Mats Alvesson

Scarpino:Today is Wednesday, October 15th, 2025. My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History Emeritus at Indiana University, Indianapolis (IUI) and Oral Historian for the Tobias Leadership Center, also at IUI. Today I have the privilege to be interviewing Dr. Mats Alvesson, Professor of School of Economics and Management, Lund, Sweden. We are conducting this interview at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association which is taking place at the Hilton Hotel in Prague, Czech Republic. This interview is a joint venture sponsored by the Tobias Leadership Center and the International Leadership Association. I note that as part of my background research I talked to two of Dr. Alvesson’s professional colleagues, Thomas Fisher and Yiannis Gabriel. Mats Alvesson earned his BA degree from Lund University in 1978, and his PhD from Lund University in 1984. He is a Swedish Management Scholar and Professor of Business Administration at Lund University, particularly known for having made key contributions in the field of critical management studies, his areas of expertise in organization studies, management, leadership, critical theory, and qualitative methods. On the Lund University website, Dr. Alvesson states, quoting from you:  “My current research projects focus on leadership, functional stupidity in organizations, and experiences of bureaucracy and managerial work in universities.” He has delivered a large number of keynote addresses, lectures and seminars at numerous European universities as well as universities worldwide including Australia, India, Mexico, Taipei and Wales. Dr.  Alvesson is a Social Science Scholar with a towering reputation in Europe and around the world. According to ScholarGPS, he has a total of 367 publications that include about 30 books and several hundred book chapters and journal articles. Google Scholar offers one measure of the impact of a scholarship. Since 2020, Mats Alversson’s publications have been cited 40,151 times, and during his lifetime as a scholar his published work has been cited 125,522 times. According to Google Scholar, his most cited publication with 13,845 citations is a book, Reflexive Methodology, New Vistas for Qualitative Research, co-authored by Kaj Skoldberg.

Alvesson:Yep.

Scarpino:His most recent publications in 2025 include “Strategy as Practice and the Critical Eye”, a book chapter in Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice, co-authored with Martin Blom, Cambridge Press, 2025; “Living the Janus Face, The Promise and Perils of Role-Distancing for Middle Managers” in the Journal of Management Studies, Volume 62, Issue 1, 2025, co-authored with Susan Gjerde; “Critical management studies: A Critical Review,” Journal of Management Studies, Volume 62, Issue 1, 2025, co-authored with Andre Spicer. 

I'll add that Professor Alvesson has been or is currently a member of fifteen review boards for academic journals including leadership. He's earned numerous awards and recognitions for his scholarship. The recognition that brings us here today is the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the International Leadership Association. 

With that brief introduction, I want to ask your permission to do the following: to record the interview, to have the interview transcribed, to deposit the recording and the transcription in the Indiana University Indianapolis Special Collections and Archives, where they may be used by patrons including posting of all or part of the recording and transcription to the website of the IU Special Collections and Archives. Also, to deposit the recording and the transcription with the International Leadership Association and the Tobias Leadership Center, where they may be used by patrons with the understanding that all or part may be posted to those organizations' websites. Do I have your permission to do those things?

Alvesson:Yes.

Scarpino:Alright. I want to start by explaining, for your sake and the sake of anyone using this interview, that I'm going to begin by asking you some basic demographic questions and then followed by some bigger picture questions about leadership. We’ll then work our way more or less chronologically through your career with plenty of discussion about leadership and leadership ethics if that comes up. Tobias Center has some standard leadership questions that help provide continuity to the interviews done over the years, and I'll work some of those in. I will say that part of the fun for me of doing this is I know where we're going to start, but I don't always know where we're going to end up, so we'll see how that works. So, basic demographic questions and we'll come back to the topic of leadership. The first question is when and where were you born?

Alvesson:I was born in a small city in Sweden, 3rd of November, 1956.

Scarpino:Where did you grow up?

Alvesson:Southern part of Sweden, unknown for most people in the world.

Scarpino:Well, southern Sweden.

Alvesson:Yes.

Scarpino:You lived out in the countryside?

Alvesson:A small city mainly.

Scarpino:Do you have any brothers or sisters?

Alvesson:I had one brother. He died a couple of years ago.

Scarpino:How about your parents? What does your father do?

Alvesson:He was an engineer manager, low level manager in a manufacturing company.

Scarpino:You said he was trained as an engineer, though?

Alvesson:Yes.

Scarpino:Yeah. What kind of engineering?

Alvesson:I actually don’t know.

Scarpino:That's alright. Trained as an engineer. How about your mother, what did she do?

Alvesson:She was a secretary, part-time secretary.

Scarpino:And a mom, right? She raised the kids.

Alvesson:Yeah, precisely.

Scarpino:Can you say a few words about the impact that your parents or your family had on shaping the adult you became?

Alvesson:They probably didn't shape me so much. I think that I'm a self-made person in the sense that not so much strong influence. My personality, my orientations, my life choices are probably relatively autonomous.

Scarpino:Of them?

Alvesson:Sorry?

Scarpino:You said autonomous, of them?

Alvesson:Yeah.

Scarpino:As you think about your youth, teenage years, whatever, were there any experiences that stand out as having shaped your character or shaped the adult you became?

Alvesson:Not really. I think that the years just passed without much drama or anything particularly happening. I was rather shy when I was young and that probably influenced me to later on focus very much on writing. I’m very much a writing academic. Of course, most academics write quite a lot, but I probably produced much more text than average.

Scarpino:When you were a young person, say a teenager, were you writing then?

Alvesson:No. I was reading a bit, but then sleeping a lot, I think.

Scarpino:That's what teenagers do, I raised a few. (laughs)

Alvesson:Yeah.

Scarpino:Again, as you think about your youth, were there any individuals who had an impact on shaping the person you became?

Alvesson:I don't think so. They were teachers that were okay, I guess, but no lasting impression, no role models, nothing that really stood out.

Scarpino:Were there people you knew about in the world that you looked up to or you said, “Boy, that person really is somebody to be admired?” or not admired?

Alvesson:Yeah, no I don't think so. I mean in Sweden, Raoul Wallenberg was like a hero.

Scarpino:Who was that?

Alvesson:Raoul Wallenberg. He was I think the first or second honorary American citizen in the world. He saved a lot of Jews in Budapest in 1944. He was kind of greatly admired for being a heroic character.

Scarpino:You said he was an American of Swedish descent?

Alvesson:No, he was Swedish, but I think that the United States, around that time, they had two honorary citizens, and one was Winston Churchill, the other was Raoul Wallenberg.

Scarpino:How did this individual become an honorary citizen? What did he do?

Alvesson:Well, he saved these Jews. He was a diplomat in Budapest in the Hungarian fascist and then the Nazi state, whatever, and was an activist and tried to save as many Jews as possible from the concentration camps. But he was kind of going around and giving temporary passports and so on to people. He really tried to do a lot of things to save the Jews from being sent to the concentration camps.

Scarpino:He was one of the people who tried to get Jews away from the Nazis and out of Europe.

Alvesson:Yeah, precisely.

Scarpino:You have both a BA and a PhD at Lund University. Why that university?

Alvesson:Well, it's the large local university in Sweden. It was founded in late seventeenth century. Good reputation, nice city. If you are from the southern part of Sweden and you have the characters, then you most typically go to that place.

Scarpino:In Sweden, is that a country where tuition is kept deliberately low to allow people…

Alvesson:There’s no tuition.

Scarpino:No tuition.

Alvesson:No, so all education is free.

Scarpino:You just have to pay for your meals and a place to live.

Alvesson:Yeah, and you get some sponsorship as well, so some State support. 

Scarpino:Did you have State support?

Alvesson:Well, I mean, you get a loan and then there's some free part also, which is more like a stipend. There is a combination of stipend money and then a loan. But the rate for paying back the loan is very low, so everybody can go to higher education if they have the interest and the ability.

Scarpino:In Sweden, was there a test that people took to decide whether or not they were college material? 

Alvesson:Based on characters, on characters from the school.

Scarpino:When you were an undergraduate student, what was your major?

Alvesson:I studied psychology, business administration, management, organization studies really, and then a few other subjects as well. Mainly psychology and then administration with the focus on org studies.

Scarpino:What was it about psychology that attracted your interest?

Alvesson:Well, I thought it was more interesting than it really was. It's a lot about people and psychological functioning, it's been a bit appealing, but then psychology can be a rather dry subject, very much focused on perceptions and quantitative studies and so on. I'm very much a qualitative person, I like to make interpretations and use judgment. I’m not so analytical or so strict in my academic approach.

Scarpino:In the United States, as I'm sure you know, a lot of the leadership scholarship is quantitative… a lot of psychologists and so on. You're not a quantitative scholar, why did you decide to go the qualitative route as opposed to the quantitative route?

Alvesson:Well, in my studies, in business administration, all the teachers were very qualitative. They were very negative about quantitative work, positivism and so on. I thought that that was at the university quite inspirational, that is that you do case studies. You understand the context, you go into situations, you try to understand what goes on here, how people really experience or perceive the situation and base their actions on their own constructions of reality. I thought that was inspiration and that fits me quite nicely as an approach.

Scarpino:Case studies were studies written by your professors or…?

Alvesson:Yeah, or if you look at the more influential social research, it tends to be qualitative or with more mild quantitative ingredients. I also thought that more philosophical and theoretical stuff was interesting. So, the approach is not so much experiments, not at all experiments or questionnaires or things like that, but more how to understand real life outside the lab or outside the questionnaire.

Scarpino:How do you do that? How do you understand real life outside the lab or the questionnaire?

Alvesson:Yeah, no, I mean you go out there, but then the same way we do research, typically interviews with people, not only managers or people who are supposed to be leaders, but also others. You try to have a much more rounded picture, and then also make observations of what goes on there and understand the context. And then you use also source critique. As a historian, it’s well known that a lot of material is a bit uncertain and misleading even. When you interview managers, of course you get the managerial story about the world. How great they are as leaders, etcetera. You need to balance that with other interviews, and best also observations. Plus, when you do an interview, it's very good to be prepared and have some background knowledge so you understand the context and know what questions to ask.

Scarpino:Good. Did you record these interviews or just take notes? How did you go about doing that?

Alvesson:It's a combination. I’ve done some empirical work, and I mainly then led research projects, and then my research assistants or my younger fellow researchers have done most of the empirical work. It's often a combination of some notetaking and some recordings, plus notes then from observations.

Scarpino:I'm going to remind anybody that uses this interview of the trajectory of your academic career. I know we've already mentioned this, but I want to use this to set it up. You earned your PhD in 1984, and you held several academic positions over the next few years. ’85 to ‘91 Concordia University Montreal.

Alvesson:Yeah, that was only for a semester really, 1984 or ‘85, I think.

Scarpino:Then Linköping University, located in Sweden.

Alvesson:Yeah.

Scarpino:Stockholm University.

Alvesson:Yes.

Scarpino:Then 1991 to 1994, you're a full professor, Department of Business Administration, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg Sweden. Then in 1994 you returned to Lund University where you remained for the rest of your career.

Alvesson:Yeah, well, I have a half-time position at University of Bath in UK as well. And  then I’m part-time only from my chair in Lund, in other words, a combined position a bit. I’ve a lot of these fractional appointments as well.

Scarpino:In Concordia University in Montreal, that was your first academic position?

Alvesson:Yeah, but it was only for one semester, so it hardly counts.

Scarpino:Why did you decide to go there?

Alvesson:Well, after my PhD… my PhD was called “Organisation Theory and Technocratic Consciousness.” That was a bit critical and outside the mainstream. For some time I had some difficulty in finding a position, but then I could have a temporary one at Concordia in Montreal.

Scarpino:You were willing to take a risk and work on this project that was outside of the body of mainstream scholarship in your field, right?

Alvesson:Yes.

Scarpino:Why were you willing to do that?

Alvesson:Well, why not?

Scarpino:(laughs) We all do things when we're young, but I mean…

Alvesson:I always felt that for me then autonomy, critical reflection, trying to say something that is a bit more original and make people think a bit differently

about issues is very important. I've always been a bit hesitant in doing what others are doing or base my work on or repeat the assumptions that everybody else seems to be into. I always like to have an original and a little bit more critical touch on things.

Scarpino:As a scholar, do you think of yourself as an iconoclast?

Alvesson:What's an iconoclast?

Scarpino:Somebody who goes against the mainstream.

Alvesson:Yeah, I’ve always been quite against conformism and obedience and mainstreaming and so on. For me, the academic heroes, they've always been a bit outside, or very much outside the mainstream.

Scarpino:Did you work outside the mainstream because it interested you or because you were looking for a way to separate yourself from everybody else?

Alvesson:Well, if I had a shrink, I would consult him or her on possible personality disorders explaining all this. (both laugh) But I always felt that, okay, you can do research based on various cognitive interests or knowledge-constitutive interests. That is that we use research then, social research then, to try to liberate ourselves from dominant mindsets, from institutions, ideologies, identity constructs that attempt to freeze institutions, people into prison-like arrangements. I always found that the idea of social science is not that we deliver recipes or objective versions of reality, that means that we can (inaudible). I think that we can use social science in order to get productive input to rethink who we are, what we do, what our institutions are standing for, and often prison-like elements in bureaucracies, in hierarchies, sometimes also markets and public sector arrangements. But with a lot of life, it’s very much about constraints. Some of these constraints are necessary. We need civilization; that calls for constraints. But often we live in a world that is over- regulated and tends to dominate us in rather unfortunate ways.

Scarpino:Obviously, society needs some constraints. We can't just kill each other. Did you see yourself as a person who was pushing against the constraints, the self-imposed constraints of your fellow scholars?

Alvesson:Well, it’s more a general issue, I think, that we have a lot of impact on us, or consumers for example, I mean the pressure from commercial forces to make us into consumers and then be very much dependent then on this supply of goods. We follow fashions, we don't want to be deviating from the norms, etcetera. We are living in an age of overconsumption, and it's not just coming from people's spontaneous needs. This stuff is orchestrated, regulated. We are very much controlled by commercial forces, for example. But in our working life, there are so many ideas of what you need to do so that people tend to be dwarfed or minimized as individuals. It's a cultivation of immaturity. If we look at the enlightenment ideal with Kant and have the courage to use your own judgment, use your intelligence fully, yeah, I think that's a great idea, and perhaps one could do better in this respect. Now, we are assumed to follow policies, regulations, various forces that are making us rather constrained.

Scarpino:You used the term cultivated immaturity. What do you mean by that?

Alvesson:Well, rather than use your own judgment, then you're supposed then to… okay, in organizations then, what are the policies, rules, procedures, the hierarchies, your own location in this division of labor, what are the norms, what are the recipes for how to think and act. All this kind of stuff tends to lead to the cultivation of immaturity. So, if you have a problem or an issue at work, okay, you try to deal with this based on your knowledge and judgment and talking to others without the policies or approach people senior up in the hierarchy, etcetera. And this tends to be overdone. I mean, sometimes it's motivated to, of course, if I can't access this situation, I need hierarchy to be involved, or I need experts or whatever, I need to consider policies, etcetera. But sometimes we tend to overdo this. So, there’s a mushrooming of everything, regulating people at work, but also in other spheres; as citizens, as consumers, as people trying to deal with a lot of situations, and we are over-regulated in many ways.

Scarpino:In Sweden, what is the source of this regulation?

Alvesson:I think there’s a multitude of sources. We are just finishing a book called well, actually tomorrow, this is the 15th of October, tomorrow's the 16th…

Scarpino:The book will be done tomorrow?

Alvesson:Yeah, we had a book launch last week, but the official publication date is tomorrow. It’s called The Art of Less. The idea is that in organizations in working life there is a surplus of policies, regulations, routines, expertise, meetings, branding, image management. You have large communication, HR, financial control, security teams, etcetera. This is then overdone, and there are three major reasons for this, I think. One is the legislation and too many lawyers. A lot of regulations, and we have law growth and then a lot of people profiting from all this. So, there's one source. The second is that there is a surplus of people produced as experts. With the mushrooming of higher education, you have a lot of people that are “experts” on absolutely everything. They are then solution mongers. And then with all this supply then you create demand for this. So, a lot of leadership and diversity management and well-being and identity regulations and security and dealing with diversity and gender issues and whatever. You have a lot of all this. Then all these people, professionals, they are supposed then to find jobs and solutions. And they tend to impose templates, regulations on others. Then with the mushrooming of experts, the experts they absolutely think, what do I know? Well, I know my own small expert sub-sub-sub-field, but in all other respects I need to go to the communication people, to my shrink, to my HR department, my manager, blah blah blah for almost everything. So, we this over-supply of expertise, then knowledge and expertise are built into our lives and that tends to make us a bit more disinclined then to act autonomously and take initiative. So, that's the second. Then based on all this, you have people that are rather nervous about doing things the wrong way. Sometimes with that, you call for more, we need more support, we need more instructions, regulations. In schools then, in higher education then, take some responsibility for yourself. No, you need to have everything clearly sorted out and deliveries of everything, and a lot of consumers. So, people become cultivated as consumers and as clients. With that, of course, you have strong fuel then for cultivated immaturity.

Scarpino:Particularly in the United States, our whole economy is based on that.

Alvesson:Yeah. A very large part of the labor force, there are things that are not always useful. Sometimes it's useless. Sometimes it's destructive.

Scarpino:Early in your career, what were your research interests?

Alvesson:After my PhD, there was a bit of a critical exposition about some ideas in organization studies. Then I took an interest in organizational culture. I thought anthropology was a bit appealing perhaps. Then I was doing research on organizations in terms of cultural assumptions, ideologies, meaning patterns, practices, following then from people's shared meanings; so what is rational and how should you do things? We were studying organizational culture.

Scarpino:How do people in a particular, say, corporate culture -- where do these shared meanings come from? How do they develop?

Alvesson:Yeah, well sometimes, it's like the context. If you go into a particular field, for historical reasons it developed in a specific way then. So, you may have pharmaceutical companies, there’s a combination of all different scientific groups and then commercial pressures, etcetera. And then of course we have a large machinery with factory-like arrangements, in combination then to people coming up with a good idea perhaps. So that tends to lead to a particular culture. It's often historical. It’s always to some extent historical. Sometimes history can move quite quickly, as you know, the context, the national culture. Sometimes you have internal combinations of people, groups, sometimes important leaders, particularly if they founded the company themselves if they continue as a CEO, like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, I guess. In Sweden, Ikea's founder also had a very strong influence on the company. He started it. He worked there for 50 years, very active and a strong personality. Of course, that creates some impact. But often it's a combination of a lot of different forces. Sometimes leadership is important, sometimes it's less so.

Scarpino:Under what circumstances would leadership be less so, less important?

Alvesson:Well, in most cases then, there’s historical patterns, a lot of people there that practice historic conventions. And then if you have a CEO then they can't do that much in most cases because it's culturally ingrained. There's an old cliché:  Come up with a new strategy, but then it’s said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. It's sometimes very difficult to accomplish that much. In order to make a clear difference, you need to have the right situation. Often it's a crisis or there’s a unique opportunity for growth or innovation. Or if you have stayed there for a very long time then you are powerful so you can get your own folks in and then gradually change it. Then leadership makes a difference. But it's relatively rare, I would say, apart from in startups and in some companies where you have a big crisis or, as I said, innovation opportunities so it really can change a bit. But very often it's more like this is how it works, and there are lot of sanctions if you deviate too much from all this. People become suspicious if you have an original idea and if you have total control of the company. And most CEOs of course they are very dependent on everybody else assessing them and being certain that they seem to be doing things as they should do. Unless you kind of own the company or in other ways have a lot of control over it.

Scarpino:Do you think that, generally speaking, corporate culture encourages conformity rather than the kind of thinking you're advocating?

Alvesson:I think that the definition of culture is that we tend to be conformists. Of course, then you may have different ingredients. You have a culture where you should show your individuality, etcetera. But often that is also constrained in different ways. So, one thing is to be an original person, another thing is to be a deviant or be crazy.

Scarpino:Right.

Alvesson:Of course, cultures can vary, be very conformist or be less conformist. But I think that there's always an element of shared norms, shared meaning, shared understanding of a view of what is kind of reasonable and not too crazy to do.

Scarpino:You took this brief appointment at Concordia, and then you went back to Sweden and took a position at Linköping?

Alvesson:Linköping, pure Swedish.

Scarpino:Okay, say it again?

Alvesson:Linköping.

Scarpino:Okay, why did you go back there, or to Sweden?

Alvesson:The position in Concordia was a very temporary one. It was only to get some money, and I worked there for a semester. Then, well the position that I managed to get in Linköping was very good because it was only about fifty hours of teaching per year, and part of that could be done in PhD supervision, etcetera. It was one of relatively few luxury positions that were available at that time that you could have for six years. And that was fantastic, you can do what you want basically and limited teaching on more of a senior level. So that's very good.

Scarpino:For a person who is so relatively junior in his field, that gave you a lot of time to pursue research and so on and so forth.

Alvesson:Yeah. I published quite a lot, and that may be because I'm a great genius, but I think it's more to do with I had plenty of time. I probably spend most of my academic years… I probably spend 90% on research, 10% on teaching and admin. But I work quite a large number of hours as well, so it helped a bit.

Scarpino:Early in your career, what kinds of research interests were you pursuing?

Alvesson:I started based on Frankfurt School critical theory. I thought that that was really… and this idea that you use knowledge for emancipation. That you look critically at phenomena, at truths, ideas and see if something is problematic with this that may be quite constraining. Then you critically explore this and point at other meanings and possibilities. I've always been interested in that, but it's a very broad framework idea. Then sometime I did a study of an IT consulting firm, and at the time knowledge-intensive companies, knowledge in organizations was a very hot topic. By chance, I studied this IT consulting firm, and then I did my book… it was a case study, 350 pages or something like that of one company. Normally it's very hard to get readership for that, but I called it Management of Knowledge-Intensive Firms. There was a huge interest because it was very timely. It was a good study as well, rather lively and interesting and so on. Then I did work on organizational culture, but I was also doing work on knowledge, knowledge-intensive companies and the meaning of knowledge, etcetera. Then when I was doing this in-depth research of a company, then all kinds of interesting topics appeared. So I thought leadership is one element of all this that was interesting to study, the meaning of knowledge and also how you can sell your product if you're into consulting. I was interested in rhetoric and persuasion and image issues and so on. I wrote a number of articles based on these topics.

Scarpino:Knowledge-intensive companies, such as?

Alvesson:IT consultancies, other consultancy firms, the entire professional service sector, universities, advertising agencies, newspapers, the editorial part of newspapers, etcetera. So, these organizations where a large and crucial part of all employees are supposed to be well educated and use brain power to produce results. Sometimes you make discrepancies between white collar, blue collar, pink collar, that’s service work.

Scarpino:Oh, I didn’t know that.

Alvesson:And then gold color. Gold color are the people that are supposed to be a bit more well educated, brainy, use their intellectual resources, knowledge.

Scarpino:The term for that is?

Alvesson:Gold color. You have the four colors; blue, white, pink and gold that you summarize part of what goes in the labor market.

Scarpino:Blue is blue collar.

Alvesson:Manufacturing work.

Scarpino:White is white collar.

Alvesson:Yes.

Scarpino:Pink…

Alvesson:Pink, that's more routine service work, hotel, restaurants.

Scarpino:And the final one is?

Alvesson:Gold color.

Scarpino:Who are these people?

Alvesson:Well, it's consultants, university teachers, lawyers, physicians, other groups that are somehow seen as not elite but clearly above average and are supposed to use their knowledge as the key resource, not necessarily their smile or helpfulness, but making…

Scarpino:And you were doing consulting work?

Alvesson:No, not much. No, I’ve not really done it. I mean minor assignments but…

Scarpino:Let's talk about leadership. So, a basic question:  How do you define or explain leadership? What is it?

Alvesson:I see it as very much management or meaning, how people from a temporary perceived superior position tend to exercise systematic influence on others in terms of meanings, world views, identity constructions, beliefs and other things. It's very much how you influence how people think, feel, prioritize, etcetera, not about regulating behavior or counting performances or something like that, but very much influencing meaning. We have this element of voluntarism, so it works by people accepting the messages, the ideas and then taking them on board. They influence the meanings and not specific behaviors.

Scarpino:What does a leader do to get people to accept?

Alvesson:Well, you can be a good role model, you do certain things and people find out. That's kind of impressive, I'm persuaded by that. You often use communication, talk in a particular way that people are influenced by. You tell stories, examples, you frame issues in specific ways, so that's seen as appealing and people are convinced and then it tends to influence their actions, values, priorities, how the world looks like, how we should understand then the objectives, rules, procedures, gender, diversity issues, quality related to customers, whatever. So it's more like the world view, the meaning systems that are being focused.

Scarpino:As institutions get larger, I mean it's one thing if you have a family business and everybody knows everybody and they know the boss and so on. But think about Volvo or General Motors or some companies like that, Deutsche Bank. How does that work as the institutions get larger?

Alvesson:I think that we talk more and more about leadership.

Scarpino:About what?

Alvesson:Leadership.

Scarpino:Okay.

Alvesson:But I do think we may practice it less and less. Because all these large organizations, it's so much about structure, performance, measurement, various forms of structural control that is taking over. In that sense, it's less about leadership than management. But still, how do we understand and relate to all this? One thing is then some free space for structures, they don't control everything. And even if you have performance measures, then you can deal with them in different ways. Then the meanings, the understanding of all this still plays a role because there's free space there for doing leadership. You take care of people and then you influence them in different ways. But then also how you kind of navigate or how do you work with structure. That's also very much on how you understand these elements. Sometimes people are very much into following structures mechanically. In other cases, you can say, “Okay, we skip that.” We interpret this. We just resist or we avoid all this. So, still there is space there for people doing leadership in different ways, partly to make procedures and performance measurements and so on run a bit more smoothly. Sometimes you have to use the oil in order to maneuver around. Sometimes managerial will work, priorities and then behaviors that they support. But sometimes you can influence people's mindsets, the meaning, so that they act.

Scarpino:How do you do that?

Alvesson:Well, you talk with them in different ways. “Here we have a problem, an issue. Top management wants to do that, that and that. Now, between you and me, we perhaps should park this issue and prioritize this.” Even if you have instructions, directives or measurements where everybody to some extent needs to follow that because it’s fast, it’s more convenient perhaps to do that and that. So, you can influence people in various social settings, then getting them to understand what this is all about. I have one example. I heard one person, he said, “New CEO, and of course CEOs often talk like other CEOs, ‘this is our vision and blah blah blah.’ Nobody cares so much.’” But they said one thing that the person that I spoke to was impressed by. And they said, “We spend an enormous amount of time in meetings. I think that you should only participate in, come to, or stay in meetings where you find this meaningful. If it's not meaningful You should leave.” So, that's like one intervention that you can do when you do leadership. And of course there are various problems perhaps on the local level, but they should sort it out, the local manager, the middle manager. “Okay, I understand that you don't see this as particularly valuable for you, but still it would be very good if you stay a bit longer in certain meetings, because then you can perhaps add something or know how others are thinking, etcetera.” You can see that leadership is here being played out. So, the top manager, “Okay, don't spend too much time in meetings that are unproductive.” We know that a lot of people spend a very large part of their working life in unproductive meaningless meetings. So, there you can try to reduce that time significantly. But then there may be problems at other levels, and then you may equal that intervention or you may perhaps say that we should not overdo non-meetings either. So, we need to find a balance here. And then you can try to motivate people, “We need you there because it's good for general morale. There are some elements of bonding here. If you are sure that this is meaningless and it's frustrating, please don't come, or leave at a certain point. That's fine, but still you need to take some responsibility, not only for your own work but also for the unit. Therefore, you should come perhaps a bit more frequently.” Those are different examples of leadership that people can do. It is very different from here where you have formal management where you regulate this, or you strike people, “You should do this or you should not do this.” So, this is more encouragement for people to think through what they are doing, and then the influencing at the end of the day it's up to the people that are subordinates to make their own decisions, use their judgement. But you can influence them in different ways as managers. And that probably needs to be played out also in large organizations in different ways.

Scarpino:I started this off by naming some companies, like Volvo and Deutsche Bank and so on, but how would the kinds of things you've been talking about apply to government?

Alvesson:I think that you could apply the same principles there. Of course there are a lot of laws, regulations, etcetera. Perhaps you should not overdo this at all costs at all times, but still use your judgment and sometimes try to be a bit more flexible and so on. Most organizations try to do that. There are some studies indicating that if people follow all rules and regulations and all procedures, then it's like sabotaging an organization. There is always some space there for doing things a bit more flexibly. But that can be increased. And there are some times you can say, “Okay now we are working with this, these are the laws and regulations, you need to follow them.” And then at the end of the day you should also balance that with ideas of what is meaningful work, what leads to a positive outcome in terms of whatever you are doing. Then you can as a leader try to balance doing everything formally correct versus doing things that according to you and your perhaps colleagues, or even the managers’ assessment, would be seen as valuable for creating value then for taxpayers or for consumers or patients or police, crime victims or whatever you're supposed to deal with.

Scarpino:I asked you about leadership. How would you define or explain management?

Alvesson:It's an overlap. Sometimes it's difficult to tell exactly what is what. They tend sometimes to overlap, but it's not the same thing. Management is more about behavior, procedures, outputs, it's more like the external side of organizations. Leadership are interested in how do people think, how do they feel, how do they relate to reality? Management is more what do they do? What did they accomplish? So, it's more behavior and outputs that tends to be the focus there. Sometimes you have situations, do I do leadership here or do I do management? Imagine that you are in the retail industry and you see that your salespeople in the supermarket look a bit grumpy, unhappy. You can understand that. Then okay, if you are a manager, “We need to have people behaving or looking less grumpy. Okay, here are some instructions. Say hello to everybody, ask them how their day was, etcetera. Try to smile at least once for every customer.” So, you can have instructions there. Then you can have people then making random inspections and see how it works, and the supervisor can say, “Now you should look more happy and so on, so be happy.” But that's management.

Scarpino:Right.

Alvesson:Then leadership can be that, okay, you try to influence their view. “I understand that you're sometimes a bit tired. Some people, they come there and so on, but think about the situation. They may have ended their working day and they're very tired and there are queues and so on. Imagine their situation and then think that they are paying your wage. If they are happy, then the company will improve, and it's not only the taxpayers, we can also (inaudible) a bit better and so on. So think about your customer as a king or queen and consider their situation, and try to be as happy or satisfying or positive as possible, or try to think about how you would like to be treated when you go to a supermarket market and then try to do the same.” So, here it’s not like fixed instructions. It's more kind of imaginary that you try to portray and then people are good to get on board with that. So that would mean leadership then, inspirational talk, good examples, blah blah blah, while managers would be a bit more structured, behaviorally oriented.

Scarpino:How do you understand the relationship between leadership and management? How do they go together?

Alvesson:Sometimes they are working in tandem and sometimes they can be a bit contradictory. I think that the challenge is often then to make them co-exist in a kind of nice way. If you have a lot of all these mechanics how to make people behave, then the space is more limited for leadership because people probably can't accept both messages, so they tend to be a bit contradictory. In other situations you have there, when you think about budget issues or people that are very unhappy, customers or collaborators that are kind of in a conflict situation, then you probably need to do both. We need to think about how can we kind of lead with this situation, and what should we do very specifically? In that case, you have tandem or overlapping logics, and sometimes if you follow people a couple of hours, you see this is clear leadership, or this is clear management, and sometimes it’s a combination.

Scarpino:As part of your research, have you ever had circumstances where you followed people to see how they functioned as leaders or managers?

Alvesson:Yeah. I think that good research, then you make observations, not just listening to their talk, but what are they doing? In some cases then you can ask, of course, subordinates how they perceive the managers, and then you get some indirect indicators of what they actually do. Surprising there is that when people ask what you do, there's a lot of leadership talk. When you observe them, less of that. More admin.

Scarpino:Do you consider yourself to be a leader?

Alvesson:No, not really in the sense that I… I mean I work with people, but there's often a combination, and it's more like egalitarian relationships. I tend to be a bit more senior than others, so in that sense I probably define projects or come up with ideas a bit more than others. In that sense, it's often a bit of an asymmetrical relationship, but it's often one or two co-authors that are involved. So, it's not so much of that there. I’ve always been kind of avoiding admin positions. But sometimes then I used to be the senior person in the research group, then I probably took more initiatives and influenced people a bit more than others. Now, I often work also on a more kind of broader scale, selling my books and chronicles, and then I give a lot of speeches also for large audiences, and sometimes people are influenced by all this.

Scarpino:I've looked at your resume and everything, but when you go out and give a speech, is it to corporate people or not-for-profit people or government people, or who comes to listen? Who are you speaking to?

Alvesson:It's a combination. More frequently it's the public sector than companies, but it may be an organization that is interested in something. It can be all managers in a municipality. In a month, I’m going to give a talk for the Swedish Defense Ministry. Sometimes there are ministries, sometimes there are professional groups, physicians. They often like what I say because I’m broadly on their side in the sense that we need to give a bit more space for judgement, and university people and physicians often agree with this. So, there are a lot of different groups.

Scarpino:Defense Ministry, that's the military in Sweden, right?

Alvesson:Yes.

Scarpino:I have a little bit of experience with the military. That's generally thought of as a hierarchical organization. Do you have to modify your delivery when you are talking to people who represent hierarchical organizations?

Alvesson:Not much. I tend to say certain things that I think are of general relevance; “think for yourself.” Of course, then thinking can mean different things. If you are a senior university professor, then I think that you normally should not accept any constraints. But if you are in a situation where you’re supposed to act much more quickly, decisively, and needs to be coordinated, then of course “think for yourself” is within that context. But still there, there’s a lot of things that people could imagine doing differently. Even if you don't speak up that much to your senior officers, sometimes there are situations where this is definitely motivated to do that. We have one example, actually. President Adedo (spelling?) used to be in the Armed Forces, an officer, and then he said that he wrote a report every week to his commanding officer. And after some time, he started to think, is anybody reading this? And then they took a picture of him only in his underwear and he put it into the report under with the assumption that if the commanding officer would read it, he would detect this and probably come up with some remark about this. But he didn't. So, they decided then to stop writing the report. Did anything happen? No. That's an example that also in the military you sometimes can think through issues a bit more and take your own initiatives or suggest things or check certain issues. So, out there in the field when you are fighting the enemy, I think that that's one situation. But 95% of the time is spent in other types of situations, and they probably can do things quite differently than you normally do.

Scarpino:You've written about reflexive leadership. Can you explain what that is? And then I'll have a follow-up question, but let's start with what is it?

Alvesson:For me, reflexivity is a key element. That means that you try to think more broadly and in a more all-sided way about what you're doing in your organization and your institutions. And then, you are not kind of stuck in one model or one world view, but you try to challenge that; I could think like that; I can also think in opposite ways. Then you have often some alternative ways of approaching an issue, or letting an issue be. That's kind of reflexivity. When it comes to leadership then a lot of people like these models, transformational or ethical, or often they are made up with hooray words. It sounds really good and, of course, yes, fine then it must lead to good outcomes. Not my cup of tea. I think that you really need to think through what you are doing a bit more on a basic level. Reflexivity means that you consider these leadership ideals. Are there drawbacks with this? Are there alternatives to leadership? So that's reflexivity. And sometimes a well-functioning organization can include leadership, it can include management, it can include use of power. Sometimes you kick ass or you stare people in the eye, like Steve Jobs, people who are resistant. Sometimes you skip leadership. This is not a site where you need to have that much leadership. You may rely on your horizontal relations, so the peer group, the team, the profession or network relationship or people just being autonomous, self-governing, that may solve a lot of problems. And then reflexivity means that you consider the various options, and then you make wise decisions after having considered a range of different possibilities here.

Scarpino:You mentioned Steve Jobs a few times. He clearly was an innovator, but do you think that people like him or others who create organizations, who create businesses, do they end up also creating institutions where the kind of initiative that they showed isn't really welcome anymore? They want conformists and not people who are just doing their own thing.

Alvesson:Yeah, and I guess that Jobs wanted a lot of conformists working with him also. So, you have a lot of innovation, but also elements where you have a lot of discipline and obedience, subordination, etcetera. He was not a very democratic person. I think that a lot of people would like to have these recipes, these templates for good management, good leadership. What is good leadership? Well, it depends. It very much depends. You can have some very broad and vague -- they are ethical, they are considerate, they are intellectual, inspiration and so on. But in practice then, recipes don't work. If you take Jobs, for example, the world's worst manager or the world's worst leader in terms of how he was addressing people and so on. But at same time, he was the twentieth century most successful entrepreneur and successful CEO. But, I mean, lessons from Steve Jobs, yeah, I mean you can yell and give people a kick in the butt even if they’ve worked extremely hard and done their best and so on. So that was probably not something that most people should take seriously. But it probably worked for him because he set very high standards. And in that context, with these kind of people, the standing of Apple, then it may have worked nicely there. But then the idea that this is something that we could just export to everybody, it doesn't work like that. We need to think about the situation and then adapt much more, and then be varied and sometimes the method of doing the right leadership; sometimes the best thing is not to do leadership.

Scarpino:If you're not doing leadership, what do you do? 

Alvesson:Sorry?

Scarpino:If you're not doing leadership, what do you do?

Alvesson:Well, sometimes you don't have to do anything. You can rely on people to use their judgment. Take a university; do we need much leadership at a university? We have certain issues in certain respects. I never benefited from people trying to do something (inaudible) leadership. I think the less of that is good, at least for people like myself, that is very self-going. I probably know more about what to do, and to do good teaching and to do good research, than my deans or vice rectors and so on. A lot of people are self-going and qualified, etcetera. And then I think that the rule should be: let it be. Not so many initiatives or procedures or admin or things like that. If it works nicely, the teaching seems to be done well, research works well, let it be.

Scarpino:In 2025, I think it's safe to say that there's a large and growing body of scholarship on leadership. What has come out in Europe, United States, Canada in the last twenty years has just exploded. We talked about reflexive leadership, and I'm going to put a couple of examples in here. “Leadership studies: from procedure and abstraction to reflexivity and situation,” which you put in Leadership Quarterly, Volume 7, Issue 4, 1966. You co-authored a book with Martin Blom and Stefan Sveningsson, which on your CV is listed as forthcoming. Both of these are your colleagues at Lund University, is that right? 

Alvesson:Yes.

Scarpino:Okay. And then you published “Reflexive Leadership” in 1993. You've been talking about reflexive leadership. The question is, what does reflexive leadership add to what scholars have already written about leadership?

Alvesson:I think it's a much more well-rounded picture. So we are not just into the leadership, you think about alternatives. For me, reflexivity is that you are not caught by one recipe or one vocabulary. In order to understand leadership, you probably need to see the limitations of this and consider alternatives, and also the dangers with leadership. With almost everything, there's a problem if you are kind of overdoing it, whether one-sidedly oriented with a particular line of reasoning or a particular vocabulary. We need all the time then to be aware of the drawbacks or the negative hidden side of stuff. Leadership is not necessarily only positive even you define it in these fantastic positive ways that you have authentic people that are transformative and ethical and so on. You tend to then hide contradictions, problems, issues. Reflexivity means that you are careful about raw words and templates that promise golden sunshine. There’s a lot of stuff (inaudible) they all talk about toxic leadership, but I think that's peculiar. You have all the good leadership stuff and then you have toxic or unethical or pseudo transformational or whatever. But then in most cases then when people try to lead others, it's something in between. It's a bit more messy. It's a bit more inconsistent, contradictory. People may not necessarily be on board. The supposed followers may not see themselves as followers, necessarily. And then you have a lot of problems around all this. A bit more realistic, open-minded, multi-dimensional view on leadership is what I think that we can offer to all the stuff that is already there.

Scarpino:You train students, some of whom go on to leadership positions. Is that right? 

Alvesson:Yes.

Scarpino:What do you hope your students are going to take away from the work they did with you?

Alvesson:Just think more independently in relationship to all the noise that even enters the situation for many people. Because a lot of people are into self-serving bias or they’re into grandiose fantasies about themselves. What I like is to be much more realistic about what's happening in working life in organizations. A lot of leadership tends to be these idealized better-than-real-life narratives around what goes on there. Then okay, what what's happening here, what are we doing, how can we do this in a better way? Can we solve problems through leadership? Sometimes yes. Can we solve them in other ways? Sometimes we can. Then if you access a broader repertoire or toolkit or ways of thinking about organizational issues, then I think that they can do a better job than if they are full of leadership, or management, or bureaucracy or whatever they are very much up to.

Scarpino:As you look back on particularly the early part of your career, when did you find your research interests tending toward leadership? Because you didn't start out there.

Alvesson:No, I did not. I'm also interested in method, qualitative, but it’s not quantitative method. It's, how do we find out about the real world? For me, that's you go out and ask intelligent questions and then you do good interviews, etcetera. There’s a lot of people that do questionnaires. I looked at some questionnaires and I thought that this can't work. So, I started to write a bit about method stuff. But then we were doing one of these in-depth studies of a company and we asked very briefly, kind of Readers Digest version of it, “What do you do, manager?” “I do leadership,” was the response. “Fine, what does that mean?” “It means what are the values, visions, overall issues. I don't do micro-management,” blah blah blah. And then, “Okay, what do you do in practice?” Answer is, “I sit in meetings.” We said, “Okay, what happens there?” “Well, it's a lot of issues, budgets, infrastructure, IT systems, HR issues, the location of offices, etcetera. Listening to senior managers talking.” “Okay, what about the leadership then?” “Well, I don't have much time for that.” I started to become interested in this leadership. Of course, we also have other examples. On the positive, we have where the manager is, according to concept, socially integrative leadership when I did a study of an IT consulting firm, and here the subsidiary managers were managing groups of 30 or 40 people. They saw themself as very much integrating groups. Because in consulting they're out there working with clients and so on, so the trick is very much to create some loyalty and community feeling to compensate for them being out there and having few connections. So, then they were much into knowing people, to kind of bonding with organized social activities, having meetings in a lovely way, telling nice stories, etcetera. I was a bit interested in that as well, and then it continued. I've done a lot of work on leadership.

Scarpino:Do you remember when, or under what circumstances, you began to really think about the significance of leaders and leadership?

Alvesson:It's not like a decisive moment. I mean this is on the agenda if you are a lot of people but particularly perhaps if you are in a management school kind of context. We do studies of stuff, then it often pops up. I’ve always felt that this is one element. I have a broad repertoire of interest. I studied power, identity issues, change, organizational cultures. I’ve also done some studies on gender, functional stupidity and ignorance, willful ignorance in organizations and basic irrationalities. I have a large number of interests. Then the kind of leadership is interesting here where you can connect it to different themes. So sometimes being a manager, it's boring work sometimes, you do a lot of admin. But then with leadership, you feel great about things, it's important and it's inspirational, it's sexy. So you can combine the leadership and identity, or you can consider that sometimes people are up in the blue with a lot of wishful thinking about issues. Organizations, they are supposedly full of strategies and quality improvement and leadership development and a lot of other things which sometimes can be a bit disconnected from real life. I wrote a book, published a book a few years ago called The Triumph of Emptiness.

Scarpino:Yes.

Alvesson:It's very much that we try to exaggerate visions, strategies on a corporate level, also on a society level, with “Make America Great Again.” I find it as very embarrassing, but we're all into this in various ways. (Inaudible) grandiosity, identity boasting and leadership may be part of all this.

Scarpino:As long as you brought it up, is the whole “Make America Great,” we're talking about President Trump, just so in 20 years people know what we're talking about here.

Alvesson:Yeah, yeah.

Scarpino:Donald Trump, President of the United States. Do you think that the campaign organized around “Make America Great Again” represents leadership or something else?

Alvesson:Leadership is almost everything. It’s a mixed blessing. It can be used for better or for worse purposes. Some of the elements around all this that Trump is a fantastic person, is greater than life, is so inspirational and good, and should be worshipped and so on by people, yeah, I mean that's part of sometimes political leadership and sometimes also entrepreneurial leadership. If they are extremely successful, then there's a cult around the person. Cultish leadership is also a form of leadership. I guess that it's very much a matter of trying to build an image and self-understanding of the person as a real leader. This is a story you know that American presidents in the past were seen as administrators.

Scarpino:For a good part of our history they were, you're right.

Alvesson:Precisely. And still the administration, the Biden administration and blah blah blah. But then over time of course that changed a bit, the (inaudible) I guess and so on.

Scarpino:Do you think image Is an important part of leadership?

Alvesson:Yeah.

Scarpino:In what way?

Alvesson:Well, it depends a bit on the distance. Often leadership is seen as something very general, but it's one situation. If you have a group of people around you that you interact with all the time, so you lead or participate in a work group, a project group or small department or whatever, that's a very different situation than if you are a president or a general or whatever where a lot of the work is done through distant influencing.

Scarpino:Do you think that somebody who strives to be a successful leader, or I'll say an effective leader, that part of their job is to generate an image of effective or successful leadership.

Alvesson:Yep. Sometimes you have situations where it's very clear what you accomplish and so on, and people can assess you. They see what you do and how. Also, the results may be more clear-cut. That's one situation. In another situation, it's much more ambiguous, much more uncertain, and people don't know (inaudible) for public talks or what the spin doctors are up to, or you manage media. So, the media appearance is more important than what you really do. Of course, the discrepancy can be huge. But over time, then we have more and more focus from people being closer then to who they’re supposed to influence, and now it's much more indirect and here image work probably makes a difference.

Scarpino:Do you think, and not just in the United States, I mean all over the world, that the management of image and spin - you used the term spin doctor - has made it harder to be an effective leader?

Alvesson:Well, I think sometimes it can make it easier. I think that in Trump's case that it made it easier. I mean, in Europe everybody is extremely negative, not everybody, but almost everybody is extremely negative to Trump. But then of course also how media here reports his doings. He is on the target list for lying and exaggerations and being a bully. So, it’s not like the image that’s being conveyed here; in United States it’s probably a bit more mixed. But then of course, with different groups it works in different ways. But then leadership, I mean one element is how do you actually influence people and produce effects? The other is how you can create an image and then an emotional response to the person, because it's very different than if you are a head of a hospital clinic and you're supposed to accomplish something. If you are into politics, you’re doing that as well, but your success criteria is if you can persuade, manipulate the voters.

Scarpino:Mm-hmm.

Alvesson:It's very different situations and, of course, then image and other indirect indicators or something, they are being played out in different ways.

Scarpino:I want to ask you a little bit about leadership training, and I'm going to put a little bit here on the record. I'm sure this is stuff you already know, but this isn't for you, this is for context. According to Google, in 2018 there were 1,562 leadership training programs in the United States. Now they all aren't equal or whatever; 1,038 were private institutions, 488 were public institutions. In 2022, there were 51 leadership programs offered online in the United States by 33 universities. Most were offering a master's degree. There are at least 72, according to Google, United Kingdom universities that offer master's degrees in what they call educational leadership. Now, nobody can be familiar with all these programs. I mean, you have a towering reputation in your field and I'm pretty sure you don't have a grasp of every single one of these programs. But based upon your scholarly publications and decades of being a scholar, what do you think leadership programs should be offering their students? And I'm not really asking you to critique any particular program, but if you could be, you know, king of leadership training for a week, what would you be telling the programs they should be offering their students?

Alvesson:I think one should try to broaden the topic a bit, because often it's singled out as leadership, and then the prototypical case, leader and subordinates or followers. It's as if it's a closed system. So, there’s leadership and then this has an effect. But of course, in real life you are always into a more complicated social organization situation where constraints are enormous on most managers, and expectations, demands, duties, what is institutionalized. So I think one should, A, try to broaden their perspective a bit more, so what's happening here but understand that a lot of leadership issues are not only about leadership. So broaden the perspective. And then also think about who actually is doing the influencing work here. Of course, you can have informal leadership or leadership from bottom up, etcetera. But often it tends to be acknowledged, but minimized in terms of understanding. So try to see what's happening here in terms of the influencing processes in a more multi-dimensional way. Sometimes subordinates need their managers, and then managers are dependent on subordinates, particularly when it comes to leadership. Managers can force them to do certain things perhaps, but when it comes to leadership they need to be on board. And then you are very dependent on them accepting the message. It's often then more like a negotiation or sensitivity or feedback there. I think that's the second key point. Then the third element here is find out what goes on, what really happens here. 

Scarpino:You mean in the real world after school is over?

Alvesson:In the real world, yeah. They learn from case studies or from your own observations, or record some interactions and then try to learn much more from this real life episode or near real life situations. That's a bit different then from Gandhi's leadership or Nelson Mandela's leadership, because that's not relevant for most people. Or what’s the result when you send around questionnaires asking people about is the manager ethical and then are you happy with his or her work. I mean a lot of that is not particularly relevant to understanding the real world. And I think that one should be very interested in that.

Scarpino:You teach leadership to students. Do you think case studies are an effective way to teach about leadership?

Alvesson:Yeah. We tend to use more research papers that are not… I mean sometimes case studies, they are very pedagogical in the sense that they should be set up to provide a particular learning experience. If there are case studies that are relatively open and show some of the complexities so it's not like guidance to a particular way, then I think that they could be done. But they also need to be written in such a way so that people are stimulated to think about contradictions, dilemmas, inconsistencies.

Scarpino:That's kind of where I was headed with this. I'm not even going to pretend that I know what goes on in every leadership training program, but you mentioned contradictions and inconsistencies. Do you think students who are in these programs should learn about that the world they're going to enter is full of contradictions and inconsistencies? But how would you teach that?

Alvesson:Well, you show that through good research, and a lot of research is not particularly good. If I would say something bragging in my case, it's that we have good access. We have done these in-depth studies with recordings or interactions. We’ve done interviews with people involved as managers and subordinates, etcetera. I think that's a bit more kind of realistic. Sometimes also people report experiences to me. I got one interesting remark. Somebody was a Master of Engineering student. He started to work for a rather large internationally successful company. And then he thought everything was fantastic about this firm, including there should be world-class leadership there. He started then and didn’t see any signs of that at all, to coach him. All the successful managers seemed to be spending their time in meetings with other managers, but then they cultivated an image of themselves as real leadership oracles when they were talking about all this. But for him it was like a bizarre real world. A lot of talk about leadership, but very little that you could experience or perceive yourself.

Scarpino:They created a closed system in which they reinforced a particular version or understanding of what leadership was all about. 

Alvesson:Yeah.

Scarpino:Created and self-reinforced.

Alvesson:Yeah, and sometimes you have a sense that my values are fine, I kind of know this model, I don't interfere. I mean you never see them. You can frame everything in positive ways. So, like my leadership is based on trust in my very competent co-workers. Well, he is never there. He's always cultivating his relationship with senior people and customers and so on, which may be fine or not. But it's not so much about the leadership, but still you can somehow frame this as trustful or decentralized or whatever leadership perhaps. There's a lot of space then for coming up with ideas and making claims that are not necessarily there.

Scarpino:If you think about what makes a leader effective or what makes a leader successful, where does trust fit into that equation?

Alvesson:Well, of course, you need to have some positive sentiments to your leader, and trust is presumably one ingredient in all this. At the same way, I don't know if successful leaders like Hitler and Mussolini and Mao Zedong or others, that people have full trust in them. Sometimes there are a bit more complicated dynamics going on. Sometimes we have other elements than pure or full trust. So, some level of trust is probably needed. I think if a place should run really well, then not overdo the trust. Some suspicion is probably also motivating. And that can be in relationship to motives or drivers, but it can also be in the context of the belief that the manager is perhaps a good person, but he or she doesn't know everything. You cannot have full trust in the person, because in that case then you just say “oh I don't have to think for myself or take initiatives.” It's very good to have some critical thinking also about all this. So then, yeah, trust is important, I guess, by definition, but then there are a lot of complexities around this, as with all good things in life.

Scarpino:I'm actually going to come back to the bad people probably tomorrow, but you mentioned some bad people, you know, Hitler, Mao, people who were really ruthless in various ways. How do you account for people like that or leaders like that in the way you understand leadership?

Alvesson:Well, there are a lot of elements involved in all this, of course. In many cases you have very strong group thinking, we against them, basic human orientation is probably social paranoia. They may threaten us. And then if you like to unite people and have them forcefully acting, then you play on the paranoia, the capitalists, the communists, the Germans, the Russians, the Ukrainians. You play on people's eagerness and inclination to social paranoia.

Scarpino:I'm going to ask you a couple more questions and we'll wrap up. In order to provide some context, one of the people you suggested I talk to was Thomas Fisher.

Alvesson:Yep.

Scarpino:Okay, and I did that. I had a nice chat with him on Zoom and he was very helpful. He told me that he sees two important interrelated themes in your scholarship. Now, there's more, but I mean, these are the two that he wanted to talk about first. He said those themes are divergence and convergence. Does that sound like you?

Alvesson:Yeah, no, yeah. I think so, I wonder exactly what he means.

Scarpino:Just for context here, he's a professor at University of Liverpool. He’s a specialist in environmental assessment.

Alvesson:No, no, this is Thomas Fisher. He works in Geneva and…

Scarpino:Oh, wrong guy, okay.

Alvesson:I think so, and I'm not certain about convergence and divergence.

Scarpino:Alright, well the Thomas Fisher that I talked to, you gave me his email address.

Alvesson:It must be right, I guess.

Scarpino:The guy I talked to is the one you recommended.

Alvesson:Yeah.

Scarpino:Anyway, I mean, that's his assessment. But I always ask people like him when I talk to them: If you were going to interview you, what would you want to know? And he told me that if he were interviewing you, he would ask you how you came up with those insights. It seemed really important to him, so maybe what he's trying to say about your scholarship isn't the way you look at it, but that was the question he said he would ask you if he were sitting here instead of me.

Alvesson:Yeah, well, I tend to read relatively broadly. I'm a bit curious, I guess. I'm bored with stuff after some time. A lot of people have become specialists. And here there's a lot of people spending their entire working life on leadership. I wouldn't do that. I think that becomes a bit constraining. To get ideas you need to have some wider, more varied interests and orientations. But you can't be too scattered either. So, you need to diverge sometimes and sometimes you converge. I guess that I have a number of research programs, and sometimes they are more active and sometimes they are a bit more in the background. But then I may come back to that when there is something that pops up or you have an interaction with people or you start to think about the issues and then it's more on the table, you work with that a bit more actively. I also like to play around with words and then see if I can come up with something that is a bit different. Functional stupidity is probably the most successful concept that I’ve coined.

Scarpino:I'm going to bring this up again tomorrow, but what is functional stupidity? How do you define that?

Alvesson:It means that you tend to be relatively rational and knowledgeable and smart and acceptable for the environment, but that's because you are an expert or tend to think within a limited space. So, you tend to take assumptions for granted, you have a silo and then you work very much within that. And then people that you interact with, they share more or less your own mental or cognitive box. And within that everything is fine. So, it's like functional, well-adapted to considerations and constraints and so on. But if you think a bit more broadly then it becomes stupid. So functional stupidity is a form of learned, socially prescribed form of limited thinking within the box. So you may have an ideology and then you are totally mesmerized by this. You have division of labor and this is my kind of work area. I work only within this and I concentrate here, and then I don't consider really does this makes sense before or after my part of the labor process. Or this is a fashion and it's fantastic, good. Or I buy into a particular conceptualization, and it can be a particular leadership idea. This is ethical leadership, or I mean you can't be against it, can you? But then you tend to narrow your thinking, take assumptions for granted, then you operate entirely within that kind of limited universe.

Scarpino:If you look at scholarly fields in general, say in the last thirty years and their developmental trajectory, it could be leadership, it could be history, it could be sociology or whatever, what I tend to see are narrower and deeper silos. You find that one thing that you think sets you apart from everyone else and you just dig down. So, how do scholars… and I'm not putting you in there. One of the things I like about your work is I can't shove you in a silo. But how do we deal with a field like leadership studies or any other academic field where the silos get narrower and deeper?

Alvesson:Well, I mean yeah, it's a dilemma, particularly for younger people in academia I suppose to show their being employable and being promotable. So they tend to be caught very strongly in this. But it's a lot of unnecessary self- disciplining around all this. I mean you can't avoid it, but you can also spend some of your time trying to read and think a bit more broadly, try to find other collaborations doing research that is more scholarly sound than just pumping out these often rather narrow formulaic journal papers. You can do that, perhaps not in the beginning of your career if you are a bit weak or you have a problematic situation with a family to support or not the right socioeconomic background, etcetera, so then it's a bit more tricky. But I would say that most people have chances to do work that is much more interesting, intellectually rich and varied than they do.

Scarpino:Yes. I am going to ask you a couple more questions and wrap this up because it's getting late. Again, when I talked to Fisher, he pointed out that you're a founder or co-founder of critical management studies and that leadership he saw as kind of a subset of that. For the benefit of anybody who uses this interview in the future, critical management studies, just briefly how do you explain that?

Alvesson:You look at management in corporations and other organizations, and then you consider a key element which is of course the management, the structures and cultures and strategies and leadership and performance measurement systems and so on. You can have one assumption - this is all good, it's functional, it's productive. You can also have the assumption or the idea or the suspicion that a lot of all this is perhaps a bit problematic. It tends also to be constraining. So you have organizations that are prison-like, and to some extent we need prisons, not only for bad criminals, but also to have some structure and order and avoid chaos and so on in organizations. But sometimes that's being overdone or done in rather stupid ways. Critical management studies take a more critical look at what goes on in organizations, what people are doing in management, and then see if there is something that one perhaps should point at being problematic, and then encourage people to think differently about all this. So you look at organizations with more prison-like arrangements and perhaps we should try to make the prisons less strict.

Scarpino:Do you consider yourself to be founder or co-founder of critical management studies?

Alvesson:Yeah, I mean the concept was coined then in 1992, and we were responsible, Hugh Willmott and I. We kind of coined the concept, but then it took off without us really being aware of this. Well, one says yes, but then other people have been kind of doing critical work without being so lucky so that they coined the concept. So yes and no.

Scarpino:Last question and we'll wrap this up for today. What do you see as the connection between critical management studies and leadership?

Alvesson:I think that leadership sometimes is overdone and calls also for critical scrutiny. All this mushrooming of leadership training and development and then the “leaderization” of the world. This is not only a good thing. It is not a bad thing either. We need leadership, but sometimes all good things can be exaggerated. Critical management studies would look at leadership in terms of okay, what are the problems, what are issues, what are the constraints around all this? One worries that we may cultivate followership. So, we very much focus on leadership, and then it calls for people to be something else. And then followership is not bad sometimes. Sometimes you have people that are clearly junior, and sometimes you have situations where it's necessary to have some discipline and order and coordination, etcetera. The fire brigade in a shop situation. That's fine, but sometimes we tend to overdo this a bit. One could study also the over-cultivation of followership. That would be a good target then for critical management studies.

Scarpino:I'm going to talk to you a little bit about followership next time. This is probably a good place to stop. We've been going for almost two hours. While this thing is still running, I want to thank you for sitting with me today on behalf of the International Leadership Association and the Tobias Center and myself. I really appreciate your time, and we’ll be talking again tomorrow.

Alvesson:Thanks very much.

Scarpino:I am going to turn these off, so let's get this done.

(END INTERVIEW PART 1)

Scarpino:Today is October 16, 2025. My name is Philip Scarpino. I'm an oral historian for the Tobias Leadership Center at Indiana University, Indianapolis (IUI). With me here today is Dr. Mats Alvesson, who is Professor in the School of Economics and Management, Lund, Sweden. This is the second session with him. Even though we've done this before, I'm going to begin by asking you for permission to record this interview, to deposit the recording and the transcription with the Tobias Leadership Center, the International Leadership Association and the Indiana University Library and Archives, where each of those institutions may elect to post all or part of the recording or the transcription to their websites where they could be used by scholars or the public. The point being that this is not private. It's going to be public. Can I have your permission to do those things?

Alvesson:Yes.

Scarpino:Okay. Where we left off the last time is that I had mentioned Yiannis Gabriel and some of the things that he suggested. One of the things that he mentioned that you've certainly written about is the subject of stupidity. We talked about that, but if you want to add anything, you're welcome to do that. He really wanted me to know that one of your areas of contribution had to do with the rise of global strongmen, which he felt really altered or revised what we have known about leadership in the past. I got you to talk about that, and again, if you want to add anything on that subject, you're welcome to do it. Then we talked about the subject of power. Again, he suggested that one of the things that you do when you look at leadership is to examine it through the leadership and followership and the relationship between the two through the lens of power. Is there anything you want to add to any of those things that you thought about?

Alvesson:No.

Scarpino:Okay. You have written on the subject of gender, which we did not talk about last time. I’ll just mention one thing for now: “Leadership - a matter of gender?” co-edited with Savita Kumra, Oxford Handbook of Gender in Organization, Oxford Press, 2014. I'm just wondering how you answer that question, leadership as a matter of gender?

Alvesson:Gender, they have two basic meanings. One is the sex, the bodies, men and women. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated with transgender and so on. But still mainly it's about men and women. Now there is leadership in the context of cultural masculinities and femininities. You can always point at that dimension, that sometimes leadership is a masculine notion connected to men or people that have certain characteristics; being decisive, instrumental, bold, heroic, wanting to be in the front, etcetera. And there's a strong masculine undertone toward that. But then of course you also have a lot of other ideas around leadership that possibly could be little bit more feminine; ethical, servant, relation oriented and so on. I can always look at leadership in terms of different gendered connotations without necessarily evoking men or women in the picture.

Scarpino:A lot of the early literature about leadership really did focus on men. Do you think it was because up until, say, the last twenty-five years or so, most of the leaders were men, and most of the people who wrote about leadership were men, so that's the lens they used. Is that…?

Alvesson:Well, I mean, it's most men…

Scarpino:And then when women become more involved, you know…

Alvesson:Yeah. Well, most managers were men. I guess it was natural to focus on them. Like if you focus on mass murderers, they tend to be men. 

Scarpino:That's true.

Alvesson:They’re probably not directly neglecting females in the world because there's a few of them, or dictators for that matter. So sometimes there's a natural or self-evident thing to focus on one of the sexes then.

Scarpino:Okay. Again, on the subject of gender, you wrote a piece called “Questioning the Notion of Feminine Leadership: A Critical Perspective on Gender Labelling Leadership.” You co-authored that with Yvonne Due Billing, in Gender, Work and Organization, volume 7, 3 in 2000. What do you mean by critical perspective on gender labelling?

Alvesson:It's a long time ago, so I don't remember it particularly clearly.

Scarpino:What do you think about it now? 

Alvesson:For me, gender, you should be aware of gender and keep eyes and ears open for this, but sometimes we tend to overemphasize gender, gender in leadership. It's very easy that it calls for the under-representation of females or discrimination or various disadvantages and problems and stress levels or work/family problems and so on. It's very easy to do that. If you look at what managers typically do at work, research indicates that there are some small differences and others indicate probably not. I think it sometimes is a bit misleading if you assume that with leadership and gender you have a particularly clear relationship in the sense that one would argue that the sexes do quite different things in managerial work. Maybe sometimes a tendency to certain differences, but if you emphasize that, then it easily becomes a bit stereotypical and then it's also a bit misleading perhaps, because I think that it's more a matter of structures, expectations, templates for doing leadership that tend to mean more than if you are a man or a woman in a particular job.

Scarpino:As you try to understand leadership, or you spent your life trying to understand leadership, or you try to explain it to your students or write what you've been thinking about in an article or a paper… Well, let's do it this way. What do you tell your students when they ask you why gender is a useful category of analysis for understanding leadership? Now they probably just want to know what to put on the test, but I mean we're…

Alvesson:In some cases, you have a clear masculine undertone around gender. All the strongman, authoritarian people tend to be mates and play very much with masculinity in various ways. So, there you have masculinity as one element around all this, and sometimes it's crucial. Then of course in some other cases, organizations that are dominated by females, then you probably have expectations and demands and interaction patterns that are a bit more gendered.

Scarpino:Right.

Alvesson:But that can be not necessarily only a matter of the biological representation of some people there, but also that the entire field is perhaps gendered. If you take education for small children or healthcare or social work, there are a lot of ideas around these being gender-colored as part of the cultural, historical apparatus surrounding all this. But then, probably to make a distinction between what are the cultural expectations and then practices responding to them as part of fields or types of organizations, it’s a bit different then from what people tend to do if they are male or females or the expectations they face. But the expectations are probably not that clear-cut in many cases, but they tend to be mixed with what is the occupation, organization, what is the level, what is the situation? Gender rather seldom came out as kind of naked or in pure form. Of course, there may be biologists that can state that there are certain differences in brains or emotional responses and so on. But I think that they tend to be so small so that they almost drown then in the context of big situations and all the forces that are influencing people at work, including their leadership relations.

 Scarpino:When we look at the shifting role of women in leadership in the last twenty-five or thirty years, do you think that that's directly related with their shifting role in society, that they're involved in more fields, they're actively involved in more fields? I'm not saying that it's a perfect world, but the opportunity that exists for a woman in 2025 is a lot greater than the one that existed fifty years ago.

Alvesson:Yeah, no, I think that there are changes, definitely. When I look around situations that I am into as an educator and I give lectures, etcetera in Sweden, school principals, well there may be seven or eight men and then fifty females in the group. The same with our management program with a focus on people and management at my own university, there's about sixty participants in this master’s program and seven or eight men.

Scarpino:Oh.

Alvesson:Of course, then it's different in perhaps finance and some other areas. And also, I gave a talk to managers in the social services a couple of years ago, and I was struck by it was almost only females.

Scarpino:Oh.

Alvesson:Yeah, it’s perhaps not totally representative, but also in the United States and a lot of other countries there are drastic changes in terms of the number of females into senior positions.

Scarpino:Yeah. Some areas of endeavor that we might have considered to be traditionally female, like nurses, there men have made significant inroads into the profession. 

What about followership? Would you tell your students that that's a useful category for understanding society, for understanding the relationship between people and leaders? What do you tell them?

Alvesson:I think that the concept of leadership implies followership. You can't be just a leader in front of your mirror. On the other hand, then some people find that followership sounds like too much of subordination or passivity, etcetera. So, they sometimes try to argue that we should talk about co-workers instead. I don't think that leadership and co-workership is like nice combination. I think that then you point yourself in a different aspect because you can be a co-worker in relationship to your colleagues. But then if you emphasize leadership, then I guess that some kind of subordinate position is key, and then followership may be the best way of representing this. The problem is if people really are followers, and of course sometimes they may be. When people shout at Trump or other people with perhaps not necessarily the best of intensions or judgement, then they seem to take a very strong follower position in a lot of other situations. I guess that people comply because they are paid and the subordinate’s expectations that they should listen a bit more during meetings and so on, but they are not necessarily followers. I think there's a lot of fake followership…

Scarpino:(laughs)

Alvesson:…probably more subordinateship in relationship to the manager because you have an employment contract and a legal effect if you don't comply, etcetera. So managers and subordinates or laborers captures quite a lot when it comes to leadership, followership captures sometimes important aspects, but sometimes it's not exactly how it appears to be, because people are not necessarily that much of followers if they have a chance to get away with it. And leadership is defined as the management of meaning, so it's very much ideas, understandings, beliefs, etcetera. You can't really force people to buy into all this. You can force them to behave perhaps, but you can't force people to accept a particular true statement or something like that. And then sometimes there is fake followership.

Scarpino:Tell the leader what he or she wants to hear.

Alvesson:Yeah, precisely.

Scarpino:To broaden out from gender, you wrote a piece in 2013, and I'm not going to expect you to remember everything you wrote, but I’m going to ask you to talk about some ideas and just play off this. Plus, I thought it was a good piece and I liked it, so that counts for something I guess. You wrote this piece, it's called “Leadership - Emotion, Toxicity and Dysfunction.” You wrote this with Andre Spicer. It came out in 2013. What I thought about when I looked at that was, how do emotion, toxicity and dysfunction interact within a framework of leadership? Where do they fit into the way in which we like to understand leadership? I'm asking you this because a lot of the scholarship on leadership is sort of celebratory and positive and, you know, and you don't do that. So, we've got here emotion, toxicity and dysfunction, and I'm just wondering again how you see those things interacting within the framework of the way you understand leadership.

Alvesson:I think that a lot of times people tend to fall into authoritarian relationships. Of course leadership is not about being a dictator, knocking people on the head if they object to something. But with the idea of a managerial position or a senior position, and then the kind of leadership is part of all that. There's a tendency that people tend to be a bit more dependent on authoritarianists and become rather obedient, not necessarily fully, but it’s much easier for everybody if you find this to be quite okay and reasonable and so on. So, obedience makes life a bit easier for managers. And if you manage to convince yourself this is not just because you're forced to do this by the kind of managerial regime or the employment contract, but you have respect for the person and you want the person's approval, emotional support and a lot of other things, then sometimes you imagine that you are doing this voluntarily, I really have respect for the person, I admire the person, blah blah blah blah. And there are lot of emotions in all this. Sometimes it's from childhood, where you have the parent figure and then the projection to all this. Sometimes it works fine. Often it creates dependencies, it creates people being relatively immature in relationship to this. Then sometimes you can see that they are not at their best as employees or as leaders because the kind of expectations and emotions around all this make people not think so clear about what's happening here, and why should I obey that person and what are the reasonable types of questioning that I perhaps should put forward? But often it becomes not necessarily so mature in the relationship. And sometimes this lack of maturity can make people a bit primitive or simple minded, or some elements of toxicity can enter the situation.

Scarpino:If one thinks about what makes an effective leader or a good leader, who I would define as somebody who's effective, do you think that one quality of an effective leader is that they listen to their subordinates, they listen to followers?

Alvesson:Yeah, and I think it’s probably wise to do that, but then what happens then? So, you listen and then what's the next step? Listening can lead to that you take the viewsviews very seriously and you change. Or you can listen and then you can say, “Okay I need to do this in another way. I may need to sharpen my sword.”

Scarpino:For example, when I was a military officer, I had non-commissioned officers who worked for me, squad leaders and platoon sergeant. Before we would do anything major, these guys, some of them had been in thirty years, you know, and here I am a year into being a lieutenant. I'd get these guys together in a room and I'd say, “This is what we're going to do. What do you think we should do?” And they would tell me, you know, “We would do this and this and this,” or “this and this and this.” And then when we were all done, I'd go out and talk to the troops and tell them this is what we're going to do, right? I didn't tell them these guys told me to do it, but I mean a leader who doesn't listen to experienced subordinates seems like they're really not being an effective leader.

Alvesson:No, I totally agree. I think that being sensitive to viewpoints and then trying to mobilize the information, or good judgement more broadly, I think that's very good for an effective organization. This is how it should work and people then responding to requests, but also sometimes speaking up without requests or an invitation even if you are in a junior position. I think that can be very good. Voice is very important then in organizations, and everybody probably agrees with this more or less. But then in practice, it’s less of this than what people perhaps would in principle recommend. There are lots of senior people that want to pretend that they know, that they are very sure about things and have a status and identity and then were not necessarily listening too much. Of course, in some cases, there may also be the problem that they listen a bit too much 

Scarpino:Well, that's it. I mean maybe a leader has to listen but not do everything that people want.

Alvesson:No, no, precisely. There's always a dilemma there. But I think that from a normative point of view, I think that voice is a good principle, to get the views of others.

Scarpino:I want to talk about a couple of global developments you've written about, but that are just I think situations that cry out for leadership and maybe situations that developed because of bad leadership. The two things that come to mind when I think about this are climate change and artificial intelligence. Now there are other topics, but if you thought for a while about issues that have global importance, can you come up with something that's more important than climate change? And I'm not challenging you, this is not a trick question, but…

Alvesson:I think it's enormously important, definitely. Then of course you have the threat of wars; Ukraine and other conflicts, but these are the two major issues. I’ve said a long time that climate change is number one.

Scarpino:I don't know what you remember from being a young man, but I can remember being in grade school, which in the US would be grades one to eight, we used to get this little newspaper, it was called Weekly Reader. It came once a week in a newspaper format and it had age-appropriate news in there, and we'd read it and talk about it. And so this is the 1950s, and I remember a class discussion about how many hydrogen bombs it would take to crack the world in half. Now you can't really do that, but that's what we were talking about. I mean the idea of global nuclear war was frightening even to ten-year-olds. Not so much now. It’s climate change and AI. Can you think of any other issues other than climate change and AI that rise to that level?

Alvesson:No, I think these are the top issues. Of course you always have a lot of other disasters that are created by nature or created by mankind, but I agree, I think that climate change and also, yeah, digitalization and AI is an enormous problem.

Scarpino:Artificial intelligence, number one, how do you understand that? How would you define it if one of your students said, “What is it?” And then how do you think that presents a challenge to, presents opportunities for leaders?

Alvesson:I'm not an expert at all. I belong to the twentieth century, so I tend to be a bit old fashioned and very slow on the uptake.

Scarpino:Welcome to the club.

Alvesson:AI, I assume that it will change drastically, so it's a bit hopeless also to capture exactly what goes on. You also get some contradictory signals. I read somewhere that a lot of companies have kind of minimized the use of AI because it looks good, but then you need really to check it carefully and it takes a lot of time and perhaps problems built into all that. So, I don't know (inaudible) revolutionizing everything, etcetera. I must say that it’s not my field and I have not much sensible to say on that.

Scarpino:It's not my field either, but I think we're going to live in a world where it's going to become more and more important to the context that leaders function in. 

Alvesson:I think that is definitely true, and how much leadership do we need? Who are the leaders? And sometimes it appears to be the systems, the IT people that do all the programming, and sometimes you just have to follow all the procedures.

Scarpino:Right.

Alvesson:And then a lot of this is beyond immediate human control. So then of course that raises issues around leadership, but we just need to wait and see what's happening.

Scarpino:In addition to climate change and artificial intelligence, are there other global issues that leaders should be paying attention to?

Alvesson:Well, then I think that for me, organizations, a lot of these issues are a bit kind of beyond what an individual organization can do. But I sometimes think quite a lot about the topic of pseudo work.

Scarpino:Of what?

Alvesson:Pseudo.

Scarpino:Pseudo?

Alvesson:Pseudo.

Scarpino:Pseudo work. Okay.

Alvesson:Pseudo work, fake work.

Scarpino:Yeah.

Alvesson:Organization slouch. A lot of things that people do in workplaces is not particularly useful. It has no effect, it is rather meaningless, so unproductive work even in organizations that need to be productive like police force, schools, hospitals, healthcare systems. There tends to be a lot of time spent on following procedures, documentation, looking good, and a lot of other things. I'm a bit worried about organizations not focusing on core work or creating value.

Scarpino:I want to talk to you about a few of the things that you've written. Obviously, as I said this morning, there's no way I can talk to you about everything you've written. And maybe it's just because there were some of the things that you've written that I found to be particularly interesting and so I'm going to ask you about them. I think we already talked about this, but “Leadership - Emotion, Toxicity and Dysfunction,” I already asked you about that. You wrote another piece that I found to be more interesting than that, and it's titled: “Less Followership, Less Leadership: An Inquiry into the Basic but Seemingly Forgotten Downsides of Leadership.” It appeared in Management, Volume 18, 3, 2015. You co-authored with Martin Blom. Maybe you could start by just telling the listeners who this guy is, Martin Blom.

Alvesson:He’s my former PhD student and then a colleague at Lund University. He's also an academic, worked a bit for Accenture before he started the PhD program.

Scarpino:We’ve got “Less Followership, Less Leadership: An Inquiry into the Basic but Seemingly Forgotten Downsides of Leadership.” Again, that's one of the things I like about your work, but what do you see as the downsides of leadership?

Alvesson:The Enlightenment idea was that people should have the courage to think for themselves. Use your judgment, use your intelligence. Immanuel Kant pitched it in the eighteenth century, and I think that's probably a wise idea. And then with Enlightenment and a lot of education for a lot of people, a lot of resources, libraries, people writing books, like myself, the internet, it should be possible for people to use their judgment and then deal with a lot of issues in life based on that. But we have very much focused on leadership, also indirectly a lot of followership. And I think that sometimes leadership is fine, sometimes followership as a part of that is necessary. But it's easy that we overdo this and we over-emphasize hierarchies. We make peculiar distinctions between leaders and the rest of the population. That can be quite tricky because it tends to make people a bit immature. You are so much in need of the manager or leader providing meaning and dealing with all the diversity issues, developing people, taking care of everything for you. And I do think that there is a tendency that too much leadership is too much followership and that leads to people becoming immature and even dwarfed. They small themselves or we small them by propagating perhaps a bit too much for leadership.

Scarpino:You see this as a trend that's becoming more significant over time?

Alvesson:I think that there is such a trend. We can at least see that there's enormous focus on leadership. When I started, university management was not supposed to do leadership, and still not doing that much not in Sweden, but now you have academic leadership as a field for example. Then the self-understanding is that as a head of department, you are not just doing administration, you should be an academic leader and then there are courses and expectations and so on. I don't think it works particularly well, but then it's part of a massive trend where the leaderization of life…

Scarpino:Well, leading academic colleagues is a little bit like herding cats. 

Alvesson:Yeah, precisely. But that's changed also. When I started, it was (inaudible). But now, people are very focused on making a career, getting promoted, rewards, incentives. And then you have instrumentalization of academia, which means that people look a bit more at hierarchies and are more dependent on the managers in order to have a good work situation and a nice career and so on. That was not the case in the past.

Scarpino:No.

Alvesson:I think that even there then academics now tend to be very disciplined people in many ways.

Scarpino:What kind of people?

Alvesson:Academics are much more disciplined today than in the past.

Scarpino:Yes, absolutely.

Alvesson:And I think that's worrying.

(PAUSE for computer issue)

Alvesson:What were you doing in the military? 

Scarpino:I was a platoon leader in an armored cavalry for a while. And then the last part of my military was in administration where I was responsible for planning training exercises and ordering ammunition for live fire ranges and, you know, trying to make sure they didn't kill each other. I was in armor, which all of that stuff is dangerous. If you're not careful, the one who is going to get dead is you. You get run over by your own tank or something terrible, the ammunition will explode or whatever. I mean it was interesting and I guess you'll do it when you're twenty-two. I'm not sure I'd do it now.

Alvesson:No.

Scarpino:It’s just too crazy.

Alvesson:Yeah.

Scarpino:I asked you to comment on the downsides of leadership. Is there anything you want to say on that subject that you didn't say?

Alvesson:No, I think that most things in life we need to have an all-sided and reflexive attitude to it. Some concepts, some ideas are just hurrah and others are boo, but in real life it it's more mixed, more complicated and we really need to understand there are very few things that have a free lunch or free breakfast.

Scarpino:Right.

Alvesson:Yeah. With leadership, you get certain advantages; order, control, the overview, a feeling of safety and direction, but you also get dependencies and sometimes vulnerabilities to bad judgment of senior people, etcetera. I think that we need to be all-sided when we think about leadership and not overdo this as a solution to all kinds of problems.

Scarpino:When you were teaching leadership students, was that part of your message to them?

Alvesson:Yeah, I often also look at okay what's happening in practice? Of course, sometimes not so much is happening in practice. So, leadership is very much idealized conceptions of what managers do. They do often more admin than they do this great visionary transformational thing. And often they don't stand out as much more impressive or larger than life figures than others.

Scarpino:Do you think that leadership is culturally constructed?

Alvesson:Yeah, I mean in most significant respects. Sometimes it may be that somebody's much bigger or speaks louder or is older or whatever, then you probably have an inclination to have asymmetrical relationships, etcetera. There may be some biological grounds for this, and sometimes you may also want to have some order, being inclined then to subordinate yourself. So, there may sometimes be something biological there. But I think for most practical purposes, and to really understand what goes on, we need to look at the construction processes.

Scarpino:The construction processes.

Alvesson:Yeah, the construction of leadership…

Scarpino:Oh yeah.

Alvesson:…as an ideal, or people in situations then construct the situation, construct the leaders, the construction of their own identities, blah blah blah. So, as an academic, you say to yourself, “I am a professor, I am a professional, I can do this and use my own judgement. I'm not a subordinate, I'm not a follower.” But in other cases then you may say, “Okay, we are followers, we are relatively small people compared to top management blah blah blah.” And there are a lot of construction possibilities here, and it’s very much how people read, interpret and relate to the situation that matters rather than being some mechanical outcome or some objective reality of that.

Scarpino:I don't want this question to sound too weird, but as you look back on - you're not done yet - but as you look back on a long career of writing and publishing and teaching and other things that you've done, but if we look at the just the publications for now, how do you think that your publications on leadership fit into your broader legacy as a scholar?

Alvesson:I have done quite a lot of things in different areas, and I think this is a topic in itself. Of course, we need to understand what goes on when people try to lead or try to follow or try to avoid this kind of relationship. So that's one theme here. But that can also relate to some of the other stuff that I've done. I published a book, The Triumph of Emptiness, a couple of years ago. It's very much that we are into grandiosity, that everything should be blown up a bit. I guess that Trump is an example of this: “Make America Great Again.” But also (inaudible) we have great inflation. In schools we have title inflation and people boast on social media, etcetera. Leadership may be an outcome of this, but also one entrance point to understand how we tend to go into this hubris or exaggerated views of what we do, what are often identity problems for people, what I’m actually doing and accomplishing here, and so on. So then, of course, leadership may be part of all this. Leadership is a topic of interest in itself, but it’s also one entrance to understand some broader culture changes and situations. I’ve done a lot research also on… I’ve written about methodologies for qualitative research; how do we understand reality? And then leadership, complicated relations is one good topic. The other trick is not just to accept managers’ talk about themselves. That can be quite misleading. But to really try to understand what goes on here, what are people doing? For me, it's also an area where you can explore methodological ideas and how to do qualitative research.

Scarpino:I'm going to ask you some final questions. The first one is:  Professionally, who do you look up to? Who inspires you?

Alvesson:It's hard question. It was much easier when I was younger. Then I probably had heroes. Now all the heroes, they are dead.

Scarpino:Well, you could answer the question, you know, “When I was thirty, I looked up to…”

Alvesson:Yeah, when I started here I was interested in the Frankfurt School; Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, etcetera. I don't know if you are familiar with this school, Frankfurt School, Habermas.

Scarpino:No.

Alvesson:Well, the idea was that social science… The idea of social science is to facilitate the critical self-reflection of societies. We then are liberating ourselves from ideologies, prejudice, irrationalities, power relations and so on. So, we use knowledge then to realize the Enlightenment ideal of facilitating for people to think for themselves. And that I thought was a very good idea. That inspired me my entire career. So, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse. Also, in qualitative results people that have done interesting stuff, Clifford Geertz perhaps, anthropologist.

Scarpino:The name is?

Alvesson:Geertz. Clifford Geertz. Foucault (sp?) to some extent, familiar for all historians I guess.

Scarpino:Yeah.

Alvesson:Richard Sennett, sociologist, social psychologist.

Scarpino:The name is what?

Alvesson:Richard Sennett. 

Scarpino:I'm asking for the sake of the transcriber, to make sure they heard.

Alvesson:It's not easy with all these names. 

Scarpino:They'll do their best to look them up, but when you're talking about people that are Swedish or whatever, they're not going to find it.

Alvesson:No. But these are Germans and Americans.

Scarpino:We pay the transcriber and they usually do quite a good job, so let's see. If you look at the lifetime of your work, is there anything you wish you could do over? Do you have any regrets?

Alvesson:I've thought about that. I think that I probably should have started writing for a broader audience a bit earlier. I started to do that relatively late, and I think that's the most satisfying part. I've written quite a lot that is widely cited in academic quarters, and that's very good in many ways. But I find it a bit more meaningful if I can do something that is also read outside academia. So, I probably wish that I had done a bit more of that a bit earlier.

Scarpino:That is the thing about professional scholarship, is that by and large the audience is pretty small. It's your professional colleagues in your field, not you but scholars, professional colleagues in his or her field, and usually the sub-sub-subdiscipline of that field. Those are the folks you communicate… It's interesting to hear that you find communicating with the public to be satisfying.

Alvesson:Definitely. We published a book a few years ago, Oxford, and it’s called Return to Meaning. The idea was that now we are increasingly specialized and then the journal publication (inaudible) very strict in social science, and they lead to work that is very formulaic. This is how it should look, how you should write and blah blah blah. And it means that you often tend to write for your own academic micro tribe rather than also for larger groups of academics, because people also specialized and then people become more and more narrow-minded. I find it problematic. With my age and experience and so on, I probably can avoid this to some extent. But sometimes academia becomes not so meaningful.

Scarpino:What is it that you would like your grandchildren to know about you? You have grandchildren, right?

Alvesson:Yeah.

Scarpino:And maybe some more in the future, but what do you hope in ten years or fifteen years when they grow up that they know about you?

Alvesson:I think it's probably good for them if they know that I was a relatively successful academic with some impact. I've done work within my specialties, but also stuff that has a broader reach. And I kind of stood up for critical reflection, integrity, and then trying to do something that is broadly useful. I see myself as very much in the anti-stupidity field. We should try to think for ourselves. We should try to identify stupidity, bureaucracy, fashion following, cliches that people take seriously, inclinations to just imitate others and then follow group thinking and so on. So, partly then some of my work, but also some of my ideals and what I try to stand up for.

Scarpino:Two more questions. First one is:  Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't?

Alvesson:I’ve been here for 45 years. We could probably can spend a year talking about everything, but I'm very happy with this. I think that you asked very many good questions. Possibly something about… One of my main areas is reflexive methodology.

Scarpino:Right.

Alvesson:I don't know if you want to address that as well. This is perhaps too much already or sufficient, but I’ve done a lot of work on methodology, and that is to not necessarily get all the facts right, or the empirical work that is waterproof; I don't believe in that at all. But I do empirical work to generate ideas and to produce research that's a bit more imaginative, a bit more creative than is common. For me, the challenge for social science – and we are not into the STEM areas, social scientists. Science, technology… 

Scarpino:Right. No, I know what STEM is. I was waiting to see what direction you were going to take that in.

Alvesson:Yeah, so it's more that in social science, reality is changing all the time, and it is constructed. The important thing is then to have ideas, conceptualizations, lines of thinking, theoretical contributions that may be helpful for people to think a bit more clearly about issues and then act in a sharper way. And for me, that's very much a matter of challenging assumptions, coming up with unconventional research questions, and then produce accounts that are a bit more powerful in terms of easy to remember, there's a key point takeaway from the study. This is something that I’ve worked with quite a lot as well.

Scarpino:Final question:  Is there anything that you wanted to say that I just haven't given you a chance to say?

Alvesson:No, I'm very satisfied, so fine. Thanks very much for everything.

Scarpino:Thank you. While the recorder is still running, I want to thank you for giving me your time and your attention and your thoughtful and well-developed answers twice, this morning and this afternoon. I thank you on behalf of myself, the Tobias Leadership Center, the International Leadership Association and anybody who uses this in the future. Thank you so much. It's been a joy.

Alvesson:Thanks so much for the pleasure of collaborating with you.

(END INTERVIEW 2)