have sought to illustrate how certain notable leaders attended to language, and in so doing we have noted at least three different aspects of their attention. One was to vocabulary, another was to rhetoric (i.e., the craft of speech making), and yet another was to poetry. These different aspects are important in somewhat different ways. Vocabulary clearly relates to precision of expression—it is said, for instance, that Lincoln would brood over words and sentences that were unclear. When later told by an admirer that the clarity of his statements was the most remarkable aspect of his speeches, Lincoln replied that “Amongst my earliest recollections I remember how, when as a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand” (cited in Wilson, 2006, p. 22).
Rhetoric, of course, is critical to the organization of a good argument and hence to the ability to persuade. Indeed Peter Dixon (1971) defines a rhetor as someone “skilled in speaking who addresses a public audience in order to make an impact on it” (p. 2). In part, such a definition has contributed to the disfavor in which the idea of rhetoric is often held. Socrates in particular (notably in Gorgias and the Phaedrus) held that rhetorical skills may serve to promote deceit and to elevate artifice over truth (Plato, 380 bc/2004, 370 bc/2005). An alternative tradition, however, lays more stress on the comprehensibility than the truth-value of an argument. Rhetoric, here, is about promoting understanding over misunderstanding (Richards, 1936). What is more, if one follows Billig (1996) in seeing thought itself as structured like an argument (to quote Plato’s Eleatic Stranger, it is “a silent inner conversation of the soul with itself”; Billig, 1996, p. 141), then one can go further and propose rhetoric as a basis for lucid thinking whether that is used to settle one’s own mind or the minds of others. Along these lines, Max Atkinson (1984) has provided compelling evidence of the importance of rhetorical features in signaling the core messages in a speech to the audience and hence in eliciting applause. The same words, organized in slightly different ways, can either fall flat or receive thunderous ovations.
The role of poetry may be less obvious, but in many ways it is the most interesting and the most critical. On the one hand, a sense of rhythm and of meter—of poetic form, that is—helps make a text both easy to memorize and memorable. It also helps to create emphasis on the parts of the text that are of particular importance. A fine example comes from Lincoln’s second inaugural speech, which Lincoln himself, along with many others, considered his greatest speech (White, 2002). The poetic construction is apparent throughout the speech. Sometimes it is obvious:
Fond-ly / do we hope
Fer-vent-ly / do we pray
That this might-ty scourge / of war
May speed-i-ly pass / a-way
(citation and notation from White, 2002, p. 156)
However, as White shows, the use of balance, contrast, repetition, and alliteration is found throughout the speech. Consider the second paragraph:
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it—all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
(cited in White, 2002, p. 60)
White points out the series of features embedded in the paragraph. First, the repetition of “all” in the first two sentences complemented by “both” in sentence four. Second, the use of alliterative antitheses such as Inaugural address / Insurgent agents; devoted altogether to saving the Union without war / seeking to destroy it without war; One of them would make war rather than let the nation survive / the other would accept war rather than let it perish (this is an example of what Atkinson, 1984, would call a “contrastive pair”). The third feature is the repetition of the term “war” to achieve emphasis and movement. Fourth, the alliterative use of words such as the eight vital terms starting with “d”: directed, dreaded, delivered, devoted, destroy, dissolve, divide, deprecated. Alliteration is there in every sentence, accentuating the rhythmic pacing, enhancing the cadence and hence setting up a contrast with the final stark four-word sentence: “And the war came.” “I do not argue that Lincoln set out to write poetry,” says White, “Yet he had a poet’s ear” (White, 2002, p. 157). And the speech is the more striking for it.
Another example of poetic usage comes from another inaugural address—that of John F. Kennedy (which we also had reason to refer to in earlier chapters). The link is hardly coincidental. In writing his own speech, Kennedy had Lincoln’s firmly in mind and he asked his speech writer, Ted Sorensen, to look closely at Lincoln’s rhetoric (just as Obama did in crafting his speech some 48 years later—symbolically also choosing to swear his oath of allegiance on the same Bible as had Lincoln). Thus as with Lincoln’s inaugural speech, one also finds a combination of overt rhyming and other poetical devices. To illustrate this, Sorensen picks out the following passage:
To those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.
(cited in Tofel, 2005, p. 107)
Here, as well as the contrastive pair request/quest, one also finds the alliteration of pledge, peace, powers, and planned. The following is a more overt example, picked out this time by Lyndon Johnson’s speech writer Jack Valenti as an example of: “a deliberate rhythm that is the mark of a truly great speech” (Tofel, 2005, p. 99):
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
(cited in Tofel, 2005, p. 99; emphasis added)
Poetry, then, was a key element in achieving one of the notable features of the Kennedy (-Sorensen) style: “the construction of sentences, phrases and paragraphs in such a manner as to simplify, clarify and emphasize” (Tofel, 2005, p. 87). But of course, poetry is about more than mere form—rhythm, cadence, stress. In particular, it is about providing compelling images that help make sense of human experience. Such images are as critical to the speeches that we have been considering as their style. Kennedy, for instance, centers his appeal on the figure of a trumpet calling the new generation to serve the nation. He combines that with another image, one where the efforts and energies of this generation ignite a fire that “will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world” (cited in Tofel, 2005, p. 122).
To use the language of social representations theory (Moscovici & Farr, 1984), poetic imagery serves as a form of concretization—the process of transforming an abstract idea into a concrete instance. This is one of the ways in which unfamiliar ideas can be turned into common-sense knowledge. Another way, often paired with concretization, is the process of anchoring, whereby the meaning of the new is shaped by assimilating it to something that is already well understood.
It is here that we move beyond those who argue that words of rhetoric or poetry alone are enough to move people to applaud and approve (e.g., Atkinson, 1984), to stress that we must examine how the form and the content of language relate both to each other and to psychological processes. It is here that we can move from considering the artistry of leadership to understanding how that artistry links to identity. Finally, it is here that the arguments of this section begin to engage with the arguments of previous chapters. For, as we have argued at length, effective leaders do not just tell us how things are and what we should do. Rather, they tell us how to act in the world by telling us who we are—and, as we have specifically indicated, the power of Lincoln and Kennedy was tied to their success in (re)defining an American identity and an American mission.
As we saw previously, the image Kennedy invokes is not that of just anyone lighting up a dark world, but of Americans—and, more specifically, of a new American generation—rallying to do so. The challenge he throws down in his inaugural speech (from which we first sampled in Chapter 3) is to ask whether present-day America will live up to the civilizing mission and the sacrifices of previous generations:
Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe. Now the trumpet summons us again…. Will you join in that historic effort?
(cited in MacArthur, 1996, pp. 483–487)
As Tofel (2005) observes, this question was met by cheers and applause. With that encouragement, Kennedy can, in the speech’s most famous line, move on from a challenge to a demand: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” But note, Kennedy creates the authority for this demand—the ultimate demand for followership—by rooting it in a poetic account of who Americans are, which in turn is anchored in a claim about who they have always been, and what they have always done.
Perhaps the most important aspect of being an artist of identity, then, lies in being able to root one’s account of who we are and what we should do in a common stock of cultural knowledge about the group: the sorts of things that everybody will have absorbed through school books, through watching the television or listening to the radio, through seeing monuments, visiting museums, and simply participating in the institutions and rituals of everyday life. That is, the successful leader needs to be encultured and to employ culture in the sense envisaged by Raymond Williams, the Welsh academic and social commentator. In his writing, Williams sought to wrest culture from the arcane space of specialist production into lived everyday experience. In a 1958 essay, famously entitled “Culture is ordinary” (reprinted in Gray & McGuigan, 1993), Williams explained that a culture has two aspects. One consists of the known meanings with which group members are familiar. The other consists of those new observations and meanings that are offered to members. Leaders will be effective to the extent that they can link these two aspects. To be more specific, effective leaders are those who can root their proposals for the group in the sayings of cultural icons, in the received wisdom surrounding formative historical events, in the characterization of kings, liberators, and other group heroes.
Those who can combine linguistic skills and cultural knowledge to give such weight to their accounts of identity and their invocations to action will have a clear advantage over those who cannot. Or, bearing the example of a silent Corneliu Codreanu in mind, the advantage lies with those who have the skill and knowledge to choreograph displays of identity (verbal, visual, or other) in ways that incorporate core cultural symbols. Both elements—the artistry and the knowledge of group culture—are equally important. For artistry without culture lacks authority; while culture without artistry runs the risk of being hackneyed, transparent, and merely formulaic. It invokes symbols in the same way that everyone else invokes symbols and hence achieves nothing for the one speaker over others. The Scottish author (and one-time nationalist candidate) Eric Linklater (1934) satirizes such tired usage of national events, national icons, and national sayings in his comic novel about a budding Scottish politician, Magnus Merryman. The novel provides accounts of several general election meetings. Of one, he writes: “it was hardly possible to distinguish one speech from another. Most of them referred to deer-forests, Bannockburn, rationalization, and Robert Burns” (Linklater, 1934, p. 84).
There is an important point, here, about the relationship between collective history and identity. The past does not determine who we are. Rather, it provides a number of resources that we can draw on in order to create a contemporary understanding of ourselves. In Reszler’s (1992) resonant phrase, it is a symbolic reserve. Or, to use a less elevated comparison, it is like a dressing-up box from which we can select and choose items, reshape them, and use them in new combinations to clothe our present aspirations. But if history is continuously reused and reinterpreted for contemporary purposes (see Hill, 1974), part of its power also lies in it being represented as immutable. It can therefore be used to represent the speaker’s particular portrait of identity as an expression of an enduring essence. We have always valued liberty for all, indeed we are a nation founded in liberty, says Lincoln. And so we must act to make that liberty a reality now. We have always been loyal and always made sacrifices for freedom, says Kennedy. So now too we must answer the call to duty.
To put it slightly differently, by establishing a continuity over time within the context of the salient group membership, the speaker’s version is no longer one version amongst many but rather the only valid version of identity. In Thompson’s (1990) terms, the use of history is therefore a means of “eternalization,” which itself is one of the ways of reifying contingent constructions as unquestionable facts. Another means of turning constructions of identity into “facts” is what Thompson terms “naturalization.” In this case, a version of identity is rendered immutable by linking it to some aspect of the natural order. Thus, in their study of Self and Nation, Reicher and Hopkins (2001) quote a Conservative politician who argues that the Scottish environment makes the Scot naturally individualistic and entrepreneurial:
He’s canny and thrifty … careful, avowedly loyal and hard-working. Perhaps that derives something from the rigours of the climate, the rigours of life. And one needs to look at so many of the great Scottish achievers, they came from a little cottage up a cold glen somewhere … and it maybe that that was a spur and an incentive to get ahead.
(p. 115)
However, harsh conditions can be used not only to reify identity as solitary and self-reliant, but also to claim that the group is “naturally” cooperative. Accordingly, a different speaker, this time a strong nationalist, uses Scotland’s unenviable weather to underpin a distinction from the individualistic English:
Probably due to the fact that our environment has been a harsh environment, I think that by and large most Scots are a very co-operative people. We tend not to be as individualistic if you like as the English. We tend to hold back much more. We are not as articulate, we tend to hold community values as being important.
(cited in Reicher & Hopkins, 2001, p. 115)
So the natural world does not determine identity, nor does invoking the natural world necessarily buttress any particular version of identity. Rather, those who have the imagination and skill to justify whichever claims they are making about identity through links to the natural order will be in a better position to authenticate their version of who we are—and hence of what we should do (see also Richards, 1996).
Altogether, then, there are multiple strands to the artistry of identity. Skilled and effective leaders are those with a rich appreciation of poetry and prose, a detailed knowledge of the collective culture, and an understanding of the various techniques by which their portraits can be made to appear as if they capture the “true nature” of the group. Great leaders need to use these skills to create and project a vision of the group and of a world where the group’s vision has become a reality. But however important those visions may be for mobilizing would-be followers and getting them to work towards a desired future, they are not enough. These things are important and necessary, but there is clearly much more to leadership than rhetoric and oratory alone.
Leaders as impresarios of identity
If, as we have argued at some length both in the last chapter and in this, social identity is as much about future as about past social realities, if it is about creating the social world as well as reflecting the social world, then how can one convince people that such a creation is either desirable or viable? How can one even give people a sense of something that doesn’t yet exist and perhaps has never existed—let alone mobilize them in favor of it?
One way of squaring this particular circle, we suggest, is to realize one’s vision within the mobilization itself. That is, the process of shaping social identity needs to encapsulate the social identity that one seeks to craft. The organization of social action—meetings, parades, celebrations, memorials, and more besides—should, in miniature and in the here and now, stand in anticipation of the world to come. So, as well as articulating a vision, the skills of leadership extend to putting on a show of that vision. This means that successful leaders need to be impresarios as well as artists of identity.
There is by now a voluminous literature that examines how events such as those we have just listed serve to embody and convey particular notions of identity and society. Perhaps the most powerful and famous—or, rather, infamous—example concerns the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies. And of these, perhaps the most famous is the Party rally of 1934, known through the film “Triumph of the Will” (a title chosen by Hitler) directed by Leni Riefenstahl (on Hitler’s express orders; see Kershaw, 2001, p. 69).
The film starts with Hitler’s airplane descending through the clouds over Nuremberg, casting the shape of a cross over the storm troopers and huge expectant crowd below. Later, Hitler is seen walking through the massed and serried ranks within the arena. He emerges from them and ascends alone to a platform above and in front of the masses. Then he speaks.
A number of themes are relevant here (and more generally in Nazi rallies). First, the people were transformed into regimented blocks arranged in geometric formations. They constituted a single, ordered, and disciplined unity. Second, Hitler alone has individuality. He is of the mass, but before it and above it. He alone speaks, the mass only responds. To quote one architectural critic of the time: “the elevation of the Führer is an expression of his position, a man who with all his deeds is always the leader of his people” (cited in Spotts, 2002, p. 69). Third, all aspects of this organization are formalized and celebrated: Hitler, the Party and Nation, the hierarchical relationship between them. The choreography of the event thereby instantiates an ideology that equates Hitler, the individual, with Germany, the category (see Kershaw, 2001; Spotts, 2002).
In essence, Nazi public events were displays of the so-called “Führerprinzip”—the notion that certain people are an incarnation of the law, that they have an absolute right to rule and to unquestioning obedience from others— and affirmations that German identity and German society should be centered on this leadership principle (Reicher, 1996). The importance of these theatrical displays to the Nazi project has been recognized by a number of authors. Indeed Hitler’s rule has been described as a “theatrocracy” (Spotts, 2002, p. 53), and even Berthold Brecht—a staunch opponent—described Hitler’s use of public events as “sehr interessantes Theater” (very interesting theatre; Brecht & Hecht, 1971, p. 45). Brecht wrote a poem to encapsulate the link between theatricality and other aspects of the regime. It included the lines: “his virtuoso use of lighting/is no different from/his virtuoso use of the truncheon” (Spotts, 2002, p. 56). In a slightly less elevated register, Spotts notes that David Bowie once said of Hitler (after watching Triumph of the Will 15 times with Mick Jagger): “How he worked his audience! … He made an entire country a stage show” (2002, p. 56).
In one respect, though, these observations are misleading—for they miss a crucial aspect of the impresario’s work. That is, the performance is not conducted in front of an audience. Rather, the audience is made a critical part of the performance itself. The audience members don’t just watch a display of identity, they themselves are participants who live it out. In this sense, Spotts (2002) describes Hitler’s rituals as “participatory ideology.” To quote Spotts at greater length:
In the party rallies the German people symbolically enacted their willingness to be used by Hitler at his will. In his well-known aphorism, Walter Benjamin observed that fascism aestheticized politics. In fact, Hitler’s fascism anaesthetized politics. The rallies were a microcosm of Hitler’s ideal world: a people reduced to unthinking automatons subject to the control not of the state, not even of the party but of him personally—and that unto death. Never before was there a clearer example of aesthetics used to promote enslavement and heroic death.
(2002, p. 69)
Spotts also records the impact of participation, even amongst those who were not true believers. He cites a young American architect, referring to his experience of the 1938 rally:
Even if you were at first indifferent, you were at last overcome, and if you were a believer to begin with, the effect was even more staggering.
(cited in Spotts, 2002, p. 69)
Faced with the example of Hitler, it would be easy to condemn and repudiate all uses of the aesthetic and of theatricality in politics. But the question is whether the specificity of Nazism lies in its aestheticism per se or in the particular use of a fascist aesthetics? What is problematic here: the fact that people were organized into a performance or that the performance denied their autonomy, glorified their enslavement, and made them into passive objects at the disposal of the leader? We suggest the latter. It is perfectly true that Hitler—and Mussolini as well—had a very distinctive view of politics as aesthetics and as themselves as artists. But at the same time they had a distinctive sense of aesthetic activity and hence of their relationship with their materials. As we noted in Chapter 1, both viewed themselves as akin to sculptors, and the masses as stone (an inert material) to be shaped by their will and, where necessary, to be crushed in the process. But not all art is as brutal and not all aesthetic politics renders people quite so passive. Indeed, events can be choreographed in order to invite people into history as much as to exclude them.
Patrice Dabrowski (2004) from the Watson Institute of Brown University provides a case in point as part of her analysis of how commemorations were used to shape modern Poland. In 1894 a series of events were organized by the nationalist movement in order to mark the centenary of an uprising against the ruling Russians. The rebels, led by a veteran of the American Revolutionary War, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, won a series of battles, most notably at Raclawice. In this battle, peasant soldiers played a major part in defeating the Russian army. Possibly the key event of the centenary was the Lwow Provincial Universal Exposition—an event the size of a small town with 129 pavilions and shops. The most significant object in the Exposition was the “Raclawice Panorama” (see Figure 7.2). This was an immense painting in the round portraying the famous battle. In addition to the peasant army, Kosciuszko himself was depicted wearing peasant dress— an emblem of the belief that the peasantry should be elevated to the level of the nobility.
Visitors to the Panorama would come in through a dark corridor to a viewing platform where they were placed, literally, in the center of the battle.
Figure 7.2 The building containing the Raclawice Panorama.
Note: The vast cylindrical painting depicts the victory of the peasant army at Raclawice under the command of the celebrated leader, Kosciuszko and remains a popular attraction at the Rotunda in Wroclaw. To see the panorama itself, go to www.panoramaraclawicka.pl
They would then walk round, following the course of events towards the Polish victory. All the time, the realism of the experience was heightened by cannonballs and remnants of weapons that were strewn in the space between the platform and the painting. There were some 200,000 of these visitors in total, with a special emphasis on the peasantry. Large outings involving hundreds of peasants were organized by noblemen, by newspapers, and by other local organizations.
This active experience of participating in a ritualized homage to their own role in the life of the nation had immediate political repercussions. In 1894, a mass peasant rally to discuss political organization was preceded by a visit to the Panorama. This rally led to the foundation of a Peasant Party the next year. Reflecting on this sequence of events, Dabrowski ponders:
[Would] this empowerment of the peasant masses … have come so soon, had thousands not seen with their own eyes the peasant scythemen and Kosciuszko in the peasant sukmana marching across the canvas of the Raclawice Panorama?
(2004, p. 127)
Certainly, leading political activists of the time believed the experience to be critical.
The more general point that Dabrowski seeks to make through her analysis of the Lwow Exposition, as well as a series of other celebrations, is that the way they were organized (e.g., who was included, who was placed more or less prominently in an event) “broadcast as well as helped shape the configuration of power within society” (2004, p. 216). They all served to enact what it means to be Polish and what Polish society should be like. Indeed, partly as a result of the Lwow Exposition, Polishness came to be imagined and enacted in increasingly exclusive ethnic terms.
Two considerations flow from this. The first has to do with the interrelationship between identity and the structuring of identity performances. More precisely, if the organization of events serves to broadcast the nature of identity, then those who wish to promote different versions of the same identity would be expected to choreograph performances in different ways involving different relationships between the participants. The other consideration concerns the interrelationship between material artifacts and participation in performances of identity. The impact of the Raclawice Panorama derived from the fact that it was a concrete focus around which people could come together and symbolically affirm their participation in Polish national life. Dabrowski’s analysis therefore raises the importance of such artifacts in facilitating the choreography and construction of identity.
Concerning the link between the way identity is defined and the way performances are constructed, there is, by now, ample evidence of how changing notions of identity are reflected in changing forms of commemoration and celebration. Indeed, a whole series of texts has examined how changes in national identity are enacted through changes in the organization of national days (to list just a few, on Australia, see Spillman, 2008; on France, see Prendergast, 2008; on Ireland, see Cronin & Adair, 2002; Wills, 2009; on Poland see Dabrowski, 2004; on the United States, see de Bolla, 2007; Travers, 1997).
Much of this work draws its inspiration from Monica Ozouf’s seminal study of festivals in the French Revolution. In her highly acclaimed book, Ozouf shows how the revolutionary leaders set great store on rebuilding France and the French through a reordering of the continuous round of festivities that punctuated everyday life for the population. In effect, these festivals were to serve as a form of baptism for the new revolutionary citizen. On the one hand: “the festival is therapeutic, a reconstruction, as in the utopias of the 18th century, of a social bond” (Ozouf, 1988, p. 10). On the other hand, the festivals were so structured as to make this a bond between equals. Lynn Hunt encapsulates this argument in her foreword to Ozouf’s book:
The nation required new categories of social definition, the old categories having disappeared with the abolition of Old Regime corporations and titles of nobility. Processions based on rank and precedence therefore had to give way to processions grouped more neutrally by function and age. For the most part, however, the festivals emphasized consensus and oneness rather than distinctions within the community.
(Hunt, 1988, p. xi)
But differences in the way that events are used to embody particular identities are not always manifest across the years, as they were in pre- and post-Revolutionary France. Sometimes, those who wish to promote different conceptions of the nation will, at the same time, reflect this in the very different ways that they organize collective events. A beautiful example of this can be found in James Gelvin’s (1999) study of rival political formations seeking to create a new Syria out of the collapse of empire after World War I. The Government and its allies envisaged Syria as a modern, liberal, civilized member of the international community—a set of values embodied by the elite and threatened by the disorderly masses. Accordingly, the ceremonies they organized were based on a strict separation between elite and mass, the former putting on a display of political sophistication, the latter relegated to the status of a passive audience. One such example was the event planned to mark the return of the King, Amir Faisal, from Europe in Spring 1919. Faisal arrived in Damascus in a carriage drawn by eight horses. The carriage was decorated with silver and gold. Victory arches were erected and adorned with jewels. Twenty-five thousand carpets were spread on the King’s path. Yet when he arrived, Faisal only briefly acknowledged the crowd before turning to a park where he spoke to a small invited group. Then, in the evening, a banquet was held for the King and an elite group of government figures, spiritual leaders, and heads of local communities. Once again, the masses remained outside.
By contrast, oppositional “popular committees” envisaged Syria as an organic and traditional community at odds with both foreign imperialists and their agents inside the country. Here, the people were spiritually united as the nation: kings and notables were separate from, but nevertheless still answerable to, the general population. Once again, this was graphically enacted through ceremonies—especially as the committees became more powerful and better able to get the authorities to bend to their will. Take, as an example, a demonstration of January 17, 1920. The King had just returned from concluding an agreement with the French leader, Georges Clemenceau, but the popular committees feared it might not go far enough in providing complete independence. The demonstration—which involved over 100,000 participants—was organized as follows. At the head were the families of martyrs and religious leaders representing spiritual unity. Then came members and representatives of the national committees. After that, all were mixed together: notables and merchants, doctors and artisans, government officials and students. “The people” subsumed both elite and mass. They marched to the seat of the National Government where the King was to be found. But rather than passing by while he remained inside, the King came out to the street to meet with the demonstrators and receive their “national demands.” No longer were the masses on the outside staring in at the splendid carriages and palaces of their “betters.” Here, even the King had to come outside when summoned to the space of the people.
In each case, then, the ceremony was a perfect enactment of a political vision of the Syrian nation. They were, as Gelvin puts it, “a ‘model of’ and a ‘model for’ reality” (1998, p. 227). Elaborating on this point, he goes on to quote Clifford Geertz (2004), in suggesting that:
An effective collective ceremony in the secular sphere … connects the participant, both as an individual and as a member of a community, to an exemplary order so that “the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world”.
(cited in Gelvin, 1998, p. 226)
Now let us turn from the interrelationship between identity and the structure of performances to the interrelationship between material artifacts and possibilities for performance. Artifacts, we have suggested, facilitate the organization of identity-embodying performance and, as a corollary, it follows that the absence of material artifacts will inhibit performance and place limits on the construction of identity.
To start by looking at the first of these claims, in his book Bismark’s Shadow, the Michigan-based historian Richard Frankel (2005) provides a vivid account of the role of Bismarck towers in promoting a Bismarckian vision of Germany in the period leading up to World War I. Over 500 of these towers, or fire-pillars, were built on heights across the land between 1898 and 1914. On specific days—notably the anniversaries of Bismarck’s birth and death—supporters would process to the monument, often at night and often bearing flaming torches. Once there, wreaths would be laid, songs would be sung, speeches would be made. According to Frankel, these rites would strengthen the sense of community and mission amongst the Bismarckians. To quote one participant, to attend such a procession was “like a national purification” in which people could connect with the spirit of their hero:
Through the still loneliness of the forest it rustles like a revelation and on the consecrated site the devout nation pilgrim receives a wealth of the richest impressions which impart to him goal and direction for his own life.
(cited in Frankel, 2005, p. 56)
However, the ritual does not only serve to affirm national identity, but also to impart a particular meaning to nationhood. The night-time trek to lonely heights lent a sense of hardiness and self-sufficiency, it also spoke of discipline and loyalty in the group. Above all, it signaled reverence and obedience to the leader. While not necessarily a Nazi vision (although the Nazis later appropriated Bismarck before supplanting him in the national pantheon), this was a distinctly authoritarian version of nationhood that was used to challenge and supplant more liberal versions. The towers and the regular events surrounding them played an important part in building the strength of this movement and, ultimately, in allowing it to take hold of the people and the state.
Now consider the converse case, where an absence of material artifacts impedes the way we can enact and imagine our identities and our society. Our example again concerns the nature of national identity and the shape of the nation—this time in Scotland. We have discussed above how certain historical and cultural resources dominate in giving meaning to Scottishness—with Bannockburn (where the Scottish nobles, first mobilized by William Wallace, finally combined under Robert the Bruce to defeat the English king) being a case in point. However, not everyone is content with this. In the second author’s research with Nick Hopkins into issues of Scottish identity, a left-wing Member of Parliament complained that the battle was “a triumph of a branch of the ruling elite over another branch of it” and hence meaningless to him as a working-class man. He continued:
One of the odd things is the complete failure of the nationalist movement, other than its very far left, to commemorate occasions in Scottish history which are much more recent and much more important. For example, the 1820 rising with its socialist and nationalist platform and motivation.
(cited in Reicher & Hopkins, 2001, p. 147)
The rising, or insurrection, to which the Member of Parliament was referring was part of the agitation that occurred throughout Britain in the economic downturn that followed the Napoleonic Wars. A “Committee of Organisation for Forming a Provisional Government” was created. On April 3, 1820, there was widespread strike action in Central Scotland and an armed group of some 25 men set out to seize weapons from a munitions factory. They were met and overcome by British Army Hussars at the so-called Battle of Bonnymuir. Three men were singled out as leaders: John Baird, Andrew Hardie, and James Wilson. They were executed and a further 19 men were held in Greenock jail prior to being transported to Australia. As an added twist, people from Greenock held a demonstration in support of the imprisoned men. The army fired on the crowd, killing 11 and injuring many more (for fuller accounts, see Berresford Ellis & Mac a’ Ghobhainn, 1989; Halliday, 1993).
It is hardly coincidental that renewed interest in 1820 coincided with the upsurge of Scottish nationalism from the 1970s onwards and with attempts to promote a radical republican Scottishness. One of the aims of the various publications was to call for acts of commemoration around renovated, or else newly created, monuments to the rising. This might sound like a perfectly reasonable plan for identity enactment, and, as such, a masterful act of leadership. But it encountered a fundamental problem. For, in all, there were only three such monuments—all obscure, all dilapidated, and none which even mentioned those killed in Greenock. Indeed, the sponsor of a debate in the Scottish Parliament on 1820 (a nationalist member, Gil Paterson) acknowledged that, even though he was born only 500 yards from Sighthill cemetery where the memorial to Baird and Hardie is found, he had no awareness that it existed.6
So, as leaders, Baird and Hardie remain effectively unknown. When attempts were made to force Glasgow City Council to name streets after them, the best the Council could come up with was a road that was shortly to become a motorway slipway. They rejected out of hand the suggestion that one of Glasgow’s major sites, George Square, be renamed “1820 Square” (see Berresford Ellis & Mac a’ Ghobhainn, 1989). Compare this with a recent mapping of 83 place names across Scotland connected with William Wallace (Hamilton, 1998). In addition, there are many memorials that, like the Wallace Monument in Stirling, are the sites of regular commemorative events.
The basic point then, is this: leadership—and the collective projects with which it is associated—needs to become physically embedded in the world in order to have enduring impact. For unless there is a material record, it will be hard for followers to connect with that leadership and to take its particular projects forward. This is one reason why, after the fall of despised regimes, followers of the new order are quick to destroy the material identity-related symbols of former leaderships, and take such delight in doing so.
However, while any material artifact may serve as a focus for collective rites, one must also pay attention to the construction of the artifact itself and to whether it provides a space that allows for these rites to be organized in a way that embodies the desired vision of identity. Here, we can return to the baleful but brilliant example of Nazi arenas and Nazi ceremonies. To the last detail, these were built to allow for the rigid, disciplined, and hierarchical performances that enshrined Hitler’s ascendancy over a fascist society. Spotts (2002) documents how Hitler oversaw every aspect of the design of the Nuremburg site. The space was rigidly geometric. It was isolated from the outside world. It allowed for participants to be formed into exact solid blocks. The leader was to be at the center in the view of all and with nothing else in the sight line. As one architectural writer explained at the time: “The eye-to-eye position of the Führer with his people is always the underlying principle” (Spotts, 2002, p. 69). Even the building materials were an expression of identity: exteriors were made of granite, limestone, and marble as signifiers of tradition hardness and indestructibility (the 1000-year Reich), while interiors were lined with oak, another hard austere material and a mythical symbol of Germanness.
Hitler, as a leader, exemplified the homology between artistry and showmanship. He showed the importance of constructing a vision and then bringing it to life by constructing a set and directing a performance. He exemplified the skills not only of rhetoric (which we addressed in the previous section), but also of choreography and of stage design (which we have addressed in this section)—all of which are so important to leadership. Together, these skills allow the leader to give followers a sense of a desired future and inspire them to work towards it. The performative dimension functions, in a sense, as a promissory note. It keeps people going in anticipation of a new world that will fully embody group identity—and it moves them clearly in that particular direction. But promises can only engage us for so long before they need to be fulfilled. There is still more for the effective leader to do.
Leaders as engineers of identity
In order to move forward we need to go back to the question of how social identity relates to social reality. As we have stressed in previous sections, social identities both reflect the organization of existing social reality (they are perceptions of the collective self—“who we are”) and also serve to mobilize people to produce the organization of future social realities (they are projects for the collective self—“who we want to be”). Thus it is entirely consistent with our position to note that there can be disjunctions between the way we see ourselves and the way things are at present. However, as we noted in Chapter 5, for leadership to succeed, this cannot be a total or a permanent disjunction.
If constructions of identity are part of the process of creating reality, they are equally dependent on such a process. The lack of achievement, or at least perceived movement, towards the desired reality divorces identity from both present and future. Even the most eloquent of constructions and the most elaborate of performances then becomes an empty show that has no relationship of any sort to the structure of social reality. Another way of phrasing this is to say that identity is about both being and becoming (see Reicher, 2004; Reicher et al., 2010). However, it follows from this that an identity that is going nowhere and becoming nothing is useless and will therefore be discarded.
This means that leaders must know not only how to mobilize people but also how to direct that mobilization so as to best achieve results. They must not only envisage the group and its future, not only dramatize that future, but also use their resources effectively in order to build a future that realizes group aspirations. That is what we mean when we say that as well as being artists and impresarios of identity, leaders must also be engineers of identity.
As with the other dimensions of identity embedding that we have discussed in this chapter, there are a number of aspects to being an engineer of identity. One is the ability to channel the energies of those who have been mobilized by creating organizational forms. We are reminded here of a passage in Trotsky’s preface to his History of the Russian Revolution where he likens the revolution to a steam engine (Trotsky, 1932/1977). The mobilized masses are akin to steam, the energy that ultimately makes movement possible. Yet without a piston to compress the steam and to harness it to move the engine forward in a clear direction, the energy would dissipate and accomplish nothing. For Trotsky, the Communist Party was that piston.
Now, again without buying into the particular vision that any individual leader enunciates, we can nonetheless acknowledge the importance of structures that coordinate and focus collective action. To shift our reference from Russian revolutionaries to organizational contexts in general, it is clear that leaders need to be initiators of structure along lines suggested by the behavioral approach of Fleishman and Peters (1962; see Chapter 2). However, as we suggested in earlier chapters, it is apparent that these structures need to be concerned with the realization and instantiation of in-group norms, values, and beliefs. That is, they need to be identity-embedding structures.
Such structures may be necessary for coordination and focused activity. Yet they do not, in and of themselves, determine where exactly the focus of action will lie. Hence a further necessity of skilled leadership is the ability to analyze where exactly the resistance to one’s projects lies. That is, one needs to appreciate other social forces that the group is arranged against that are mobilizing people to organize the social world along different lines to one’s own project. One also needs to devise a strategy for overcoming that resistance. This is a matter both of identifying the weaknesses in opposing forces and also of finding ways of reducing those forces. In this way, successful leadership is as much about demobilizing the support of the opposition as it is about mobilizing one’s own support.
In order to give substance to these points, let us start with a study of our own that we mentioned previously in Chapter 3: the BBC Prison Study (Reicher & Haslam, 2006b; see Figure 7.3). Recall that this study involved randomly dividing men into groups as either Prisoners or Guards within a simulated prison environment. Recall also that, while the Prisoners came to form a common social identity and hence to work as a group in opposition to the Guards, the Guards themselves never agreed on what it meant to be a Guard and hence lacked leadership and the ability to work together in a coordinated fashion. Our point previously was that shared social identity was a precondition for the emergence of leadership: there must be a sense of “us” before we can decide on who represents “us.” Our point now has to do with the way in which effective leadership is sustained.
Amongst the Prisoners there were, in fact, two models of action and two would-be leaders. These came to a head after one of the two, PB, had stolen a bunch of keys from the Guards. The question was then how this asset should be used in order to improve the position of the Prisoners. PB wanted to demand specific resources—regular hot drinks. He argued that if others wanted other resources then they themselves should conduct their own personal acts of defiance to the Guards. PB’s rival, DM, suggested a very different approach. He suggested a bargaining strategy whereby the keys would be exchanged for the creation of a negotiating forum in which the Prisoners as a whole could put their demands to the Guards on a systematic basis. In other words, not only did DM offer to represent the group, but he also established a structure in which the group—and his own democratic vision for it—could be promoted.
This structural solution was attractive to the Prisoners because it involved them working and making decisions with the leader rather than being left to act alone. Accordingly, the Prisoners selected DM rather than PB to represent them in a meeting with the Guards. As DM foresaw, the structural solution was also attractive to the Guards because it provided a way of organizing their hitherto very difficult relations with the Prisoners. This meant that when DM met with the Guards they quickly agreed to the forum’s creation.
At this point, we decided to remove DM from the study. We wanted to see how his proposals fared once he himself was not there to implement them. The answer came very quickly. Although the Prisoners remained favorable to DM’s ideas, they lacked the skills of DM (an experienced trades unionist) in implementing them. They didn’t have experience or knowledge of how to organize a forum, to run negotiations, to achieve consensual decisions. In short, without the practical arrangements and skills to give them substance, ideas alone proved useless. Thus, within hours of DM’s departure, the Prisoners returned to conflict as a means of challenging the Guards (for a more detailed analysis see Haslam & Reicher, 2007a; Reicher, Haslam, & Hopkins, 2005).
As well as providing specific lessons about leadership, another strength of the BBC Prison Study is that it suggests that the paradigm for understanding group relations and leadership is more complex than is often assumed. That
Figure 7.3 The struggle for leadership in the BBC Prison Study (Reicher & Haslam, 2006b). Copyright © BBC, reprinted with permission.
Note: This struggle was won by DM (panel a, left). In large part this was because, as well as offering to pursue a collective rather than a personal strategy of confrontation with the Guards, he established a forum (panel b) that provided a structure that promoted the group’s interests and his democratic vision of its identity.
is, instead of different groups (and leaders of different groups) simply vying against each other, what we see is a process of vying for leadership within the group (Prisoners) that occurs in the context of struggles between groups (Prisoners vs. Guards). In this particular case, the struggle within the group reflected different leaders’ desire for quite different types of intergroup relationship (conflict vs. negotiation). But very often, we see something rather different. That is, leaders seek to manipulate intergroup relations as a means of gaining advantage over their rivals within the group. We alluded to this point in Chapter 4 when we noted that those whose leadership within their group is insecure are often inclined to pick fights with out-groups (e.g., Rabbie & Bekkers, 1978; Van Kleef et al., 2007). Elaborating on this point, we can see that intergroup phenomena like prejudice, discrimination, and even hatred, often actually derive from the struggle for intragroup authority and leadership.
In looking for examples to back up this point, we are truly (and sadly) spoilt for choice. Thus evidence of these processes in action can be found in the treatment of Jews, lepers, and heretics in 12th- and 13th-century Europe (Moore, 1996); in the rise in communal Hindu–Muslim violence in the 1980s (Kakar, 1996; Ludden, 1996); and in the more recent breakdown of the Palestinian–Israeli peace process (Bar-Tal, 2004). To take one well-known example, though, it was precisely this dynamic that fueled the anti-Communist witch-hunts in the McCarthy era (a process that Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible examined through the lens of the witch-hunts of 17th-century Massachusetts). In this case it was only by linking the persecution of suspected Communists to national identity that McCarthy could promote his own leadership, and that of his wing of the Republican Party.
More generally, then, we can see why it is that various forms of “witchhunt” (e.g., those with targets specified by different ethnicity, sexual preference, or religion) constitute such a powerful tool for unscrupulous leaders. For not only do they create a compelling construction of who represents the in-group and who does not, but so too they create practices that objectify and sustain that construction. Witch-hunts, that is, both envisage and engineer reality so as to lend credibility to the extremist leader.
Moreover, it is also the case that various forms of witch-hunt achieve their effects by provoking out-groups to respond in ways that confirm extremist leaders’ characterizations of the world. As a recent example of this process in action, Gagnon (2004) examines the strategic maneuvers of the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic in the context of the conflict between Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Gagnon is primarily concerned to challenge the notion that the conflict was an inevitable result of primordial ethnic hatreds. He shows, first, that, prior to the conflict, intergroup relations between Croats and Serbs were very positive, with high levels of intermarriage and low levels of intolerance. According to one survey, for instance, “At the end of 1989 signs of tensions between nationalities in Croatia were hardly discernable” (cited in Gagnon, 2004, p. 36). Second, he argues that Serbian nationalism was a political strategy used by conservatives in the regime in order to demobilize attempts to reform the system. Anyone who opposed the status quo was accused of siding with those who were victimizing Serbs throughout the former Yugoslavia. However, third, this representation of groups and identities had little purchase at first. It only took hold after Serbian “special forces” were sent into the mixed areas of Croatia and Bosnia. These drove out the Croats and compelled the resident Serbs, often under threat of death, to join them or else point out Croat-owned houses. After this, the Croats responded in kind. Importantly, then, there was now a reality of hatred to sustain claims of inherent antagonism.
With the support of these various examples, let us draw together the various strands of our argument and sum up what we have been saying about leaders as engineers of identity. When it comes to various forms of witch-hunt, our point is that these can be used by leaders as strategies for: (1) claiming that they represent group interests; (2) discrediting rival leaders; (3) demobilizing actual or potential opposition; and (4) disciplining followers. However, the success of such constructions is facilitated by, and often dependent on, measures that provoke the out-group to act in ways that ensure that one’s discourse corresponds to reality.
This for us is a graphic, if dispiriting, example of the fact that, over time, the most inspiring visions of identity and society and the most impressive ritualized displays of these visions will ultimately come to nothing if leaders cannot realize and objectify identity as the actual structure of society. Leaders must be mobilizers, then. They must in some sense be prophets of the future. But their mobilizations and prophecies must take followers to the promised land or else they themselves will end up wandering the wilderness.
Conclusion: Leadership and the production of power both center on the hard but rewarding work of identity management
What we have sought to show in this chapter is that there are a number of material dimensions to successful leadership and that harnessing these requires considerable skill. The list of necessary skills that we can abstract from our analysis includes linguistic prowess, rhetorical sophistication, poetic expression, choreography, spatial design, architectural vision, organizational acumen, and social insight. But for all this diversity, there are two constants that, implicitly or explicitly, run throughout the chapter. The first is that leaders do not simply need to be artists, impresarios, and engineers. They need to be artists, impresarios, and engineers of identity—specifically, of a social identity that is shared with followers. Social identity, then, remains a key unifying construct. That is, the vision of leaders is a vision of who we are, what we value, and what sort of society would constitute our Eden. The shows provided by leaders are ritualized enactments of that Eden in which the forms of social being that “we” value are created within the rituals and ceremonies of the group itself. Finally, the structures and social realities created by the leader must be objectifications of the group identity (Drury & Reicher, 2005). That is, to be effective, leaders do not need to bring about some generalized notion of what is “good.” Rather they must realize specific goods related to the values of the groups that they seek to represent.
What is equally important is the relationship between the various material dimensions of leadership activity. We have already suggested that vision needs to be matched by practice—both the social practices internal to the group and the social practices implemented by the group. Artistry will come to nothing without creating matching shows and realities. But equally, the implementation of particular practices will come to nothing if they are not rooted in a compelling vision of who we are and what is important to us. Above, we referred to Gelvin’s rich analysis of different forms of collective action in post-imperial Syria. Both were splendid and elaborate displays, both communicated very clear ideas of Syrian identity and Syrian society. But as Gelvin relates, the elite governmental version conceded little to shared symbols, shared historical knowledge, and shared understandings of what “Syrian” meant. Rather, it was much more easily portrayed as a concession to foreign values and foreign histories. For this reason, the traditionalizing version of the popular committees won the day. Likewise, in the BBC Prison Study, the leadership of DM won out over that of PB because while PB represented himself as “an individual individual,” DM tapped into group members’ shared aspirations (Haslam & Reicher, 2007a, p. 138) and created structures in which these could be lived out. In both the world and in the laboratory, leadership that is grounded in shared identity will always win out over that which is grounded in ego.
The second constant that runs through this chapter concerns the demanding nature of the activities we have outlined. Make no mistake about it, leadership is hard work. As we will discuss more in the next chapter, it involves a range of exacting skills. Moreover, a lot of effort is involved in honing, adapting, and applying these in the particular situation at hand. But in the end it is worth it. To reiterate a core point: this is because those who have control over the definition of identity have a world-making and self-renewing power. The more they exercise that power in making the social world, the more they are able to continue doing so. It is for this reason that so much energy is expended on the task of defining identity and ring-fencing one’s definition of it. Indeed, one could argue that, in some way, all aspects of group process are bound up with authorizing some version of who we are.
As a final illustration of these various points, it is instructive to conclude by reflecting on work by contemporary theologians that has examined Paul’s leadership of the Romans. Paul, it will be recalled, was the Pharisee who took an active part in the persecution of Christians but then had a vision that led him to convert to Christianity and enjoin a great many others to do likewise through the power and clarity of his teaching. This was a radical, dangerous course (putting it mildly), but, of course, it came to exert a massive impact on world history that has affected all our lives. As a result, Paul was canonized and is now celebrated (by Christians) as a charismatic leader par excellence.
So how did he do it? Based on an exhaustive analysis of relevant texts, Philip Esler’s definitive answer helps draw together a number of points we have made here and in the previous chapter. Specifically, he observes that:
In congregations that he founded, Paul based his claim to exemplify the group on his behaviour when among them. In particular, he went so far as to portray himself as the model of life in Christ that other Christ-believers should imitate…. Paul’s position is that he epitomizes the social category of Christ-follower (that is, he both defines it and is defined by it) and that other believers … should copy him; thus he exercises leadership. To do this he needs to persuade his audience that he is an exemplary Christ-follower, encapsulating all that such identity entails.
(Esler, 2003, p. 223)
In this regard, as well as being a superb entrepreneur of identity, the major practical feat of Paul’s leadership was to establish a series of congregations within which he institutionalized a number of key rites, ceremonies, and practices (notably baptism and the Lord’s supper, “the two main rituals of early Christianity”; Horrell, 2005, pp. 129–130). Importantly, these served to formalize a Christian church that had not hitherto existed. This involved a massive amount of labor—specifically in the form of an extensive travel itinerary and a prodigious amount of letter writing—that served to set in place both a new religion and his own leadership. As David Horrell writes in his book Solidarity and Difference:
The key social achievement of these community-forming actions [consisted] in the bringing together of many people into one body, the construction of a new form of corporate solidarity. Both rituals, baptism and the Lord’s supper … communicate and reinforce a worldview in which the death and resurrection of Christ are the central event in a cosmic story—these events give meaning to the world, providing a fundamental hermeneutical orientation by which it is to be understood—and at the same time convey as the central theme of the Christian ethos the notion of a solidarity in Christ that transcends former distinctions.
(2005, p. 110)
Moreover, through these various novel forms of activity Paul succeeded in:
Turn[ing] himself and [his would-be followers] into an “us” in relation to their identity as Christ-followers, thus gaining their commitment to a sense of self from which they would derive meaning, purpose and value.
(Esler, 2003, p. 223)
In short, then, the secret of Paul’s success was that he understood that, in order to propel his mission forward, he needed to build new structures with his followers that were founded on a sense of shared social identity (with himself at its center) and that allowed them to live out that shared identity. Without this, his charisma would have gone unrecognized and his vision would have been just another dream. Without this, the road to Damascus would have been just another road.