Introduction
As is often the case with great intellects, Werhane’s only problem in academe seems to have been having ‘too many options’. Though many of Werhane’s generation of business ethicists displayed a facility to engage with a wide variety of topics, I would wager that nobody else’s work is as multifaceted and diverse as hers. Apart from her writings on most topics related to business ethics, she covers [to name but a few areas]: aesthetics, philosophy of language, Adam Smith scholarship, consumption, environmental ethics, poverty alleviation, global business, engineering ethics, health care, rights, ethical leadership and last but not least women in business.
Since her work on women in business is a relatively small part of her oeuvre, this chapter was written in the hope of gesturing towards all the rich perspectives that lie latent in this part of her work, and which could be explored through some of her other conceptual lenses. Since this chapter is the result of a response paper delivered at a conference celebrating Werhane’s work hosted at Darden in 2016, its format may slightly differ from a typical academic paper.
In what follows, I will weave as rich a tapestry as possible around her pieces on women’s leadership, making use of the tools Werhane herself provided to further explore the various dimensions of her insights on women’s leadership. I do this, of course, to suggest that Werhane still has a lot of papers to write, or challenge us to write, and I hope I can entice her to do so.
One of Werhane’s most central contributions discussing the role of women in business is: “Women in Business: The Changing Face of Leadership” (with Posig, Gundry, Ofstein, and Powell 2007). This book is based on interviews highlighting various female executives’ emergence as leaders, and their approach to leadership. The book’s conclusion stresses the fact there is no common ‘recipe’, or set of conditions, that shaped these female executives, even though here and there we find some common factors like self-confidence, motivation to lead, commitment to values, access to mentorship, and being committed to influence rather than power. It is this embrace of women’s unique pasts, the diversity of their experiences, which help us steer clear of simplistic essentialist stereotypes. In fact, one could argue that the commonalities emerge as a kind of Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblance’.
A second important text, “Leadership, Gender and Organization” (Werhane and Painter-Morland 2011), is a collected volume of essays including Werhane’s chapter on ‘Women Leaders in a Global World’. In this chapter we are urged to revise our mental models and ‘worn-out mindsets’, with the help of stakeholder theory, systems thinking and female leadership paradigms. As Werhane’s co-editor on this project, I was fortunate enough to witness her incredible vision, her ambition in getting some world-leading scholars like Mary Uhl-Bien on board for the project, and her capacity to be a ‘closer’, i.e. someone who always delivers on what she promises, even under the most difficult circumstances. The end-result, dedicated to the life of Werhane’s daughter Kelly Werhane Althoff, is testimony to Werhane’s leadership spirit, both in her professional and personal life.
Last but not least, Werhane’s work on the Award-winning Big Questions TV series,1 in which many of the societal issues she addressed are either focused on women or has implications for women. These include: Women in Prison and recidivism, wage theft, food deserts, and poverty alleviation.
The chapter proceeds as follows: I start with some general observations regarding Werhane’s treatment of topics related to women’s leadership, before articulating some of her central contributions. The chapter then goes on to interrogate selected themes and the potential they hold for more clearly articulating some tensions that remain visible in Werhane’s oeuvre. Some suggestions are made regarding further research that is needed to resolve some of these tensions. We end with her work on the award-winning TV series, “Big Questions”, in order to argue that we learn as much from Werhane’s practice as a public intellectual, than from her theoretical contributions.
General Observations About the Topic of “Women” within her Oeuvre
Werhane is the kind of feminist I celebrate. I admire her hands-on way of living the feminist agenda in her own academic and public career, rather than just proclaiming it. As such, she operated beyond essentialist stereotypes and created a space for a different kind of discourse about the role of women in business. But it would be interesting to ask Werhane more directly about her view of feminism – the types of feminism that she feels attracted to, or not. Perhaps because I often as myself this question as well… The fact is that we live in an age that benefited immensely from the work of earlier feminists and activists, and as such, some may argue that a feminist articulation is not necessarily called for (often not realizing that this may be a too easy excuse…). But surely Werhane lived in very different times – so I wonder whether she could say a bit more about her relationship towards feminism in the first few decades of her career.
A related question is: Why the timing of her work on women in business? Her perspectives on women in business went to press later on in her life. In her early work on “Persons, Rights, and Corporations” (1985) no specific reference is made to women. In her book, with Westra on the “Business of Consumption” (1998), we also find no special interest in women, ecofeminism etc. I did not have the time to close-read all 28 (!) books, but maybe we can explore when and how Werhane felt it necessary to address the issue of women in business more directly.
For example, it would be interesting to explore why Werhane never thought it necessary to write specifically about women’s rights, women’s role in consumption, the ethics of care (apart from discussing the Kohlberg versus Gilligan’s debate in the Ruffin Series book and the recent SAGE volume)? Perhaps she never wanted to indulge in the stereotypes that often came with the ‘ethics of care’ discussion? But why not challenge these stereotypes as restrictive mental models that should be reframed?
It seems to me that Werhane’s methodology has much to offer in terms of a critique of essentialism. Werhane herself states that many of the relational qualities that are necessary for leaders in a global world can also be found in men. And in the introduction to her Journal of Business Ethics paper, her narrative around the changes in a baboon troop even suggests that if circumstances remove the typical aggressive male role-models, other males step forward and adopt a different kind of leadership style. The question that emerged in my mind when reading this was: Is it that these males may have been depicted as the more ‘relational’ types? Or is it instead the case that they were changed by the female practices and styles in the absence of the dominant males’ influence? Of course Werhane’s purpose goes beyond the opening narrative, in order to suggest that we humans too would do well to embrace a different mode of leadership in a global world. But the related question is – are women essentially uniquely skilled at new forms of leadership, or have they been socialized in this way by precisely the stereotypes that persist in the business world? It could be interesting to explore the inherent question – is an inclination towards relationality about nature, or nurture?
Werhane combines an interest in individual women with an understanding of the systems perspective on business. Uhl-Bien and Ospina’s (2012) distinction between ‘entity’ and ‘constructionist’ perspectives in the Relational Leadership literature is relevant here, and help us ask questions about how Werhane’s interviews with women in business relates to her broader ‘systems’ approach. Through Uhl-Bien and Ospina (2012) analysis, it becomes clear that we are confronted with two ontologically distinct paradigms that in many ways are difficult to reconcile. From an ontological perspective, scholars seem to either believe that women leaders exist as entities that can be studied via interviews, surveys etc., or to hold that leadership is in fact socially constructed through processes of interrelationships within complex systems. It seems that Werhane’s work spans both perspectives. In Werhane’s first book on Women in Business (2007) she uses interviews to ask women about their own experience as leaders, which tends to suggest an entity-perspective. Yet in Gender and Leadership (Werhane and Painter-Morland 2011), Werhane embraces a much more systemic understanding of leading as a relational dynamic. Are we witnessing a subtle progression in Werhane’s thinking, or a more radical departure?
All in all I believe that Werhane has much to offer in bridging the gap between entity and constructionist perspectives, and would be interest to hear her reflections on how we deal with some of the ontological tensions that plaque the relational leadership literature (Cooper 2005; Uhl-Bien 2011; Uhl-Bien and Ospina 2012).
Central Theoretical Contributions
Werhane (2007) argues that: “ The kind of leadership necessary in a global economy is, interestingly, exemplified by women” (Werhane 2007). What are the characteristics of this kind of leadership? According to Werhane, it includes: the ability to shift mindsets, reframing mental models; understanding leadership as an interactive, dynamic and mutually interrelational process between leaders and managers, where each participants contributes to the vision and progress towards change; working with a diverse population collaboratively, rather than following typical leader-follower; and last but not least, not thinking about ‘borders’ at all in a global context, but instead embracing the reality of interconnected systems.
Werhane challenges agency theory’s typical assumptions of self-interest maximization as main motivation for behavior. In this way, she departs from typical the belief in a typical homo oeconomicus and replaces it with an agent who functions as an ‘unbounded mind’ with multiple perspectives (drawing on Mittroff and Linstone). In what follows, I am interested in understanding the anthropological assumptions of this ‘unbounded mind’ – how it is understood, how it is shaped, and how it functions. She argues that ‘leaders’ are all part of a network of interrelationships, such that each element of a particular set of interrelationships affects some other components of that set and the system itself. In this way, her work foreshadowed much of what is now part of the extensive body of work on “Relational Leadership” (Uhl-Bien and Ospina 2012). In the below, I suggest that she can help us resolve some of this literature’s current impasses. One would however have to look to other part’s of Werhane’s oeuvre to articulate this contribution.
Needle and Thread: Mental Models & Moral Imagination
Werhane’s work on mental models forms the golden thread that allows her to frame and reframe most of business ethics’ most challenging questions. If one reads the cases in her book on ‘Moral Imagination’, one clearly sees the value of her analysis of how mental models may lead to various contradictory accounts of particular events, which limits our ability to convince each other of the most appropriate action. For instance, in the case of the silicone breast implants that she discusses, she highlights the impasse between the legalistic, ‘scientific’ framing of the case, versus the emotional real-life testimony of the suffering patients. Yet she does not give in to incommensurability claims or conceptual relativism, instead drawing on Wittgenstein to navigate the line between socially constructed presentations of experience and socially constructed realities (Werhane 1999, p.66). I think there is a very important ontological statement latent in Werhane’s position, which should perhaps be more clearly articulated to help us resolve practical, real conflicts. How can we make sure that people’s suffering is considered as ‘real’ as the scientific evidence or as statistical measurement?
In the first place, it may help us articulate WHAT counts. Would our discussion of women’s leadership not have benefited from a more detailed engagement with the ‘mythical’, fictional’ ‘emotional’ framings that often gets no air within most leadership discourses? Is the main mental model that we should challenge not precisely the one that dismisses ‘emotion’ in favor of ‘reason’, that ‘facts’ replace ‘narratives’, etc.?
Secondly, it could influence HOW do we use these insights. Moral imagination is offered as the needle that pierces the obscurity or impasses that such differing accounts may create, and can allow us to reframe one’s perspectives by regarding events from different points of view (Werhane 1999, p. 67). The assumption here is that an important leadership capacity relates to this ability to step back, step out of one own limited mental model and re-imagine the situation from other points of view. I believe it is unfortunate if the transcendental subject slips back into our understanding of agency in this way… Should this reframing not be something altogether more embodied, affective and intuitive?
In fact, I have wondered whether we can take Werhane’s descriptions of ‘reframing’ the situation further. It seems to me that in Werhane’s community engagement, these imaginings are combined with the real practices of ‘walking in another shoes’ for a while - I will return to Werhane doing this herself through her work on Big Questions in the last section. For now I just want to highlight that a further theorization of happens in the process of moral imagination may be called for in terms of extending Werhane’s work on women in business. Werhane’s work has so much to offer a conception of ‘imagination’ that goes beyond ‘rationalism’ without abandoning the ‘rational’. It could in fact be a redefinition of ‘rationality’ as such, but in my mind what this means for women in business still remains to be articulated. It is in this respect that I think we have to challenge ourselves to bring the detail about Werhane’s thinking about moral imagination, and her reading of Adam Smith as well as her earlier philosophical work in closer contact with her thinking on women’s leadership.
The moral imagination that I see at work when I read Werhane’s reflections on the lives of women leaders, is one that is informed by her reading of Adam Smith, of Wittgenstein - I would love to see Werhane unraveling these philosophical roots with us and employ them to help us think about women in business. In fact, I am sure by the time she and I have this engagement, much would have already been said in other presentations that would help us do this work. How could the Smith’s perspectives on the moral sentiments help us understand the different accounts of the leaders in Werhane’s sample? How does it inform an understanding of divergent perspectives on breast implants? How does it inform the work that Werhane does with women in prison? But maybe Werhane can help us with a brief description of what she considers the boundaries of the ‘rational’.
The Complex Fabric: Systems Thinking
In Werhane’s later work on women in the global business environment, her commitment to systems thinking is more systematically unpacked. What is however interesting here, is that Werhane illustrates the way in which the inclusion of stakeholder perspectives operates in the reframing process, she employs systems thinking, but in ways that would be equally valid and valuable for both men and women in business.
To give this interpretation its full force we have to delve into the various relationships that make up the fabric of our organizational lives, as well us our existence in a globalized world. One of the defining elements of her description of leadership in a global world is embracing the idea of ‘no borders’. This seems to me especially important in a world where some leaders propose ‘building walls’ as a solution… In terms of what this means for women in business, there are a number of important dimensions:
The capacity to be relationally orientated to diverse groups, across national, religious, gender boundaries are important for all leaders, not just women. But I do believe that women (and some men) have been better prepared for this in terms of habituation, orientation, and practice. In my work on rethinking conceptions of ‘vision’, my co-author and I challenge the way in which vision has been conceptualized as the product of one brilliant, isolated mind (Ibarra and Obadaru 2009). Instead, vision can also, and in the current context, preferably, be the intuitive relational responsiveness (Painter-Morland and Deslandes 2014) that allow us to act with purpose without doing certain cost-benefit analyses. This capacity is something that is developed via practice and engagement on a global scale.
I believe that Werhane’s work challenges us to explore the affective dimensions of organizational life as key to the relational dynamics that shape all processes in organizations. There is a great interest in affect in Organization Studies, which may have lots to offer the Business Ethics discourse. Affect allows us to rediscover some of the important dimensions of organizational life that were exiled in a business environment that required one to leave your emotions (and values) at the office door. This exile of emotions also allowed women to be classified as ‘too emotional’ for executive positions, yet organizations fully relied on the emotional labour of women for its success (see Flemming 2014 for a critique of the use of emotional labor without compensation). It seems to me that Werhane’s work can help us think through the link between moral imagination and affect, but this may involve bringing her work on Adam Smith closer to her work on women in business.
It is in this respect that Werhane’s work goes so much further than much of the business ethics literature in taking on issues of poverty, healthcare provision, recidivism etc. She manages to integrate macro-, meso- and micro-level ethical issues in meaningful way. This goes a long way towards addressing the accusation that many in business ethicists typically steer clear of issues that pertain to the broader political economy. In an important way it offers us insights to inform the current interest in political CSR, or the political role of business in a global context. Werhane understands better than most people that business cannot operate in a vacuum and that societal challenges must be addressed if human flourishing is to be procured and business are to continue to succeed. The interesting fact is that Werhane is not so much writing about political CSR, than about living a different kind of ethical engagement that calls on all citizens to exercise moral imagination.
It is therefore also important to note that Werhane did not just write about these topics, but engaged with practice in real terms. It is to this contribution that I want to turn next.
Werhane’s Life as Public Intellectual
I would like to end my remarks to talking a bit about Werhane’s engagement with women beyond scholarship - as Director if IBPE, mentor, and through her TV series, Big Questions, to illustrate her practice speaks as strongly as her scholarship. In these activities, we see the impact of Werhane’s work, and we also see her operating as a woman in business, with all the challenges it entails.
In terms of the Big Questions TV show,2 I will focus on some of the programmes with a focus on women in business. I believe that there is some work to be done to bring the practice of Big Questions and some of Werhane’s theoretical perspectives together in a meaningful way.
- 1)
The Female condom: In Zimbabwe and Kenya, Big Questions investigated HIV prevention through the Female condom. In addition to combating HIV, female condoms prevent unwanted pregnancies and as such, unsafe abortions that account for 13% of maternal deaths. In her leadership books and article, Werhane explains that this business model reframes the typical stakeholder map. Instead of having the corporation in the center of the stakeholder map, the public sector is working with for-profit companies and NGOs, creating a network-model for stakeholder engagement where no one player is permanently in the center. The goal is empowering women, who are most at risk. The Female condom programme met 3 Millennium Goals combating HIV, decreasing maternal death, increasing gender equality.
- 2)
Food deserts, defined as a lack of access to fresh food and vegetables – only overly-processed, packaged food, packed with sodium and sugar, providing empty calories. Food deserts are coupled with poverty. This programme includes the personal narrative of a female doctor talking about the scarcity of fresh food while growing up in South-side Chicago. Women in these communities have to spend hours to shop, find public transportation or walk, just to be able to find fresh food. Environment contributes to poor dietary quality, diabetes, and obesity. But equally important, one should look at this from a justice and equity perspective – community development requires a holistic perspective. It is this ability to connect various issues in a systemic way that sets Werhane’s work apart. Exploring the implications of this holistic perspective for women in business holds much promise.
- 3)
Fresh start: In this episode the focus is on women in prisons, and deals with the threat of recidivism. Again, Werhane responded to a local community in Michigan that would typically not be noticed by business ethicists and CSR specialists. The fact is that this phenomenon disrupts families and entire communities. In terms developing a sound moral compass in society, this seems to be of immense importance, but we often only deal with the symptoms of moral decay in our organizations without thinking about engaging with broader societal issues that could lie at the heart of later problems. Some may argue that crimes resulting from drug addiction are not relevant for business ethicists whose main focus is on preventing white-collar crime. But what struck me in the Fresh start episode is the story of one woman, who describes herself as a soccer-mom, close to finishing her degree, when she got addicted to heroine, and lost everything. I could not help wondering about this woman’s children, their education, their future – what is the chance that they may end up in a DePaul business ethics class? If they do, what sense of morality would they enter the classroom with? Do we have a duty as business ethicists to think about this? Werhane’s work seems to suggest that we do.
The research for the Big Questions series meant that Werhane herself had to travel around the world, crossing borders, much in the way she advocated when talking about leadership for a global age. Her unique ability to converse with people of all backgrounds, means and perspectives, allowed her to bring these perspectives into American living rooms in a way that writing academic papers could never do.
Acting as Director of De Paul’s Institute for Business and Professional Ethics (IBPE) for a short period while Werhane was on leave made me keenly aware of the challenges of project management of the Big Questions. Aligning the perspectives of diverse players, artistic spirits and the IBPE team and its Board, was not easy. Funding this kind of project is also a huge challenge, which Werhane tackled with her characteristic can-do attitude (and her 3-word emails).
I think I speak on behalf of many of the women who benefited from Werhane’s mentorship when I say that she an inspiring and often intimidating role-model. Such energy, such vision, such dedication is hard to follow. The kind of vision and drive that Werhane exhibits in her professional life is an excellent example of the kind of vision that my co-author and I articulated in a paper on gender and vision, published in Organization (Painter-Morland and Deslandes 2014). The ‘vision’ that we discuss in our paper, is an intuitive, embodied form of making sense through practice. It is a way of ‘doing’ and ‘being’, rather than ‘thinking’ and ‘planning’. Unfortunately this form of ‘vision’ is often not recognized in organizations. Werhane’s professional life as a case study in inspired practice makes it eminently clear that we would do well to celebrate, recognize and foster precisely this kind of vision within our organizations.
In this chapter, Werhane’s work on women in business was placed in the context of her broader oeuvre in order to argue that the implications of her thinking on the topic hold much promise in terms of inspiring future research. In addition, her professional practice is a display of what women’s leadership entails, and as such, could stimulate further theorization. If we take our cues both from Werhane’s theory and practice, a rich tapestry of insights emerges, which will remain influential far beyond her own extended oeuvre.