David Collinson

Scarpino:Today is Wednesday, October 15, 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. David L. Collinson, Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Organisation, now emeritus, Lancaster University Management School, United Kingdom. We are undertaking this interview at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association which is taking place in the Hilton Hotel in Prague, Czech Republic. This interview is a joint venture undertaken by the Tobias Leadership Center and the International Leadership Association. I note that as part of my background research I talked to three of Dr. Collinson's professional colleagues: Gail Fairhurst, Keith Grint and Jeff Hearn. 

Professor Collinson holds the following degrees: PhD, School of Management, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, 1988; MSc, by Research, School of Management, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, 1981; BSc, with honors, Department of Management Sciences, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1978. And I understand that you were captain of the golfing team.

Collinson:(laughs) Of the student golfing team, that's right.

Scarpino:Yeah, so now everybody knows. David L. Collinson has areas of research expertise in critical approaches to leadership, management, and organization. Primary interests explore the dynamic interplay between leadership and followership; gender, men and masculinities; conformity, dramaturgy and resistance, and humor; positivity; and “Prozac” leadership. I am looking forward to talking to you about Prozac leadership. 

Dr. Collinson is presently Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Organisation, Lancaster University, UK, and he is just recently emeritus. His employment history includes the following: 2002 to just before the present, Department of Organisation, Work and Technology, Lancaster University, United Kingdom; 2006-2009 three year Secondment as National Research Director for the Centre for Excellence in Leadership/Learning and Skills Improvement Service; January 1992-December 2001 Senior Lecturer and Reader, University of Warwick,Warwick Business School, Coventry, UK. 

In 2005, David Collinson was the Founding Co-editor (with Keith Grint) of the peer-reviewed, international journal, Leadership. He is also the Founding Co-Organizer of the “International Studying Leadership Conference,” (also with Keith Grint) first held at Oxford University in 2002. Hosted four times by Lancaster University, as well as the Universities of Oxford, Exeter, Cranfield, Warwick, Auckland, Birmingham, Lund, Copenhagen, Richmond (Virginia), Rome, and Edinburgh. 

Collinson:And several others now as well.

Scarpino:Pardon?

Collinson:And several other locations.

Scarpino:Yeah, I don’t think I got them all. Well-traveled conference.

Collinson:Yes.

Scarpino:And successful over a number of years. And again, I know that Richmond in Virginia in the U.S., hosted by the Jepson School of Leadership Studies.

Dr. Collinson has published a large and impressive body of scholarship. According to ResearchGate accessed in late September 2025, his 198 publications have been cited just over 10,500 times. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Collinson-3.  Examples of his publications, earliest to recent include: 

David Collinson and Jeff Hearn, “Naming Men as Men: Implications for Work, Organization and Management,” in Gender, Work, and Organization, Vol. 1, Issue 1, (January 1994): pp. 2-22. The SAGE Handbook of Leadership. 1st Edition, Co-editors, Alan Bryman, David L. Collinson, Keith Grint, Brad Jackson, Mary Uhl-Bien; Sage Publications, 2011. Routledge Handbook on Men, Masculinities and Organizations Theories, Practices, and Futures of Organizing (2023), Co-edited by Jeff Hearn, Kadri Aavik, David L. Collinson, Anika Thym. Includes David Collinson’s single-authored chapter: “Critical dialectical perspectives on men, masculinities and leadership” and a co-authored chapter: “Men, masculinities and military organizations,” Kadri Aavik, David L. Collinson, Jeff Hearn and Anika Thym: “The gendering of men, masculinities, managers and managements: New directions, ecological collapse and global governance”, in J. K. Rodriguez and E. Guenther (eds.) Gender in Management: A Research Agenda, Editor, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2025. Jeff Hearn, Kadri Aavik and David L. Collinson “What have leadership and DEIB [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) got to do with men and masculinities? Challenges at a time of growing authoritarianism”, in Jennifer W. Martin and Monica Wirz (eds.), Inclusive Leadership: Connecting Theory and Practice of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, Cambridge University Press, 2026.

He has 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 and career summary, I need to ask your permission to do the following: to record this interview, to have the interview transcribed, to deposit the recording and transcription in the Indiana University, Indianapolis, Special Collections and Archives, where they may be used by patrons including posting of all or parts of the recording and transcription to the website of the IUI Special Collections and Archives, also deposit the recording and 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 all of those things?

Collinson:Of course.

Scarpino:Okay. I want to start by explaining, for your sake and the sake of anybody using this interview, that I'm going to begin by asking you some basic demographic questions followed by bigger picture questions about leadership. Then we're going to 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 some continuity to the interviews done over the years, and I'll work those in as we talk. I'll tell you part of the fun of doing this is I always know where I'm going to start, but I'm not always sure I know where we're going to end up. We're going to kind of go on a journey together. Let's do the basic demographic stuff first.

Collinson:Okay.

Scarpino:And then we'll come back to leadership. When and where were you born?

Collinson:I was born in a town called Blackpool in the northwest coast of England, north of Manchester and Liverpool. It's a famous seaside resort, and famous for its tower. Blackpool Tower was built in the nineteenth century as a sort of copy of the Eiffel Tower. Interestingly, we did a float trip yesterday on a boat down the river here and this city has its own copy of the Eiffel Tower.

Scarpino:The Eiffel Tower.

Collinson:Yeah, but Blackpool Tower is very famous. It was the place I was born in 1957 on Valentine's Day.

Scarpino:Valentine’s Day!

Collinson:Yeah, same every year.

Scarpino:That was a real gift to your mom. Alright, did you grow up there?

Collinson:I did, yes. I went to school there.

Scarpino:Do you have any brothers or sisters?

Collinson:No. I was very close to my cousin Chris. She now lives in California.

Scarpino:So you get to go visit somebody in a warm climate?

Collinson:Yes.

Scarpino:Because it is not warm on the northwest coast of England, at least not to me.

Collinson:It’s freezing.

Scarpino:Alright, I want to ask you about your parents. What did your father do?

Collinson:My father originally was a professional musician who played in the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, as did my grandfather. My grandfather played the cello, and my father played the double bass. They played together, and they played under famous conductors like Sir Malcolm Sargent. And so he grew up learning music and he loved it. But he, at some point in his career, decided that the money wasn't quite as secure as in the ‘50s, you know. I was born in ‘57. Around that time, he decided he needed a more secure income for his family. And so he moved on to being an industrial photographer, BAE Systems, which at that time was called English Electric and it's been through various evolutions. But it's the main manufacturer of arms and planes and military equipment in the UK, and he was their photographer. He loved photography.

Scarpino:He took pictures of what they produced?

Collinson:Yeah. And he went up in planes and took photographs of land, before drones. He was very adaptable. Then my mum's father died and they went into a furniture selling shop because that's what my grandfather did. They did that for some years, and then he changed again. He got a bad back carrying these big sofas. So then they went around the corner into this shop in Blackpool which had lots of fancy goods and little cards that you could sell to the visitors and they could say “I love it being in Blackpool” and all that. But Dad specialized then in repairs of lighters. Remember lighters?

Scarpino:Cigarette lighters.

Collinson:Yeah, and shavers.

Scarpino:Electric shavers.

Collinson:Yeah. Remington and all these big name… Colibri lighters. They would come from all over north of England to get dad to repair their shavers and lighters. So a complete evolution from his original musical career, and his family and his uncle, they were all musicians. Before you ask, he didn't teach me how to play music.

Scarpino:I was going to ask you if he did.

Collinson:He played the bass. He always said, “Oh if you show an interest I'll do it, but obviously you need to do something…” He was worried about the financial security for me, I think, so I didn't really learn. I can play the guitar a little bit now, but yeah, so very different. I kind of learned, I think, from my dad's… He was tremendously adaptable, very much better with his hands than I am, I would say. But I thought if I find something I really want to do, I want to stick with it. And if there's no obvious income source, I'm going to stick with it as long as I can, rather than… Because I think he was always a little disappointed that he couldn't stay with his music. I think if he had his time again, he would have stuck with his music. That's what I learned from all that.

Scarpino:Do you ever think about how fortunate you are / we are to be academics and…

Collinson:Very fortunate.

Scarpino:…get to chart our own paths in some ways?

Collinson:Absolutely. It's incredible, isn't it? 

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:I can't imagine a better career really for me and what my interests are and my skills, whatever they happen to be. I can't imagine better. When I was a young guy, I was quite a good golfer. I could have gone down that road, but I might have been in a shop selling golf clubs. You'd be a shopkeeper.

Scarpino:I was going to say, probably in my 70s I wouldn't be playing golf.

Collinson:That's true. So no, I feel very lucky.

Scarpino:What about your mother? What did your mother do?

Collinson:Let's see, well mum was a fantastic swimmer. She won all the prizes at school when she was young. She had two sisters. She married my dad quite young and, well, she worked in the shops, with my grandfather in the furniture shop and then in the fancy goods shop -- the furniture shop with my dad and then the fancy goods shop. And then when he went back to BAE Systems, mum became a professional social worker. She also was very adaptable, and very, very supportive of my career. My undergraduate dissertation was on football violence and football crowd behavior. My mum typed it up for me. She was a great… She'd learned all the secretarial skills, she learned all the cooking skills before she started a career. So she was a great typist. She always teased me and complained that she was you know, “It's Labor Day and you're asking me to type on a dissertation.”

Scarpino:I'm going to say for the benefit of any Americans who listen to this that football is soccer. 

Collinson:Soccer yeah.

Scarpino:In the United States it's soccer. Everywhere else in the world it's football.

Collinson:Football yeah, not American football. That's true.

Scarpino:In South American it’s spelled F-U-T but it's still football.

Collinson:It's it, of course. Yes, that's true. Yes. I assume that comes from the word… In England they used to call it association football. So an abbreviation of association could be soccer.

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:I don't know.

Scarpino:I don't know.

Collinson:I don't know why it’s called soccer. That's the only way I can think about that. But Yeah. Alright. Well, I'm happy to talk about football as well.

Scarpino:I'm going to ask you about that. 

Collinson:So they were both very adaptable and their careers changed dramatically, whereas mine has sort of gone the opposite way, and it stayed on the same path.

Scarpino:The question I was going to ask you, and you partially answered that, is talk about the impact that your parents had on shaping the adult you became.

Collinson:Well, that's interesting. We lived opposite a golf course and my dad was a keen golfer. So in the summer holidays at school, they would be off working the shops because it was really busy in the summertime. And the fancy goods shop would be open until ten and eleven o'clock at night. Really long hours they were doing. It was hard, I think. But they knew that I would be quite safe walking over the road and going on the golf course. Golf does teach you a lot about how to… rules, ethics, etiquette. It also can be incredibly humiliating when you hit the most stupid shots, and I think why did I do that? So it does get you thinking a lot. By introducing me to golf I think my dad really helped me. I would have loved to have learned more from him about his musical side, but I've explained that. And mum was more encouraging of me. She taught me how to drive, for example. She encouraged me to go to university. I think if my dad had had his way, I'd have stayed at home. There were people at the golf club who were in insurance. It was an insurance company. And he actually arranged for me to shadow a guy who had his own company as an insurance man. I think my dad would have liked that as a safe, you know, white collar, high-status role for me. He wasn't sure about me going to university, and he certainly wasn't sure about me doing a master's or a PhD and then going into academia. But I think he came around to it eventually, whereas my mum was more supportive and more encouraging.

Scarpino:At what point did your parents realize how successful you were?

Collinson:Oh, my goodness. Well, there was a time when they'd ask, “Well, you’re writing all these papers, but you don't get paid for them, oh oh oh.”

Scarpino:Well, you do get paid, just not…

Collinson:Yes, I tried to explain it's indirect. My first lectureship was at St. Andrews, which obviously is the home of golf, and they could see then that there was a career for me. I think that's probably the first big point when my dad realized that this was a good thing. Because they actually moved up and we bought a house in St. Andrews and I started my lectureship, and mum and dad moved up, although I think they were a little bit surprised when I left after a few years. But I did tell them, “I'm not sure how long I'll be here. Are you sure you want to do the move?” But I think they loved St. Andrews as well because it's a fantastic place.

Scarpino:Are you, or were you self-taught as a golfer or did you…?

Collinson:Well, my dad taught me. 

Scarpino:Everything after that was just practice and hard work.

Collinson:Yeah, yeah, and an occasional lesson when things got really confusing. But yes, so I think that was probably the first time. And then of course when I got the chair at Lancaster in 2002, they were both still alive then. I think that confirmed to them that this was a pretty good career choice.

Scarpino:Well, it was nice that they got a chance to know about that.

Collinson:Yeah, and at that point they then moved back down from Scotland. All the time I was at Warwick, almost ten years, they were up in Scotland, but they moved back down once they knew I'd gotten my professorship at Lancaster.

Scarpino:As you think back on your youth as a young man, teenager, you know, young man, were there any early experiences that you had that helped shape your character, that helped shape the adult that you became?

Collinson:Well, obviously being at school, going from junior school to the grammar school and having to wear a uniform and the discipline of… The first two years at Blackpool Grammar School, it was an all boys school and it had been that throughout its history. So there was a strong… Most of the teachers were… It was a much stronger disciplinary culture than the junior school I’d been at. Then in my third year, our third year, early ‘70s we merged with Collegiate Girls’ School and all of a sudden we're surrounded by these young ladies in little blue skirts. It was perplexing, to say the least, having… It was a surprise.

Scarpino:You had to figure out how to act in that new environment.

Collinson:Yes, it was totally different. The school completely changed, and of course it was new for the teachers as well and for everybody. There was a big… you could see… you experienced the culture change as that went on. So that was one factor definitely. Loads of experiences on golf, with lots of good friends, some of whom I'm still friendly with. Lots of learning experiences, tremendous place for learning about life, I think, on the golf course.

Scarpino:What did golf teach you about life?

Collinson:Wow, well I mean, the importance of etiquette, the importance of honesty I think, because there is room for dishonest golfers and then we do hear… They call it the leather wedge when the boot just knocks the ball a few feet, or you miscalculate, “How many shots did you have there?” “Four?” “No, I think you had five.” So there is room for issues there. Oh, and particularly how to manage, A, anxiety. If you're in a competition and you're on the first tee and you really want to hit a good shot, and how do you cope with that? But equally, how do you cope with a bad shot? Do you start throwing your clubs and what we call throwing a wobbler in the north of England, getting really angry. There were friends, really good friends of mine, who when they played badly they became a different person. They were just so angry. And I thought that's no..  Because that's no way… If you hit a bad shot, you've got to then play your next shot, and you've got to clear your mind somehow.

Scarpino:Right.

Collinson:There's quite a mental aspect to golf, I think. So there's the social side of golf, the rules and etiquette and just learning to be with older people, you know, older people when you're a young boy is quite… You learn, you see how older men are. It's a sort of apprenticeship in masculinity in some ways. But equally, the technicalities of playing the game and playing the course and finding ways to try and… What was it Kipling said? Treat success and failure in the same way. Don't get too excited when you do something well, and don't get too disappointed when you do something badly. Try and find a balance.

Scarpino:Do you think that golf helps with the self-discipline that it takes to be a successful academic?

Collinson:I haven't really thought about that, but now that you mention it, I there are some overlaps there. I think that's right, yeah. And persistence, and you know we all get kicked back by reviewers, anonymous reviewers in journals.

Scarpino:Yes, we do.

Collinson:Everybody, and then sometimes you think that's really unfair. That's not what I'm saying at all. And then you know the review process, which can be quite challenging. But again, if you just sit back and think harder about the issues, I’ve found over the years that the feedback is fantastic. Even though at first you feel almost resentful. How could you say that? Oh, okay. And then you think about it for a few days and nine times out of ten it improves the paper.

Scarpino:This is just a clarification question because I'm guessing that most of the people who are going to look at this are going to be Americans. You mentioned going to grammar school.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:What grade level is grammar school in the UK?

Collinson:I was 11 years old. In those days, you had this thing called the 11+ exam. It's not there now, but it really was a key moment, very young, eleven years old. You either went up to the grammar school which was heading towards university, or you went to the secondary modern school where you might be heading towards more practical, vocational types of courses. The grammar school was the more academic.

Scarpino:So that grammar school, that exam puts you on the academic track at age eleven.

Collinson:Yeah, and it's too early. That was there in Britain for many, many years, the 11+ exam it was called. And now people have realized you can really damage a lot of people at secondary modern who should… By and by they've taken that away, and I think that's a good thing. But yes, it was a big issue whether you passed. A lot of my friends from my secondary school, I never really saw again because they went to a totally different school.

Scarpino:Like a technical track.

Collinson:Yeah. Exactly. At the grammar school, the first year, we were taught Latin, which I must admit was a little bit of a struggle.

Scarpino:I had Latin my first year as well in what we call high school, grades nine through twelve.

Collinson:Yes.

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:Yep. Very similar, yeah.

Scarpino:I don't use the Latin very much. 

Again, as you think back on your time as a young man or in your youth, were there any individuals who helped shape your character, who contributed to the adult you became? You've talked about your parents, but were there other people you'd put in that mix?

Collinson:Well, there were friends at school. I think golfing friends. I've got a friend called Steve who I talked to last week, we grew up together. He's two years older than me, but we played a lot of golf when we were kids, and so we look back on a very happy time when we were kids together. He introduced me to Neil Young, played After the Gold Rush to me in 1970, and I’ve been a Neil Young fan ever since.

Scarpino:You're talking about Neil Young, the musician?

Collinson:Is there any other? (laughs)

Scarpino:Alright. I just wanted to be sure we're talking about the same Neil Young.

Collinson:Yeah, that's the man. I'm more of a Neil Young fan than he is now, but he introduced me to Neil Young. We used to go to a lot of concerts together in the early ‘70s. We saw Neil Young at Manchester Palace in 1973, so the slightly infamous tour partly because he didn't want to play all his hits.

Scarpino:Oh.

Collinson:He played an album that he'd not released. He played the whole album through and then everybody was shouting you know play Southern Man or Heart of Gold or Down by the River or whatever. And Nils Lofgren, his guitarist, who also works with Bruce Springsteen, said, “Alright, we're going to play a song you've heard before now,” and he played Tonight's the Night again which he played, nobody had heard of before, the album Tonight's the Night which didn't come out for another two years, and he played that song again. It was almost like he was resisting the audience's desire to hear the great hits.

Scarpino:And that's what people go to concerts for.

Collinson:Well, that's right. In the encore, he played Cowgirl in the Sand, I think. Anyway, it was slightly disappointing, except that the backup band was stunning. I'd heard them before and I had their album, but they were not well known at all. I don't know how I’d come across them, but I had. And they played this set and my friend Steve, he's been a fan ever since. They’re a band called the Eagles.

Scarpino:Oh, yeah. (laughs) They were the backup band?

Collinson:They were the backup for Neil, yeah. And that night they just… they were the best backup band I've ever seen.

Scarpino:I would imagine that was the case.

Collinson:And then we'd go to see Elton John and other… Saw Elton John a few times in the northwest of England. So, Steve was a big influence. Being two years older as well, he could drive before I could and he just knew a lot more about life than I did all the time, but don't tell him I said that.

Scarpino:Alright. (laughs)

Collinson:Then a very good friend of my parents, Gordon. I always called him Uncle Gordon. He wasn't actually, but he was a friend uncle. He took me down to Blackpool Football Club. I really enjoyed that. We used to go regularly to watch the games. I'm still a Blackpool fan, as is Keith Grint. We not only have shared professional interests, we still complain like crazy about what's happening at Blackpool Football Club. And we both really like Neil Young, so we've got a lot of shared interests.

Scarpino:Good for him.

Yeah, my oldest son played soccer. I mean not… a reasonably high level, but what he found out - he traveled a lot as a young man – was that he could be almost anywhere and make friends because he could play soccer.

Collinson:Absolutely, absolutely. This morning we had breakfast, my friend Pam and I, and this guy who was serving us, we just got talking and he said, “Oh, are you from England? I'm going to England in a couple of weeks to see Arsenal play.” I said, “Oh why are you going?” I thought perhaps he was supporting the away team. No, he supports Arsenal and he lives here. 

Scarpino:How about that?

Collinson:Yeah, so we had a good chat about football. It's a good medium. Like you say with your son, it's a good medium for getting conversations going with people.

Scarpino:I lived in Colombia for a while and I'm not fluent Spanish, but I used to go to the bar and watch soccer. It's hard to follow because the Spanish they use isn't what you learn in class. There’s a lot of technical terms for soccer that you just have to learn.

Collinson:Yes. You mean Colombia the country, not Columbia, Ohio.

Scarpino:No.

Collinson:Colombia. Okay.

Scarpino:I taught at Universidad de los Andes in English. I can tell you about that when the recorders aren't running, but that was quite a gig. 

You mentioned Keith Grint. I wanted to talk to you about your ongoing collaboration with him. When did you start collaborating with Keith Grant? When did that begin?

Collinson:I got the chair at Lancaster in autumn 2001 almost simultaneously with the Twin Towers. 

Scarpino:Oh, my goodness.

Collinson:It was that week I was offered the job. Extreme intensity. Well, I think you'd have to check with Keith. He was at Oxford at that time and he ran the first conference there. But soon after that he moved to be another chair in leadership at Lancaster. So, we were working together which was great. I knew Keith from before. Once we were both at Lancaster together, that was a fantastic time. So that was probably about 2003 or 2004 when he arrived. I think we decided to set up the journal before he came to Lancaster. We were talking to Sage before that. We said, “We’ll run the conference,” because I was on the committee, “we'll see, is there a community outside of America that's interested in leadership? Because at the moment we don't know. We think there is. But let's run a conference at Oxford, let's run it at Christmas when there's no other competition.” Maybe not the best time of year to run it, but there's no competing other things. It's the only conference I know that's run at that time. And let's see, and there was, again you’d have to check with Keith, certainly over 100 people and it was a great event. Then we realized, yes, there is an interest in looking at leadership that's not just Leadership Quarterly and the ILA, which I think at that time the ILA was the Interdisciplinary Leadership Association. It changed its name to International at some point. It was funded by Kellogg's, and I think it was primarily focused on the public sector. There seemed to me to be a big gap with the private sector. Well, there's leadership in the private sector as well and nobody seems to be talking about that. And there's leadership in Colombia, there's leadership in Japan, there's leadership in China that takes different cultural forms. And we just seem to be looking at American leaders, using predominantly quantitative positivist methodologies, not really oral histories at all, producing very quantitative papers, which…

Scarpino:Mostly psychologists were doing the work.

Collinson:Exactly, exactly, which aren't sort of speaking to the rest of the world. That's why we started to think, well, maybe we should set up a journal. It's going to be a lot of work, but we'll give it a go and see. Before that, I'd been helping run the Organisation and Control of the Labour Process Conference. And they'd taken a different approach. That was with David Knight who was my PhD supervisor at Manchester and Hugh Wilmot who was… well he was at Aston at the time, he's down in London now. And their approach was to run the conferences and then from the conference each year to publish an edited book on the…

Scarpino:And the name of the conference was?

Collinson:The Organisation and Control of the Labour Process Conference. It was particularly inspired by Harry Braverman's work on Labor and Monopoly Capital, which was a critique of Taylorism and scientific management and how that was de-skilling workers.

Scarpino:You see yourself as a qualitative researcher?

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:Yep. Yeah. I can do numbers if forced. I supervised seven master’s summer dissertations, six of whom were Chinese students, and they love their numbers. So, you've got to go with it sometimes.

Scarpino:I took a course on what we called quantitative research as a graduate student. I was the only humanist in the class. I was definitely, as they say, odd man out.

Collinson:Yes. I worry that the numbers may detach you from the process and you lose the meaning. The meaning then becomes what the researcher imposes on the numbers. I know they're processing the meanings of… they're quantifying these meanings, but I think an oral history or an interview allows the researched person to speak more clearly and more openly and clarify some of the issues in a better way than the numbers do. The numbers are okay for large scale patterns, and the big surveys are really important, but they have their limits.

Scarpino:Did you go down that research path because it seemed like a better path? Or did you, I don't mean this the way it sounds, stumble into it?

Collinson:Yeah. I'm trying to think back now.

Scarpino:Because the body of literature was coming from the psychologists and the number cruncher people.

Collinson:Yeah. So, do you mean in my early days?

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:In my early days I wasn't focused on leadership specifically. When I was doing my master's I was looking at the shop-floor culture. Obviously, I was looking at the senior management, the managers in this factory I was looking at in Oldham, Lancashire, and also the leaders there…

Scarpino:Truck manufacturing factory.

Collinson:Yeah, it was called Seddon Atkinson Vehicles. They were owned by International Harvester. I think I can release the identity now, because I don't think they're there anymore. 

Scarpino:The name of the company was?

Collinson:Seddon Atkinson Vehicles.

Scarpino:Okay.

Collinson:Limited.

Scarpino:Seddon.

Collinson:Seddon.

Scarpino:I'm asking you this because the transcriber is never going to figure it out.

Collinson:S_E_D_D_O_N.

Scarpino:Thank you.

Collinson:Atkinson, A_T_K_I_ N_S_O_N.

Scarpino:Okay. That'll do it.

Collinson:Yeah, yeah. I don't think there's any problem with revealing their identity now. So, it was always based on interviews. To get access I had to talk to the management. I knew one of them, the personnel manager from… We used to have these seminar presentations on a Thursday evening at Manchester Business School, which at the time was separate from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. Now they've merged. It used to be a lot of academics, but also a lot of HR types coming from different companies. I got talking to this Mr. Archer, Sid Archer, and asked about access, because I'm doing my master's research by this point. This is after the undergraduate. And he said, “Well yeah, come along and we'll talk about it.” So, he approved it. And I had to talk to another HR manager and he said, “Well, you say you want to find out what makes them work, what motivates them. I can tell you now, their interest in money. It can save you a lot of time, you don't need to go on the…” I said, “Well, I'd still like to see how it works because this is my master's.” And he said, “Well, I'll talk to the trade union and the trade (inaudible),” and the guy who ran the… the shop steward, quite a fierce character. It was the convener of the union, sorry, the convener, so he was above the shop steward. He was the top man. He said, “Okay, well I'm not prepared to speak to you at all because I think you could be a spy for management, but I'll bring sixty lads, sixty other guys into a room and you stand up and talk to them. If you convince them to talk to you then fair enough. If they say no, that's it.” So, he sort of still sat on the fence. He always said, “I'm taking the Fifth Amendment,” which of course is… (laughs)

Scarpino:I didn't know you had that. (laughs)

Collinson:I was a young 19-year old confronted by all these experienced skilled guys, asking them if they would be willing to let me interview them. Somehow they agreed. So, that got me onto the shop floor. But I have to say what… it was a guy called Tommy Yates and what he… I was going there for about 18 months, two years primarily, and then I went back later but to catch up. But what he used to tell me was… he did start to speak to me over time, but it was over a long time. I couldn't use a tape recorder, it was too noisy. So when I was interviewing people, I'd make notes. But the minute I got my note… He was giving me all this incredible information. But the minute I got the notebook out, he was off. That was interesting. I'm sorry, we got off the original question.

Scarpino:You're doing fine.

Collinson:The interesting thing about that was that it illustrated to me a key factor about just the very act of trying to negotiate access to this company revealed these issues about culture, about trust or the lack of it, about the fundamental relations between the union and the workforce and the management, and how the management were reasonably relaxed about me going in. I said I'd do some sort of report at the end, but they would be anonymous and confidential, and they were happy about that. Whereas the union, and I think some of the workers thought, if management are letting you into this company, management don't do anything unless it's good for them, they must think that they're going to get the mood of the lads on the shop-floor and you're going to act as some sort of management spy. So, the insecurity was embedded in that relationship, that they didn't trust anything. Whatever the management said, they believed there was another ulterior motive being concealed behind it.

Scarpino:Were they right?

Collinson:Well, not in this case. I wasn't a management spy.

Scarpino:No, no, I wasn't asking you if you were a spy.

Collinson:Yeah, yeah. But I think in many cases they knew that management were just trying to increase productivity. Some of the guys would say to me, “Oh, you know, everything's fine when the company's doing well, but as soon as there's a downturn in the market, we're the first to lose our jobs.” What they were saying was there's a fundamental job insecurity here that can't be denied, and all this flowery language from management is trying to conceal the fact that we're the first to lose our jobs. That's how they saw it.

Collinson:Isn't the responsibility of management to make the company profitable?

Collinson:Of course.

Scarpino:Making a company profitable is not always what the workers see in their own best interest. I mean obviously they want a job and if the company is losing money they're going to get fired.

Collinson:Exactly.

Scarpino:My wife worked for a company, and they were sort of up and down. Every time they had a down, they fired the accounts payable clerk, which was the lowest, poor young girl who was making minimum wage and she'd be gone. Then as soon as things went back up again, they'd hire somebody else.

Collinson:Yeah. Absolutely. But this is the issue of, as I'm sure you know only too well, the power of perception. In a way, you're challenging what they were thinking, but that doesn't matter.

Scarpino:Talk about the power of perception.

Collinson:Yeah, it doesn't matter. They believed it. They strongly believed that. That was their working class experience in this northern town in England, that basically they were… in a Marxist sense, their labor was a commodity that was bought and sold and that’s the reality of life.

Scarpino:It is the nature of labor in an industrial system, isn't is?

Collinson:Yes.

Scarpino:It's a commodity that's bought and sold.

Collinson:Yeah. For them, not all of them, I mean I don't want to overstate the counterculture, but there was a counterculture there, but there were other guys who were very pro management and almost deferential in some ways. But they did have that, certainly the union and the shop stewards were very what you might call quite suspicious of management.

Scarpino:Was the union a strong force?

Collinson:Yeah, it was a full trade union closed shop in those days. Not anymore, but this was late ‘70s. This was just at the end of the Callaghan government in the UK, and Margaret Thatcher came to power in '79 as the first female prime minister with an agenda, really, of smashing the unions, particularly the mining union. 

Scarpino:And she did it. She did it, yeah.

Collinson:Yeah. My research in ‘79, really I was going there until about ’84 or ’85, it was that time, that period where the bigger picture… where there were attempts to reduce the possibility of a closed shop and erode the power of the unions.

Scarpino:A closed shop means you have to join the union to work there.

Collinson:Yeah. Tommy Yates, the convenor, he said, “Now we've got these American managers, they've come in from Chicago, and International Harvester now owns the company.” Up until I think about ‘75 it had been a family run company. There was the Seddon family in Oldham and the Atkinson family in Preston and they merged. But these owners were there, so famously he was called George Seddon. Everybody called him Mister George. It was a very, very deferential culture. One guy said, “Well look, we knew where we stood with the old Seddon family. They were bastards… (I'm using their language)… but we knew where we stood. The trouble is now we've got these Americans and they're really good at talking. They're much more sophisticated. But we don't know where we stand anymore. We don't know whether it's true what they're saying. And we don't know if the managers, the senior people who are here from Chicago, are actually speaking on behalf of… Could it be different at the head office?” Because all of a sudden the power's been moved over to another country.

Scarpino:To Chicago or wherever International Harvester was.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:It's in northern Illinois somewhere, I know that.

Collinson:I think so, yeah. So that created… you've got this fascinating clash of cultures with it. You've got the old owners of the company with their family-based approach which was probably quite dictatorial. But then you've got this new American approach which is much more articulate and much more committed to communication. They produced this new magazine, it was like a big newspaper and it was called Truckman.

Scarpino:Truckman.

Collinson:Truckman. It was like a newspaper and the headline in the first newspaper was “Call me Barney.” And this was Barney White, the new CEO who came over from Chicago. And he said, “We've got a great company here, but I can see we've got a communication problem. And what we want to do is really improve our communication with everybody in the company. Truckman is going to help with that. Any time you see me in the company, I'm not Mr. White, I'm Barney. Call me Barney.” You see, you've got this new culture superimposed on a previously more autocratic family culture which apparently is more inclusive. And he's committed to communication. But then talking to guys on the shop floor, they started to see tensions and contradictions in what was said and what was done. Barney said in this article, “I'm going to be on the shop floor every morning at 7:30. Please tell me your problems.” Now, I wasn't there every day so I'm only going on what these guys were telling me, and they this was quite universal. This is 12 or 18 months later, “We've never seen Barney on the shop floor once, never mind every morning at 7:30.” So they started to see discrepancies that made them feel, is this just words? On the noticeboard near some of the machinery - there was a big trade union noticeboard that you kind of walked past as you went in - and the convener had cut out “Call me Barney” and he crossed out call me and he put “More Bullshit from Barney.” (laughs)

Scarpino:Well, if Barney would have shown up, he'd have seen it.

Collinson:Yeah, and if he'd been as good as his word, I think they would have been pleasantly surprised, and I think it would have helped. But if it's only words… So I've kind of learned about leadership, if it's only lip service… you've got to follow through. Words are actions in many ways. They're not just words. They have effects. Words have effects. But if there's this gap between what people say in positions of authority and then what they do, one thing I learned very quickly there - and followers, now broadly define followers because you know there’s a whole debate about what is a follower - but insofar as employees are followers they're very acutely aware of what's being said and what's being done. So that was one thing I learned, because that fueled this sort of counterculture of us and them. It was there before with the family company. But you've got the management saying, “Come on, let's communicate better,” they're moving towards the workforce as opposed to the old management. But then the workforce is moving two steps back and saying, “No, we want to keep a distance. We don't trust you.” 

Scarpino:Do you think that's common in those industrial work situations?

Collinson:I think so. I started this by saying these different cultures. It's fascinating isn't it, the more you travel and you see different cultures. The culture here in Prague is absolutely fascinating. The history of this place is remarkable. And you've got these different cultures and they come together. It's not just about communication, it's about negotiating those cultural historical differences as well, and finding some universal or shared agenda, as you say. Because, really, they're all in it together in a way - to use that phrase that the Conservative Party uses - we're all in this together. They are all in it together, and the success of the company is based on them all working well together. But the shop floor said, “No, no, the only way we deal with this, management manage, workers work. You can't try and confuse that. It's got to be…” That's how they try to secure themselves. I don't think it was a successful strategy.

Scarpino:That's how the workers try to secure themselves, or management?

Collinson:No, the workers.

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:They said, “I don't want these managers trying to get us involved in managing the company.” But the irony there was the workers had all sorts of creative ideas on how to improve production, how to make it better. But it didn't get communicated back up. “No, that's not my job. I mean it's obvious, look, that machine has not worked for three weeks. We could have sorted that out in an afternoon, but nobody's told me to do it, so I'm not going to do it.” There's a kind of intransigence there that was ultimately counter-productive, I think. I don't want to romanticize this, like a Marxist would want to see all sorts of revolutionary potential in this skepticism. I don't want to romanticize leaders, and I don't want to romanticize followers either. I think we have to be very cautious and cognizant of the potential for doing that, elevating leaders as the superheroes or from a mainstream leadership perspective which I think has blighted the discipline for many years. But equally from a much more critical Marxist position to elevate the working classes as potentially revolutionary either. I think both extremes are problematic.

Scarpino:Can you talk about blighting the discipline? Which is a phrase you just used.

Collinson:Well, so this is years later. After the master’s I went to St. Andrews for four years. I can talk about that in the oil rig research if you want at some point. But moving on, I then did ten years at Warwick, and that was all on organization theory and organization studies. And I was kind of moving up the hierarchy from the shop floor through middle management to leadership. Then I got the chair at Lancaster, which was in leadership. I asked for it to be leadership and organization because it seemed to me to be… And then I started to really focus on the literature on leadership and really read up on where are we with this stuff? So much of it was conflating leadership with leaders at that time. This was 2000. This is all about leaders' traits, their behaviors, their personalities, how we develop them, everything about their identity and how they behave as individuals. The idea of leadership as a relationship, which seems obvious really, wasn't very influential at the time. It was all fixated on the leader, and it could lead in some areas to seeing the leader as the hero, often male, of the organization as the person who's going to… the visionary that, you know…

Scarpino:Right.

Collinson:And then there's all the stories of the great business leaders who've transformed organizations. We could name all those. There's a great paper by James Meindl, who's no longer with us…

Scarpino:Meindl.

Collinson:Meindl, M E I N D L.

Scarpino:Okay.

Collinson:…with some colleagues in the ASQ, 1985. So it had been out a few years by this time, but it had been largely ignored, I would say. I think it's called The Romance of Leadership. He used this word and it was really saying, look, leadership studies and the media treatment of leadership is fixated on leaders, and it's an oversimplification. He sort of argues well  - he does a quantitative analysis. It's a very, very long detailed paper showing lots of examples of how leadership romanticism occurs, but it is an oversimplification of a complex set of dynamics in organizations and/or societies of the role of leaders and to what extent does the leader control everything in a company or in a society? And are we in danger of neglecting all these other factors? Obviously, individual leaders are important, but they're by no means the be all and end all. His view was that this seems to be like a short-hand simplification way of dealing with leadership, let's just focus on the impact of leaders. Whereas actually you've got all sorts of organizational, regional, national, occupational, all sorts of factors to take into account when looking at the success or failure of the organization, and the leader is just one of those. It was I thought a ground-breaking paper, so I sort of grabbed that because I thought that this connects better with my understanding of organizations that I was coming to leadership with than a lot of this stuff that just seems to want to prioritize and elevate the leader.

Scarpino:So, you moved from organizational studies to leadership?

Collinson:Yes, exactly.

Scarpino:I'm going to ask you a question, but I'm going to preface it by saying that … First, I'm going to ask you, when you became interested in this and you were looking for literature to read, was there much available in the UK or Europe?

Collinson:Yeah, there was. Well, it was predominantly American.

Scarpino:Okay, well, I mean indigenous to the UK or Europe?

Collinson:Oh indigenous, no there wasn't. That's why Keith and I talked and said, “Well, let's organize a conference and see if we can find another community,” but there was quite a few in Europe that flew over for it.

Scarpino:And just showed up for this?

Collinson:Yeah, yeah.

Scarpino:So obviously you realize you're filling a need.

Collinson:Yes, exactly.

Scarpino:In the United States, where a lot of the scholarship was when you guys got started, one of the seminal books in leadership is by a guy named James MacGregor Burns.

Collinson:Yes.

Scarpino:And it's not a quantitative study.

Collinson:No.

Scarpino:Not even close.

Collinson:No, it's more political science.

Scarpino:Yeah.

Scarpino:I actually had a chance to meet him.

Collinson:Oh, fantastic.

Scarpino:Very nice, he hugged me. (laughs) He's a really nice man.

Collinson:I never met him unfortunately.

Scarpino:But James MacGregor Burns is not the way the field went.

Collinson:No. He made the classic contribution about transformational leadership based on FDR, was it? President Roosevelt is the New Deal, is that right? 

Scarpino:Yes.

Collinson:He was, I think, inspired by FDR’s tremendous impact as a leader. Interesting, I'm moving back to focusing on the leader now, aren't I? That's another issue. So yeah, just on Burns, that contribution was fantastic, but then was he a political scientist, really, Burns? Leadership scholar, let's call it. 

Scarpino:He became a leadership scholar. Yeah.

Collinson:I think that book is wonderful. The distinction he made between transformational and transactional was really helpful to the field. And transformational then became such a concept for leadership scholars to work with. Then people like Bernie Bass took that and put it into organizations and came up with the four I's, the idealized, whatever, those four I's that he talks about, and Ron Riggio, a good friend of mine who is here I'm sure this week.

Scarpino:Is he here?

Collinson:Oh, I think he’s here.

Scarpino:I interviewed him.

Collinson:Yeah, he's a great guy,isn't he? Really like Ron.

Scarpino:A nice man.

Collinson:I don't know whether it's Riggio or Riggio (Rijjio phonetically). 

Scarpino:I think it's Riggio (Rijjio phonetically).

Collinson:Riggio (Rijjio phonetically), well that's helpful, thank you. I only call him Ron. But anyway, so yeah Burns' legacy went in a slightly different direction I guess, it got modified. And the danger - and I'm not particular about Bass or Riggio - the danger and the way it then got translated was that it became embroiled in leadership romanticism again, which wasn't…. Burns' original focus was on leaders understanding followers' needs, their identities, their values, their wants, and then inspiring them to become more than they thought they could be. It was an emancipatory notion of leadership. But as it became embedded in leadership studies, it became about the individual leader again, and the relational aspect with the followership kind of got lost in some studies, I would say. Could I just say one more thing?

Scarpino:Absolutely. This is your show. (laughs)

Collinson:But having said all that about James MacGregor Burns, one of the things that I thought was very illuminating in one of his publications about 30 years later, I think it was, reflecting - it was one of the introductions to a book which was very helpful for me - was that he talked about - I think looking back, I overemphasized the distinction between transformational and transactional. And actually, when you look at practice, there's an overlap between them. But I was trying to create a conceptual distinction, and I think he could see that it had been treated as a total either or. And that was helpful when Burns made that self-insight all those years later, because at that time I was then getting into this notion of the problem of dichotomies in leadership studies and how more - what I call dialectical for a better definition – but leadership dialectics might be a better way of thinking about these dynamics, that we as human beings, never mind as leadership scholars, we like to think in black and white terms. It's either leaders or it's followers, it's transformational or it's transactional, all these theory Y, theory X. We create these conceptual distinctions and then we believe they're real and we sort of reify them as if they are real entities. But actually, the world we live in is more complex and more ambiguous than that.

Scarpino:Isn't that sort of what scholars do, is figure out how to impose order on what's otherwise chaotic?

Collinson:Precisely, yeah, that's true, but it can limit your analysis then. For example, the other… so I've acknowledged what Burns said in some papers. But the other issue that I had with Burns’ legacy, which I think was taken down, was that he made another artificial distinction between leadership and power wielders. And he was again very explicit about that. The logic of that argument in the 1978 book was that Hitler wasn't a leader.

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:And Joanne Ciulla has written very well on the Hitler problem in leadership studies. On many criteria of transformational, Hitler ticks all the boxes. So how can that…. That's not what we want. That's not what we're advocating as scholars, is it?

Scarpino:But I mean that's one of the issues with the whole body of leadership scholarship is that it has to be good or it doesn't count. Or the person has to be good or it doesn't count.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:So, you know, Pol Pot or Hitler or Idi Amin, they can't be leaders, that they're something else.

Collinson:Yeah. But to me, I disagree.

Scarpino:I'm going to talk to you about this in more detail in a few minutes.

Collinson:Okay. 

Scarpino:Alright, so I want to talk to you a little bit about education and career development. Between ’78 and ‘88 you earned three degrees from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. And I mentioned the bachelor's degree in science with honors, master's degree in science, and PhD. Why the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology for all three degrees?

Collinson:Because of a wonderful man called Mr. Harper.

Scarpino:Mr. Harper.

Collinson:Who I've never seen once I started my degrees. Mr. Harper was my Economics teacher at Blackpool Grammar School sixth form. You do five years in the grammar school, so that was up to ‘73, and then you can carry on and do A levels in those days. There are different names now. And then if you get decent A levels you can go to university. So those two years, 16, 17 and 18, and I chose… one of my subjects I did was economics. And I loved it. I loved the theory and I just loved economics as a subject. Of the four I did, that was the one I enjoyed the most. And so then I was talking to him about applying for universities and what to do and I was thinking of economics, and he said, “No, no, don't do economics. I know you enjoy it David, but do management or business studies.” He didn't quite put it as assertive as that, but he said, “Have you thought about that? Because you can do economics, but you also get all the other subjects you're introduced to.” Management and business was kind of a new discipline developing in the ‘70s. And he said, “So it's got all these positives, it opens your mind to other things, but equally I would say having done economics at university, it's pretty dry and it's pretty theoretical. And it's based on all sorts of assumptions that may or may not be compatible with the real world.” One of our textbooks for economic A level was Economics and the Real World. We were very theoretically applied, which was good. But he said, “I'm not sure where you go with some of the theories that they apply at university.” So, I started to look for management degrees rather than economics. I went to a few universities, but Manchester was quite convenient. It's only fifty miles from home. It was a nice compromise.

Scarpino:Did you live on campus?

Collinson:I lived in the city, yeah. There were five of us living in a place next to a hall of residence in our first year, so we were there just for the first year ’75-76, and we're meeting up again because it's fifty years.

Scarpino:Wow.

Collinson:Four of them, I haven't seen for fifty years. We’re meeting up in Manchester in a couple of weeks.

Scarpino:I'm going to ask you a question, a little self-reflection question here. We’ve been talking about what you were doing in grammar school and as a teenager and as a young man. You sought out courses in economics. I raised teenagers, three of them, and one of them has a PhD and works in Northeastern.

Collinson:Fantastic. A chip off the old block.

Scarpino:But, well, he's got a better… He's a biologist, but here's the question. When did you realize that you were not like other kids? Most kids are not seeking out courses in economics and doing the things that you did. You did play sports, but you had a mind for this that somebody could have… Here's what I'm thinking and what I was thinking as you were talking. I had a graduate student once who had kids of her own and she got to know my kids and they got to know each other, and she looked at me one time and said, “He's going to be a professor,” and he was about 11, and she was right, you know, she was right.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:When did you realize what you're interested in, what you sought out, what you imagined for yourself in the future wasn't what most of your peers were seeking out doing and imagining for themselves in the future?

Collinson:On the first point I'd say I was an only child, and in some ways I was never really sure of my own abilities because of that, I think. You sort of have a slightly more solitary life in some ways, or you think you do, as an only child. There was that side creating uncertainty, I would say. But I think to answer your question fully I would say I did my first two years as an undergraduate at Manchester and it was fine. I did psychology, I did sociology, I did economics, production, different marketing, we did marketing bits and bobs, and industrial psychology. It was fine, but I didn't think I was going to be an academic. And then in the final third year, you could do five subjects, taught subjects, or you could do four taught subjects and a dissertation. I decided to do a dissertation and decided to do … at that time I was really interested in soccer. At that time in the ‘70s, the tribal nature of crowd behavior was actually deep, I would say, in the UK. I think we've kind of got on top of it a bit now, although it's still there. 

Scarpino:Well, the fans were pretty aggressive in those soccer stadiums.

Collinson:Oh yeah. Oh absolutely, absolutely. I thought, well, I'd like to study crowd behavior. At the time, my supervisor for the dissertation was Mike Smith who was a psychologist and he was very helpful. He got me free tickets to Manchester United and Manchester City. I went and I tape-recorded the crowd behavior. It was serendipitous, so there's a lot of luck involved in this. A guy called Peter Marsh, called Marsh, I think it's Peter, published this book called The Rules of Disorder, an Oxford don, and he'd researched the Oxford Football Club. His argument was, and he was an anthropologist, that what looks like total anarchy and chaos is not; even these football fans are informed by rules of disorder. I now thought that's really interesting. So I used that. The book came out just when I needed some… There wasn't a lot of publication. There were lots of newspaper articles, but not many academics had looked at it. There was another guy, Ian Taylor, who'd written about… He was a Marxist and he'd argued that in the old days, footballers either went down the pit, became miners, or they escaped it by going into football, but they stayed local to their communities. And the communities were so proud that their young lads were representing them. Everywhere the teams are named after localities, aren't they? Even though now in the Premier League in England you'd be lucky if you've got one English player on the team. It's changed a lot. But Taylor's thesis was one of what he called embourgeoisement, I think, and it was a Marxist analysis of how increasingly there was this separation between the players and the communities and how these players were now getting paid more and more money, and they were getting more and more detached from the community.

Scarpino:And they weren’t from the local communities.

Collinson:No, no, increasingly. His argument there was, you know, using the Marxist notion of alienation, these communities express their alienation through sort of violence. So that was another way of looking at it. But apart from Marsh and Taylor, I didn't have much to go on. But it was really after Christmas that year, so that was spring 1978, that would be my answer to your question, it was writing that thesis up, I really enjoyed it. It was the first thing I'd really… Whereas I'd been writing essays to get through classes…

Scarpino:For the grades…

Collinson:Yeah, exactly. I really enjoyed it. Because I had no real guidelines. By then talking not just to Mike Smith, my supervisor, but to David Knight, who has written on leadership and who became my master's and PhD supervisor, his ideas on the issue of identity were really helpful there in understanding the importance of identity for these football fans, the colors, the group, the tribal sense of self that it validated. Everything was really about identity. So that was really helpful. To answer your question, it was the writing up of that dissertation that suddenly made me think I'd like to do more of this. I just really enjoyed the process of it. And funnily enough, that’s typically what they say to students, do what you want, what you really enjoy doing. They gave me the Lomax annual prize for the best presentation on the football crowd behavior. It was the process of doing it that really made me think maybe I could do more of this, maybe I could pursue this. There weren’t a lot of jobs at the time. I wasn't sure, but I thought well if I could get funding for a masters, I'll do that.

Scarpino:Your professors were okay with you doing your research and your undergraduate thesis on football? Nobody said this is trivial or…?

Collinson:No, because it's headline news every weekend. You know, there was chaos, there was another big fight on the… Then years later there was the disaster at Hillsborough where ninety-seven people died.

Scarpino:The crowd stampeding.

Collinson:Yeah, exactly. But the beautiful thing about the word “management” is it can mean so many different things. The management of crowds seemed like a really good way to frame the research. How do we manage these crowds so that there isn't violence between them?

Scarpino:How do we do that?

Collinson:Yeah, well the big solution after Hillsborough was to make all stadium seating, all seating. That was the first big structural thing that they did. Now you've got all tickets, you know who sat in what seat. The clubs know. There are cameras. Now the monitoring is much… and of course the crowds know that they're being monitored more now. So they have to reduce the aggressive behavior.

Scarpino:You talked about football and sports, you used terms like tribal sense of self and so on. As a management and then leadership scholar, how do you view the significance of this kind of sport in English society or any particular society? It won't work so well in the United States, because we don't do soccer.

Collinson:No, you do.

Scarpino:We do now, yes, we have professionals.

Collinson:But American football and baseball and basketball and golf, I mean, those four are massively important. I won't mention the Ryder Cup, but anyway let's move on. (laughs)

Scarpino:Indianapolis 500.

Collinson:Yeah. Well, that's close to home. I think in British society…. Well, here's one example. My friend Pam and I left on Monday, and we got a taxi from my home in Lytham St. Annes to the airport. The guy who was driving the taxi turned out to be a life-long Blackpool supporter as well. So it was very easy to talk to him. And I said, “So what made you get into…? And he said, Well, it was my father and he took me.” And that was like with my Uncle Gordon, he took me. And I think those generations, it's just like a social reproduction process, isn't it? They pass the values down, and because these teams are representing a town, the identity of the town becomes important. Often it's the proximity of local other towns where the identities are at most intention. For example, the big one in the northwest is Manchester United versus Liverpool. I mean there is no love lost there. Sometimes it gets exaggerated, but there's more tension between those two clubs than, say, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur in London, which is a lot further away. It's the proximity. Blackpool has a big rivalry with Preston North End, which is only twenty miles away. I think it gets tied up with masculinity as well. Much more women go to football now than ever, so it's not exclusively men, but that importance that men ascribe to soccer in the UK, not all men but a lot of men, is very powerful. It’s also expressed in the success of the national team. Scotland did well last week so they're all very pleased about that, the Scots. And of course Scottish football supporters… English supporters always want Scotland to do well. Whoever England is playing, Scotland supporters are absolutely fanatical supporters because they just want England to always lose. (laughs)

Scarpino:I was going to say, they support the other side.

Collinson:Yes, a very perverse relationship. But it's a very powerful source of identity, community, a relationship, sense of self, really is an important part of many people's lives, football.

Scarpino:What does the crowd action, you know, participation in the crowd and what goes on there, what does that say about masculinity?

Collinson:Well, when it gets into violence and when it gets into even verbal violence where you're actually chanting and singing and shouting at the opposing fans - you don't know who they are, you've never met them, you don’t know anything about them other than they are the other. And it's this thing like is on the shop floor and that thing about distinctions. People seem to get comfortable with an us-and-them mentality, that psychological sense of this is me and this is them, and they are the others. 

Scarpino:Do you think (inaudible-both talking) requires a certain amount of anonymity for that to unfold.

Collinson:Anonymity.

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:Well, in a way yeah. If you get to know them over a drink, you probably wouldn't… yeah absolutely.

Scarpino:Probably wouldn't act like that.

Collinson:No, you wouldn't. It is that distance. But there’s the other dynamic, which is it's not just about the other, it's also about these young men because they're often late teenagers, often that kind of age group. They're trying to demonstrate their masculinity to their pals and their mates and to say “look how tough I am?” There's that aspect to it as well, and these other people are just the unfortunate audience for that.

Scarpino:Well, that's what I was actually wondering about, but I didn't want to lead the witness.

Collinson:Thank you, no. And that's one of the problems with issues of identity because it's partly about lots of different things. It's in relation to others who you are in opposition to. It's in relation to others who are your friends. And it's also in relation to who you think you are. So, there's some inherent ambiguities about identity. 

Scarpino:You have an ongoing collaboration with Keith Grint whose name has come up.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:I think you mentioned when you started collaborating with him, but just briefly remind me.

Collinson:That was when he joined the Management School at Lancaster in our department. It was a couple of years after I joined. Of course, Keith was from Lancaster. Keith went to Lancaster Grammar School.

Scarpino:I actually didn't know that.

Collinson:Yeah, so in a way he was coming home. But he had some issues. At that time, he needed a new hip, so he was struggling a bit. They looked at buying a house, but they didn't. He was commuting a lot of the time from Oxford, which is… and to do that with a gammy hip was tough.

Scarpino:The question I'm going to ask you, I mean, you could write a book on this, so I'm just going to ask you for the benefit of somebody who uses this in the future. Could you talk a little bit about the impact of Keith Grint's scholarship on the field of leadership studies?

Collinson:Oh, yes.

Scarpino:Where does he sit in the panoply, keeping in mind that we don't really need a book on that, but I want people to have some context for what I'm going to ask you after this.

Collinson:Yeah, absolutely. Keith's background, his family's father was in the military. Part of the issue there was that they were living in different places, so he got moved around. But I think that also gave him an insight into leadership and the issues of leadership from a military perspective. A lot of these, the military issues, like the internet, they all stem from there, don't they?

Scarpino:Yeah. So, his father was in the military?

Collinson:Yes.

Scarpino:He was what rank? Do you happen to know? Was he an officer or enlisted?

Collinson:I think he was an officer. He was very successful. I think Keith got an interest in leadership. I think he did an undergraduate. He was a trade union leader, Keith, a little bit like my late wife. She was a trade union leader. But he was in the post office, so he was quite practitioner oriented. Then I think he did his PhD later than many people, didn't do it straight on from school at York. I think it was Eric Batstone who was a very famous industrial relations writer. But he got into leadership issues, and then he went to Oxford and got the lectureship at Oxford, I think. He was writing about leadership well before I was. But we knew each other because he was at Oxford and I was in Leamington Spa, which is just north of Stratford where Shakespeare was based, of course, and next to Coventry. I was at Warwick University for ten years and Keith was at Oxford. Margaret and I spent days… we went to visit the family down there and spent days in Oxford with them at that time. We knew each other before I then moved to Lancaster and then Keith moved there as well.

Scarpino:Both of you collaborated on the founding and launching of Leadership Journal.

Collinson:That's right. But I haven't quite answered your question.

Scarpino:Okay, go ahead.

Collinson:That's all about his personal life, but in terms of his contribution to the discipline, he was one of the earliest writers in the UK on leadership. He did a really good edited book, I think it was about ’97 or ’98, that was really helpful to me when I started at Lancaster. It brought a lot of the really good papers together, and he wrote a really good preface for it as well. Since then, he's made some great arguments about how we do need to distinguish between leadership and management, and how there are wicked problems that are new that we don't know how to deal with, and then there are more routine problems that managers can deal with.

Scarpino:The wicked problems are the ones that are incredibly complex and difficult to address.

Collinson:Yeah. He's drawn on writers who've made that… and I think it's been widely cited in that area. He also made a great distinction with another book he wrote on the distinction between destructive consent and constructive dissent. Destructive consent, you know, the classic there would be how there was just a conformity to the Nazis in Germany in the Second World War and a lot of people looked the other way. You can understand why, it was a hell of a difficult situation. But you could argue that was an extreme example of destructive consent where you just allow a leader and a group behind him to run riot. Whereas what I really liked about constructive dissent was that If you look to the management literature, all resistance is just a nuisance that needs sorted, it's just a misunderstanding, we need to give them more information and then they won't resist. Whereas there's so much to learn in resistance, and I like the idea of constructive descent. If managers and leaders listen a bit more and stop talking and just listen to what their workforce are telling them, they can learn. There's a great TV show which I always tell my students about, most of whom have never seen it, I don't know why, but there's a great TV show called Undercover Boss.

Scarpino:Yeah. (laughs)

Collinson:The message of every episode is these people in follower, broadly-defined, subordinate positions know so much about how the organization works now, how some of the policies don't work so we have to ignore them or we have to reinterpret them, and they also know how to make things much better. And these bosses go in and they can't believe what they're seeing. Every time it's an epiphany for them, and they come back with a completely different conception of the organization. I think Undercover Boss has been a great show.

Scarpino:Yeah, my wife and I watch that religiously, so to speak.

Collinson:Did you? Well, so I think that's a good example of what Keith called constructive descent.

Scarpino:The two of you collaborated on co-founding this peer-reviewed journal Leadership.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:First issue published in 2005.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:initially you were co-editors, you remained as editor.

Collinson:We did 10 years. They now call us the founding editors.

Scarpino:Okay.

Collinson:We're in the background.

Scarpino:You're no longer an editor?

Collinson:No.

Scarpino:Alright okay. I think they're working on their ninth volume? 

Collinson:No, no, we're well past that.

Scarpino:Way past the ninth, okay.

Collinson:The first one was 2005, it must be near 20.

Scarpino:One volume a year?

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:Okay.

Collinson:So, it's 20.

Scarpino:I guess I'm a humanist, I can't count. Alright, so why did the two of you decide to co-found a journal?

Collinson:Well, as I said, we’d arranged that first conference and just really to ask the question, is anybody interested here? Or is it just me and Keith? (laughs) And there was another couple of guys we knew were interested. But is there more than that? 

Scarpino:What would happen if you organized a party and nobody came?

Collinson:Exactly. Then we could see there was a community. I said, “Okay, I'll run the next one at Lancaster.” At Lancaster we've got this fantastic hotel right next to the main campus, which is perfect for conferences. In December, you do not want to be going from one building to another. Everything, it’s like here, everything's under one roof. It could be snowing outside, doesn't matter. It's all comfortable in here. And it's the same at Lancaster House Hotel. That's why I've run it four times in there because it's such a popular venue for it. So, with the conference, we could see it was worth doing again. We didn't know whether it was going to continue after that. This year it's still going, you know, it's great and it's at St. Andrews, which is ironic in so many ways because that's where I started my career. Anyway, that's another factor. But we then had the choice:  If we're going to try and create an outlet that's not Leadership Quarterly, you know, because of its positivist, quantitative, American focus, what are we going to do? Are we going to do edited books, like I said, about what's called the labor process? That would have been one way to go. Probably from a career perspective, you could argue in terms of immediate hits, suddenly getting all these edited books on your CV would have been quicker roots. I'd have to check with Keith now why we decided on the journal, but we did. We didn't know, it might last a year, we just didn't know. The first few issues, two and three of volume one, it was tough to find the papers. It took us probably a year's preparation to get that first issue out because we commissioned them for the first issue to try and get things going. There’s some good stuff in there. So, we decided on the journal and then followed it on from there, but that was a choice we had to make at the time.

Scarpino:Are you surprised at how well it did?

Collinson:Yes! And looking back now, I'm so pleased we did do the journal rather than edited books. But if I was looking at it selfishly from a career perspective, it probably would have been quicker hits with less hassle and stress than running a…

Scarpino:I'm not sure.

Collinson:But looking back now, I'm so delighted we did what we did.

Scarpino:You know how this works in the UK, but in the United States, all the work you put into founding a journal would go in your service category, which doesn't count a lot when it comes to promotion.

Collinson:Precisely, precisely, that's the point.

Scarpino:If you don’t do it, it's bad, but…

Collinson:Yeah. Whereas an edited book, it ticks. But by then, you see, we were both professors so we weren't under so much career pressure. As I say, we'd have to have a good chat about why did we decide on a journal rather than… but I'm so glad we did.

Scarpino:Where was the journal based?

Collinson:At Lancaster because by then Keith had arrived at Lancaster.

Scarpino:You had editorial offices and some staff?

Collinson:We had a one member staff, yeah.

Scarpino:That would be like editorial assistant or...

Collinson:Yeah, yeah.

Scarpino:More than a secretary.

Collinson:Yeah, she was good.

Scarpino:For years, across the hall from my office was the Journal of the Early Republic, and that was the editor, and then right next to him was his administrative assistant who…

Collinson:… did a lot of the work.

Scarpino:Yeah, she worked hard.

Collinson:Yeah, so that went well for a number of years. We then had various assistants through the time I was at Lancaster. Keith then left, but we were still based at Lancaster.

Scarpino:Where did you get the money to make this happen?

Collinson:Sage gave us some money for the secretary.

Scarpino:Somebody had to sell this to Sage.

Collinson:Yeah, but they were really up for it. I remember going to London for the meeting and we were chatting on the tube, are we sure we want to do this? But when we got there, they really were keen on it.

Scarpino:It wasn't a hard sell. They were prepared to…

Collinson:It wasn’t, no. One of the reasons, I remember, you've prompted me to think now, they'd done a very global survey of people. We wrote a detailed proposal, Keith and I, and then they sent this out to a lot of anonymous reviewers, and they gave us the feedback, and it was so positive.

Scarpino:By the time you showed up, they'd already done some peer review of your idea.

Collinson:Yeah, they had, and it was a woman called Sue Jones who I knew from my time at Warwick, and she was good. 

Scarpino:She was an editor there.

Collinson:Yes. She was a bit like Cynthia here. She’d been in academia and she knew academia very well, and she wanted to push new ideas. So, it was great and off we went. It was really, really heartening to see all the reviews.

Scarpino:Now that you're an emeritus professor, you've got a little bit of distance between - like two weeks - between you and your career, how do you assess the impact of that journal on the field of leadership studies in Europe?

Collinson:Well, I hope it's been helpful in giving a much broader international understanding of leadership and its cultural forms in different societies. There's lots of societies that still have been uncharted. I'd say, South America, Japan still, even China. There's still a lot more to explore and in lots of other countries, but we have been able to get some more international. Then, of course, you need editors, language editors, who can help with the language issue, which we had over the years. But also, we've been able to I think open up a space for more questioning and what I call critical approaches to the applied, whether it's a more psychodynamic one or more of a structural one or something in between. I like to think we've provided a platform for other voices that wouldn't have gotten published in Leadership Quarterly. And there's an irony in all that. During this time, the idea of leadership became more popular generally, and so there was more research available for that. And I think Leadership Quarterly had gotten more submissions. And LQ could see that they needed to go to six issues a year. But what do you call it, Leadership Bi-monthly? You know, it's not quite got the same ring as Leadership Quarterly.

Scarpino:You mentioned ‘LQ could see,’ who is that?

Collinson:Who the editors were at the time.

Scarpino:Okay, alright.

Collinson:Yeah, LQ. 

Scarpino:Oh, Leadership Quarterly, okay.

Collinson:Yeah, sorry, Leadership Quarterly. But what they couldn't do was… and they did go to six issues, bimonthly issues, but they would have preferred to just knock off the Quarterly and become Leadership, but we were already publishing on Leadership. So there was, I suspect, a bit of tension there, so they've stuck with Leadership Quarterly.

Scarpino:Even though it comes out six times a year.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:That's okay.

Collinson:It's part of their history and that's fine. But I do think, to answer your question, I do think Leadership Quarterly is a lot more international than it ever was. I think it's much broad-ranging in its thinking. Before we started, it was very, very narrow, what I call mainstream leadership studies, which is leader centrism. Nothing on followership. I remember submitting an article on followership to Leadership Quarterly probably about 2004, and they weren't really very keen on it. And oh, I forgot the guy's name, perhaps it's best not mention the editor at the time, but he was not keen on this. The reviews were good, but he still didn't want to publish it. I challenged him and I just went through his argument, and I said, “But look what the reviewers are saying, look, look, look.” Because he wanted me to do another review and I said, “Well look, it's already in there, it's there.” But I think he was so leader centric in his thinking, he just wasn't keen on a paper on followership. It's the only time I've ever challenged an editor, because I could see it's not going to be accepted. But I went through it and said these are the arguments. And he said okay.

Scarpino:And he took it.

Collinson:He took it. Good for him, thank you. Oh, I remember his name, but perhaps I shouldn't mention it. And it was published, and it's been very well cited since. Actually, there was another coincidence. There's been a lot of serendipity poeticism in my career and that was that Ron Riggio, unbeknown to me, had run a conference on followership almost at the time when my paper came out. But it was mainly American scholars, and we kind of got in touch with each other and been in touch ever since. And he said, “Oh, I just wish I'd known you were doing that, I would have invited you across for the paper.” Then I published in a few of his edited collections since then and we've stayed in touch.

Scarpino:He's a good scholar.

Collinson:He's a great guy, really great guy.

Scarpino:I looked up the Leadership Journal, Leadership Quarterly. And I'll preface this by saying I'm a humanist, but there's an impact factor for that journal.

Collinson:Oh yeah. They’re way ahead. 

Scarpino:Can you talk about that?

Collinson:Keith and I always said if we'd known in 2004 that in about 2007 or 2008 journals were suddenly going to be rated in all these quantitative ways, I think we would definitely have gone down the edited book route.

Scarpino:Edited book route.

Collinson:We would, yeah, because these weightings totally work against creativity, innovation and new journals because you can't meet these criteria because you're not established.

Scarpino:Your journal now has a pretty good impact factor.

Collinson:It's doing much better, but I don't think the impact factor is as… I don't think it represents the quality of the work. I think the quality of the work that's published since we were edited, as well as before, is much higher and much more challenging than the impact factor really allows for. But these… it's just another evaluation. And I think it stifles creativity. And yet they think with these measurements that they're just measuring creativity. But they're not just reflecting - it's like I say about words - their numbers have impacts.

Scarpino:That's right.

Collinson:The impact factor has impacts, but they don't think that. They think they're standing back and they're objective judges. No, you're engaged. Your decisions have effects.

Scarpino:You’ve got your hands in the process when you do that.

Collinson:Exactly.

Scarpino:We don't do impact factors in the humanities. I mean if I assume that it’s good, it’s no good or whatever…

Collinson:Perfect, that's how it used to be with us. As I say, when we started, we’d never heard of an impact factor in 2004.

Scarpino:You and Keith Grint also collaborated on the founding and launching and continuation of the International Studying Leadership Conference which we did talk about a little bit. It's met in numerous places including at least once in the United States.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:New Zealand, I think?

Collinson:My relationship with Joanne Ciulla, particularly, that led to the Richmond… Yeah, I'm good friends with Joanne.

Scarpino:Were you surprised at the success? It's one thing to start a conference, and it's another thing to… it's still going.

Collinson:Yeah, but we didn't know. Again, we've never tried to commercialize it or take a patent on it or anything. It just is a loose…  For many years we kept an executive committee. If somebody says, “Hey, we'd like to run the conference next year,” then we said, “Right, okay, fill in this form and send us a two page summary of what you want to do, and we as an executive committee will assess it, and we'll assess it against the others.” Usually we'd find a way of everybody having a chance, but we'd have an order of who was going to do what when. That's sort of gone by the by now. We're the past generation. But we did it for a number of years after and that worked well. I remember we were in Rome and we didn't have anyone for the next year's conference. And I said, “Well, I'll do it if need be.” But then Eric Guthey from Copenhagen was dead keen and said, “No, no I'll do it, I'll do it.” I said, “That’s fine, you do it. I'll do it next year.” It was quite flexible, but we always knew that Lancaster was there in the background if there was a gap. That's why I finished up doing it for… I didn't rush at it because it's a hell of a lot of work to run a conference.

Scarpino:I organized for years a conference, just went to different places in Indiana, and it's a lot of work.

Collinson:It’s a lot of work, but I enjoyed it. And with it being at Christmas, there was always this lovely Christmas… The hotel had this wonderful Christmas tree, and people had finished their teaching for the term, and it was a lovely end to…  the first sign of Christmas really. It worked really well. The only thing I'd say -- we did it deliberately because we wanted to not have any competition because there's so many different conferences -- I don't think it enabled as many Americans to come across.

Scarpino:Right.

Collinson:There were certain Americans that came every year, it was fantastic, but there were other people I asked to be keynotes. Joanne came to Lancaster once, she did a great keynote. But I always wanted Gayle Fairhurst to come, but she was always still teaching at that time.

Scarpino:We want to get Joanne's last name in here.

Collinson:Oh.

Scarpino:What's her last name?

Collinson:Ciulla.

Scarpino:Ciulla.

Collinson:Yeah, C-I-U-L-L-A.

Scarpino:Okay, so I'm going to switch and focus more sharply on leadership and start with a basic question. How do you define or explain leadership?

Collinson:Well, listen, there's a conference session tomorrow with Ron Riggio, Suze Wilson from New Zealand and a few others, and the title is:  Can we at least agree on some common factors? 

Scarpino:What do you tell your students when they say, “What is this?”

Collinson:Yeah, I focus on a number of factors but particularly having a vision for the organization, and I particularly like to focus on decision making as a key aspect of leadership, for good or ill. Managers can often be just implementing routine processes along the lines of Keith's distinction really. But leaders are making crucial decisions that impact for positive or negative effects on their organizations and on their societies. To me, there's a whole area… there's all the psychology of decision making but never mentions leadership. Then there's all this stuff on leadership but never mentions decision making. I think there's tremendous potential in the future for a lot more exploration of how we make decisions, what are the factors, and can we improve that process? So, vision, decision making, and the other big one is communication. It's so vital I think in leadership, but yet often is taken for granted or isn't done very well.

Scarpino:If you're assessing the significance of a particular leader or leadership, their ability to communicate has to be pretty high up on the list.

Collinson:Crucially important, and that's one of the paradoxes of promotion, I'd say, that most people in most organizations are promoted on their technical abilities. They're not promoted for their behavioral qualities. If, say, you’re in insurance, which I know well, and finance, you go up the ladder because you're good at understanding actuarial calculations.

Scarpino:Right.

Collinson:Then I see these people in relatively senior roles, and they have no idea how to communicate with anyone else.

Scarpino:Right.

Collinson:And the companies haven't trained them. They promoted them, but they have not given them any skills on what does it mean to be a human being supervising other human beings. There's a real paradox in the way that we promote people on technical criteria rather than… And yet, the more they move into senior positions, the less technical stuff they're doing, the more behavioral stuff they're doing, but they've not been trained in it. 

Scarpino:That's right. I asked you how you would define or explain leadership. How about management? How do you define or explain management generally?

Collinson:Yeah, in terms of the routinization of processes. Certainly, the labor process literature focuses on managers as controllers of the organization. How do they control, and how well do they do it? So, routinization, control and authority. Possibly my perspective is slightly different than many other people's in that I would want to argue for the overlap between leadership and management rather than become preoccupied with the distinctions. It goes back to the point I was making before, we can exaggerate those distinctions. You get writers who are very pro-leadership and say, “Oh, management's just routine, that's not the important issue, it’s leadership.” But then you get these writers who say, “Oh man, leadership is just subjective, it's just about opinion. What we need are really good managers, and you don't need leadership.” You get that in a lot of the critical management studies and critical organization studies and the labor process. They don't want to talk about leadership, they think it's irrelevant. They think that's just for psychologists to talk about personality. They want to talk about management.

Scarpino:But don't leaders also have to manage?

Collinson:That's what I'm saying, exactly. What I want to see more of is understanding that to be a good leader you've got to manage. And to be a good manager you've got to do a bit leading. It overlaps, not just complete distinctions.

Scarpino:Do you think leadership training programs as they exist in the UK and Europe recognize that?

Collinson:No, I think they're mainly into romanticizing leadership. They focus on the individual leader and forget the context, which can take many different forms, and the relationship with followers at different levels of the organization. So yeah, I think there's a lot of work to do on leadership development to get away from the fixation with leaders.

Scarpino:Do you consider yourself to be a leader?

Collinson:Well, I'd say I've been in leadership positions. So, there's a big debate there about what is leadership, I suppose. I've been head of department twice, like you, and I ran the National Research for the Learning and Skills Improvement Service. So, I've been in leadership positions, and that's another issue that there is a hierarchy. In ninety-nine percent of organizations there's a hierarchy, which seems so obvious and yet if you look at some of the literature, they talk about leaders and followers as if there was some sort of fluid process where leaders will just emerge. Well, occasionally that's true. Vaclav Havel emerged as a leader. Obviously, there are informal processes, but equally when I talk to colleagues who advocate this perspective called leadership as practice, they don't see hierarchies. They don't see that people are promoted into leadership positions and that, therefore, they are engaged in leadership, to your question. So, I've done leadership in that sense. I was captain of the golf team. I was captain of Royal Lytham and St. Annes Golf Club. So, I've been in leadership positions from time to time, and it can be very stressful. I don't want to sugar coat it at all. There are all sorts of dilemmas at stake when you do these jobs. And of course, then there is the issue of thought leader and leader in discipline and trying to encourage the next generation of scholars in this area. There's that area.

Scarpino:Some of your work uses the term resistance leadership. Can you explain what that is?

Collinson:Yeah, well, Owai Smolovic Jones is very keen on this idea, and I sort of debated it with him. We've just done this, it's like an art. It was really an interview with Keith and I that Owain did for his special issue that Owain did on what he calls resistance leadership.

Scarpino:I saw that.

Collinson:Yeah. And he's trying to connect leadership and resistance, which is very, very good I think, and very important. I don't think you can understand leadership without folk recognizing the issues around resistance. I'm not sure I want to completely combine them in the way that he does. I'm still debating it with him. (laughs) From an organization studies perspective, a lot of my earlier publications going back to the shop floor were on resistance in the workplace, and what were they resisting to, and how do we define resistance, and is a counterculture… Resistance can mean so many different things, from strikes to whistle blowing to being late for work, being ill or output restriction, which is the classic one in management studies. Resistance can take many, many forms. It can be a resistor as a customer, and there’s some great examples of that. And they obviously are connected very closely to leadership. When you look at leaders in organizations, and in societies, in many cases they are trying to anticipate where dissent might emerge and how to deal with that. The two are inextricably linked, I think. As I say, it's Owain's term, this resistance leadership. To me, that makes me think of Vaclav Havel, where he's leading a resistance movement to the communist regime. That's the leader of some sort of collective body, a trade union or another body, where Owain means it more broadly, which I think needs further work, I would say.

Scarpino:I'm going to ask you a couple more questions and then we’ll wrap up. I said we'd talk for about two hours and we're closing in on that. I'm going to ask you a couple questions about leadership education and then…

Collinson:No more on resistance then? 

Scarpino:We'll come back to that. That's going to take longer than we have.

Collinson:Yeah, okay.

Scarpino:According to Google, in 2018 there were about 1,562 leadership programs in the U.S.; 1,038 were private institutions; 488 were public institutions. In 2022 there were 51 leadership programs offered online by 33 universities and most offering a master's degree. According to my count, there are somewhere around 72 UK universities that offer master's degrees in what they’re calling educational leadership. So, there's a lot of it out there. Now, it isn't reasonable to expect that anybody knows about all these programs, and that's not my point, but based on all your scholarly publications, your hands-on experience, what do you think leadership programs should be offering their students that they don't?

Collinson:When I'm teaching my students, I say, “Look, we're going to look at leaders, we're going to look at context and followers. Then we're going to look at issues of power and identity.” And what I'm looking at here is heroic perspectives, post-heroic perspectives, and then what I call critical perspectives. So, make that distinction and try and show them that there are at least three, there's lots more paradigms, but there are three clear paradigms there, I would say, in leadership studies. Many courses on leadership only focus on the leader.

Scarpino:Right.

Collinson:They're stuck in what I call the heroic perspective. They don't talk about post-heroic, which is about the relational side of leadership. It's about how it's not just the people at the very top that engage in leadership. You know, in a university we're all involved in leadership. We go in the classroom, we're the leaders of that classroom, aren't we? Schools and university are a good example of that.

Scarpino:At least we’d better be. (laughs)

Collinson:Yeah, that leadership is a distributed, diffuse process across hierarchies and down hierarchies. I think that's a really valuable contribution from the post-heroic perspective, and the importance of community, the importance of context, you know, what's happening in Canada as opposed to what's happening in Australia. Very different leadership issues at stake there. To answer your question, a lot of those courses I suspect, as I say and as you say, I haven't done the research, but focus primarily on the leader. And most of the research, what I call mainstream leadership study, MLS, I’ll just short-hand it MLS, doesn't look at the relational dynamics and even what happens in top teams. When you've got a leader, a president, a prime minister, they've got all these people working for them behind the scenes to create the individual. But it's not an individual, it’s socially constructed collectively even within the senior teams. That, I think, is a great insight from a post-heroic perspective, and that it translates down organizations, and leadership isn't just something that's about the individual leader. So, that needs to come into the equation much more than it has done. I think the research on educational leadership, which is a term you used, in the UK, there's a really good journal that just focuses on teaching, yeah, schools, leadership in schools, and they've got much more insight. They're quite sophisticated. But they're only specific to schools. But then the other big issues are around power and identity and the fact that there is a hierarchy. The trouble with the post-heroic perspective is that they just want to talk about relationships as if they're free-floating things, they're not embedded in organizations with structure and culture.

Scarpino:Tomorrow when we talk, I'm going to ask you about power in those things.

Collinson:Okay.

Scarpino:I'm going to ask you one final question for today and it continues the general theme of teaching leadership. Suzanne Gagnon and yourself…

Collinson:Yeah, I saw Suzanne just before... Yeah, I just saw her a few minutes ago.

Scarpino:… a piece, “Rethinking Global Leadership Development Programmes: The Interrelated Significance of Power, Context and Identity,” which is what you were just talking about. Sage Journals, Volume 35, Issue 5, (January 17, 2014). She is a professor and Canada Life Chair, School of Business, University of Manitoba. Is she still there?

Collinson:She is.

Scarpino:Okay. So why were the two of you, and to quote from your title, rethinking global leadership development programs?

Collinson:She did her PhD in our department. (laughs)

Scarpino:Oh. Well, that must make you feel good.

Collinson:But she wasn't my student. She was my colleague Mark Easterby-Smith's student. She increasingly got interested in both leadership and also questions of identity and the overlaps. We just got talking and I checked with Mark -- she then moved back to Canada and she kept emailing me and we talked. I didn't want to step on Mark's toes because it was his student, but he was fine. So, we went ahead and worked on some ideas because I was intrigued by her research on actual programs that she'd researched. She'd been into companies for a PhD. I think I was able to give a nice theoretical framework for the work, and so we were long distance co-writers. I'd met Suzanne at Lancaster obviously. But we did it all, I was in the UK and she was in Canada.

Scarpino:Isn't email wonderful? And Zoom.

Collinson:Transformative. And that was helpful in you and I setting this up, wasn't it, having email contact?

Scarpino:Well, I don't know about you, but during the pandemic, I was online on Zoom for a year. Taught all my classes that way.

Collinson:Absolutely.

Scarpino:Went to conferences that way.

Collinson:Yeah, great lesson in learning about Zoom, wasn't it? We all had to learn that stuff.

Scarpino:I'm going to thank you for today's session. We're going to sit down and talk again tomorrow.

Collinson:Okay.

Scarpino:I did write down resistance to give you a chance to talk further on that. So let me make sure that these things (recorders) are off.

(END INTERVIEW PART 1)

Scarpino:Today is October 16, 2025. This is the second recording session with David Collinson, Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Organisation, Department of Organisation Work and Technology, Lancaster University Management School, United Kingdom. The full introduction with a more fully developed biography is in with the first interview. He is a recipient of the International Leadership Association's Lifetime Achievement Award, and that, of course, is the reason that we are here together today. I'm going to ask you permission to record what we say, to have it transcribed and to deposit it in the IU Indianapolis Library with the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association where they very well may post these things to the internet. So they are not going to be private, they're going to be public.

Collinson:That’s obviously fine, yes.

Scarpino:Alright. We finished up last time, we talked about the time that you spent working in a truck factory making lorries. I found out something very interesting about you, that you had an appointment at the University of South Florida hosted by a man named John Germany. I wonder why is a man from the UK going to South Florida? I just thought I'd start with this. Why did you go to South Florida University?

Collinson:Tracing it back, because of a chapter in an edited book that came out just before that. The edited book was called The Sexuality of Organization. There'd been a lot of research in the ‘70s and ‘80s on gender, particularly women's experiences of organizations and management and leadership. But this was taking it into the next stage. Organizations are rational, managed processes. Sexuality is something that happens in the home, isn't it? What's the link here? Myself and my late wife wrote a paper that was published in a book and it was edited by Jeff Hearn, who I already knew, Gibson Burrell, who I was subsequently to work with at Warwick, I wasn't doing it at the time - we wrote this at St. Andrews - and two American women.

Scarpino:What were the names of the American women?

Collinson:Deborah Sheppard. And I can't remember the other one. You have to check my CV. It's on my CV.

Scarpino:Okay, but you've given the title, so if somebody wants to know they can look it up.

Collinson:The Sexuality of Organization.

Scarpino:Yes.

Collinson:It was a groundbreaking paper because obviously gender was implicated, some in the other issues as well. Gibson had written a very, very fascinating paper on the de-sexualization of organizations, the opposite of how management historically have tried to keep sexuality out; for example, by having separate entrances for men and women workers in Cadbury's in Bournville, the famous chocolate company in the UK. They're just trying to stop any hanky-panky because it distracts from the production process. It's a brilliant paper, it’s called “Sex at Work”, I think it was called, in Organization Studies. It’s a very, very interesting paper on the historical dimensions, examples of how keeping sensuality out of organizations has been a very, very conscious management and leadership process, in religious organizations as well. So that's some of the background. Margaret and I were visiting my cousin, who lives in Los Angeles, the one I'm very close to that I mentioned yesterday. She's like a sister really. We noticed that the American Sociological - this is very long-winded story -the American Sociological Association conference was in San Francisco. We thought hey, we could drive up through Big Sur and enjoy a visit along the coast there.

Scarpino:It's a beautiful drive.

Collinson:Oh, it's magnificent. We stopped off and met some people in San Luis Obispo and stayed the night there and then carried on up to the conference. And I didn't know, but I looked at the agenda, I hadn't paid to get in or anything, I was just… That's right, we were actually meeting a guy called Richard Spray, who was at the time the right-hand man of Robert Trent Jones, Jr., the golf course designer, who I'd met in St. Andrews. People visited St. Andrews from all over the world, particularly Americans, like I mentioned Bob Guest at the end of yesterday. So the conference was a bit of an add-on. Anyway, there was an agenda and I looked at the agenda and there was a round table discussion scheduled for the afternoon on The Sexuality of Organization. We'd written our paper, it hadn't been published then, and we thought oh wow, let's see if we… So we went there and I said a few things and there was a guy called John Jeremiah who was sat there. It was that arbitrary. We got talking and we were suddenly on the same wavelength. and he knew my supervisor David Knight, and he knew people in the UK. So we kept in touch. This is late ‘80s so it was before email.

Scarpino:There was a world before email, wasn't there?

Collinson:The following spring, him and his then-wife Jeannie came and visited us in St. Andrews, and then they went down to a conference in England. We kept in touch. Then John approached me a few months later and said, “Would you be interested in visiting Florida for twelve months?” So that's how it came about. Totally arbitrary. It's a long story, but I wanted to explain how, again, as Bob Guest’s book title As Good Luck Would Have It, that was just fortuitous. Okay, we were in that situation, we chose to go, but I could have chosen to go to another round table, and I would never have met John. So that's why we went, and that was quite a momentous time in the world, because McGill Air Force Base in Tampa was the center of coordinating the first Iraq war. And we were there watching it, open mouthed. That was a defining moment.

Scarpino:That was in…

Collinson:1990-1991, over that winter. The other major thing that happened at that time was the fall of Margaret Thatcher. I had to spend a lot of time explaining to American colleagues. “But she won the vote, why is she resigning?” they would say. I had to explain, “Yeah, but she's lost the confidence.” She won the vote but not by the big majority she should have done. In the American mind, it's, well she's a winner, not a loser, why is she resigning?

Scarpino:Yeah, I mean most Americans don't really pay much attention.

Collinson:No, no. But she was a big name.

Scarpino:I've done a lot of work in Canada, and it just makes the Canadians crazy that Americans don't know anything about Canada. They don't know who the Prime Minister is and they don't care.

Collinson:Incredible. So it was a fascinating time. I really enjoyed my time there. Walter Nord was another professor. He was the more senior and elder professor in the department.

Scarpino:Walter Nord.

Collinson:Nord. N-O-R-D. He’s a good psychologist but with a critical edge. We spent a lot of time with him and his wife Anne as well as John and Jeannie. It was great. And Steve Turner in the Philosophy Department. It was roughly twelve months. It was then, and I don't want to belabor the point, but I’d written the master's thesis on the shop-floor and written various articles, particularly the one on humor that suddenly of attention that was published in 1988. There's lots to talk about about that paper. But I'd never had the time in my career to think of making a book out of this master's thesis that was quite extensive, 100,000 words. The external examiner actually said this should have been a PhD. This is good enough for a PhD. But being in Florida, having a nice teaching load, all that sunshine, that gave me more energy I think, I worked from the thesis and made it into the book Managing the Shop-floor. I can only thank John Jeremiah profusely and Stewart Clegg in St. Andrews because he gave me the permission to go if I could find someone to take my position while I was there, which I did. But it gave me the opportunity to write Managing the Shop-floor: Subjectivity, Masculinity and Workplace Culture, that I don't think I would have done if I'd been on the regular teaching load at St. Andrews, because it was quite demanding.

Scarpino:It gave you enough time and some space to do it.

Collinson:Precisely. It was a very productive, creative… It felt like a very creative time, so I was looking back on this master’s thesis and writing it up as a book. It was a different proposition, but I really enjoyed doing that. It was great to get it published in that period. And we did other things as well. There was lots going on, it was a creative time in Florida. I didn't play much golf, but I got lots of other things done.

Scarpino:And the weather is better than in St. Andrews.

Collinson:Absolutely, I can't argue with that.

Scarpino:Maybe it wasn't rainy enough for you to play golf.

Collinson:(laughs) Oh, it was a great time. If there'd been a job, I would have been unsure what to do. I might have considered it. All the family was at home. Margaret, my wife, had two children from a first marriage. It would have been hard, but she was up for it, she would have been if there'd been a job in Tampa, sorry, not Tampa University, a private university, USF, but there wasn't any at the time.

Scarpino:University of Southern Florida.

Collinson:Yeah. So I went back to St. Andrews for a little while. Then the job at Warwick came up and I thought, well working with Gibson Burrell, you know, I'm going to apply and see, and I got it. It was hard to leave the golf in St. Andrews. The people thought I'd be there forever, but actually I was happy to leave by that time. We had lots of students, tremendous success, but we didn't have enough faculty.

Scarpino:Well, and sometimes you just know when it's time to go, for yourself personally.

Collinson:Yep, exactly. That's really well put, yeah. So that's USF. You were wondering how it happened. It was a bit like you had said, “Well how were you working with Suzanne Gagnon?” yesterday. Well, there's no… Well, she was a PhD in the department. So it's all about relationships really. All about relationships.

Scarpino:Now, as you look back on the time you spent in South Florida, what do you think its overall impact was on your career trajectory?

Collinson:I think it reinforced my belief and confidence that this was a job for me. At St. Andrews I wasn't absolutely sure because it was so much more high-pressured than it should have been, I think. I wasn't absolutely sure. When I went to the University of South Florida, taught the MBA classes, and they got nice feedback, and really enjoyed the research environment and wrote the book and a few other papers, and I thought yeah, I can do this.

Scarpino:So your entire teaching load was in the MBA program?

Collinson:Yeah. It was so different, the students. They were so much more verbally skilled than the British students, but it didn't always translate into the written word. I’d say the British students were a little bit more advanced in their writing, but the American students, having debates, it was fantastic. I listened to some brilliant debates.

Scarpino:Did that program attract students from all of the United States or around the world?

Collinson:Mainly Florida.

Scarpino:I never taught there, but I had friends on the faculty at Harvard Business School. Do you know who Alfred Chandler was?

Collinson:Chandler, the great economist, yeah.

Scarpino:He was still emeritus. I got to meet him when I was there. I didn't do anything. I just went in and, it was like going in to visit God.

Collinson:(inaudible) 

Scarpino:Yeah, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Collinson:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scarpino:Alright, so here you are and it's 1990s, and I want to talk to you about some of the things that you've written. One of your early publications coauthored with Jeff Hearn was “Naming Men as Men: Implications for Work, Organization and Management,” published in Gender, Work and Organization, Volume 1, Issue 1 (January 1994). But before I do that, I was thinking last night about what we talked about. And in the United States, when university people talk about gender, what they often mean is Women's Studies.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:When you were becoming interested in gender, and you were interested in masculinity and men and that kind of stuff, did you find yourself getting pushback from colleagues who published in that area and thought maybe it should be Women's Studies?

Collinson:That this was an area for women to write about?

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:Yeah. Oh, there was some suspicion, definitely. I then went on to do the PhD after the master’s, it was on sex discrimination in recruitment. That was funded by the Equal Opportunities Commission that was based in Manchester at the time. It's now merged with the Commission for Racial Equality, so it's broader now. So that's the project they wanted me doing. David Knight and I submitted a proposal and we got it. I was the researcher on that, and so I had to deliver what the commissioning body wanted, and then tack on the PhD later. Sorry, what was your question again? I’m giving you background information to answer it.

Scarpino:Yeah, that's what I was fishing for, was background information. 

Collinson:About gender. I was trying to get into recruitment interviews and sit in the corner and tape record them and see how… They really were looking for good practice. “We want to look at employers that say that they are equal opportunity employers on all their advertising” – it’s old fashioned now, but that's what they used to say – “Go in there and we want to see how good practice works in policy and practice.” Because the EOC very controlled by the legislation.

Scarpino:EOC.

Collinson:Equal Opportunities Commission… by the legislation. So that was a good learning process. I learned the power of the law, employment law that I'd perhaps underestimated before, in shaping organizational management practice. I was interviewing the recruiters and, if I could, the people who would apply for jobs and trying to get a qualitative… and this was a two-year study, it was quite a detailed study. 

(PAUSE FOR RECORDER MALFUNCTION)

Scarpino:For the benefit of anybody looking at this before I clean it up, we had a technical malfunction, and we believe it’s now been solved.

We talked about one of your early publications. You were talking about gender when we turned this off, and you wanted to make some additional remarks on that.

Collinson:The research for the Equal Opportunities Commission was based on five different sectors across the economy. They wanted a broad sweep. To answer your question, yes, there was some skepticism, mainly from female trade unionists. So I wanted to talk to trade unions as well about how they saw recruitment because they had lots of policies, sometimes more than the companies. So I did have quite a lot of skepticism. You can only be what you can be. However, there was one trade unionist who wasn't. And we got married. (laughs)

Scarpino:Oh. (laughs)

Collinson:Not immediately. So yeah, I interviewed Margaret because she was part of the Eagle Star Staff Association. It wasn't quite a trade union, it was a staff association. But Eagle Star was a major insurance company in the UK and that was one of the sectors I was looking at, how they recruited for their sales teams, different types of insurance. We got on very well. She wanted to do a survey of equal opportunities in the company, and the company agreed. We did a quantitative survey of employees’ views of equal opportunities in Eagle Star. It led to certain publications. Yes, and things progressed and we finished up getting married.

Scarpino:That's an amazing story.

Collinson:Yeah. But in terms of “Naming Men as Men,” I think I also have to explain the link with Jeff. Jeff Hearn and I had been writing to each other because he wrote a book early, about 1985, and in it he had a chapter on the connection between men, masculinity and humor broadly defined in the workplace. That was perfect for me for my humor interests which are established on the shop-floor settings. So I wrote to - old-fashioned post through, you know… He was over in Bradford, I was in Manchester. We wrote a little bit and that was great. I can't remember now how we first met. I certainly remember I got my PhD in 1988 and straight after I went to a conference that he was running in Yorkshire in Bradford, and we talked there. So I knew him by then, but I can't remember the first time we met. I must ask him that, see if he can remember. What the point I'm making is what connected Jeff and I was this interest in men and humor, and how that seemed to be quite an important dynamic in workplace context. That's what brought us together. The first paper we wrote together was this one called “Naming Men as Men.” And David Knight and his co-editor had decided to launch a journal on gender, work, and organization, bringing these two areas together, because there's lots of research on gender, lots of research on work, but the two hadn't been linked very well. So he organized a small conference, probably 1992, well before the journal first came out. I would have thought it was 1992, after we returned from Florida. Jeff and I were talking and we said, “Well, perhaps we should do something from the point of view of men and masculinity in organizations.” That's what became “Naming Men as Men.” We did a presentation at the conference and then David approached us and said, “Would you be interested in putting something in the first issue of the new journal?” which was very attractive. We didn't know we were going to be the first article in the first issue of the new journal. So that was great. And Jeff and I found we were very different. He had more of a sociological background and my organizational one I think worked very well together. That paper has had quite an impact. It was highly cited and did try and open up the area of gender to say that, well, yeah, women are gendered beings, yeah, but so are men. You're talking to recruits, male recruits, and it’s as if men aren't gendered at all; there are humans and then there are women, you know, it's kind of bizarre assumption.

Scarpino:Well, I mean I'm sure there are people who thought that way.

Collinson:Yes, so that was our first paper together. Obviously, he'd seen my “Engineering Humour” paper by then and you could see that we had some shared interests. That was published in ’88. Off and on, we have spells where we're doing other things for a few months, but we’re publishing still now.

Scarpino:On a pretty regular basis.

Collinson:Yeah. The last couple of years there's been some major issues with Gender, Work and Organization. David and I had finished as editor many years ago. I've forgotten who the publishers were, but anyway, they wanted to take the journal in a different direction than it was going. It's been extremely successful, GWO, and it's now been moved to American editors. It seems to have a much more mainstream perspective than it had. So the people who kind of lost their journal have set up a new journal called I think it's something like Feminism and Organization, and they've approached Jeff and I to write an article for the first issue again. So it's like the wheel has turned full circle.

Scarpino:Are you going to do it?

Collinson:We are, yeah. At first Jeff said it needed to be finished by the end of October. I said, “Jeff I can't do it, I'm going to I'm going to Prague, I can't.” It looks like it's the end of November now. So that's doable. That’s doable because we've written quite a lot recently and they've been in book chapters. So we can sort of work around that. We've got a couple of other people involved as well. Kadri is going to be involved. That'll be nice for her. So it's not just us two this time, but it's lovely, the wheel turning and coming back to where we were, the situation, I think. So yes, we're going to do it.

Scarpino:Good.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:This whole business of co-authors is an interesting phenomenon to me because we don't do that.

Collinson:Right.

Scarpino:Very, very, very rarely do we co-author.

Collinson:Yeah. Well, as you can see from my career, I've done a lot with other people, and I've done a lot by myself as well.

Scarpino:No, I mean my son's a biologist and he co-authors all the time, and that's just the way his world works.

Collinson:Natural science. It's always like that. It's a whole team of people, isn't there, usually?

Scarpino:Right. We talked about “Naming Men as Men”…

Collinson:Yes, it’s been a great success. I'm trying to broaden out the issues about gender to look at men, because they are often the power holders and they're responsible for the effects on women.

Scarpino:I mean, other people have now picked that up and it's developed big time.

Collinson:Yeah, yeah. And even then, writers like Connell were writing some fantastic stuff on men. It wasn’t… you know, we were responding to… but it was mainly sociological writers who write about the social world. They don't write about the organized world or the managed world. That's where there was this big lacuna, if you like. Connell, he's known for - he was a he, he's now Raewyn. He's Raewyn Connell now, but at the time of “Naming Men as Men” he was Bob Connell. So I have to say she now. She was writing at the time, and he's associated with this idea of hegemonic masculinity. The breakthrough idea there is that there isn't just one masculinity. We really need to be pluralizing this term to talk about masculinities. There are those that are dominant, hegemonic masculinities, which it's a term from the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci. He talks about hegemony. 

Scarpino:Yes, he does. Even historians read him.

Collinson:Yeah exactly, what a man he was. Keith was showing me his gravestone. He was in Rome a couple of weeks ago and he went to see his gravestone. So that's where the term sort of comes from. The power of ideas to influence, get inside people's heads, not just get them to do what you want them to do by force of guns or whatever, threaten their bodies, but if you can inculcate ideas into their brains, you've got much more control. So hegemonic masculinity, the sort of dominant masculinity, aggressive, competitive, all the things that we know. But then subordinate masculinities as well. He was seeing there were some hierarchies of masculinities, you know, black men or…

(PAUSE)

Collinson:So that was a really great insight for us from the sociological field, that masculinity is socially constructed. It's not somehow naturally given. And there are different masculinities in different countries.

Scarpino:Absolutely.

Collinson:Yeah, there’s not just one way of being a man.

Scarpino:Right.

Collinson:That was great inspiration for “Naming Men as Men.” But to go back to your earlier question, the start of the paper talks about how Jeff and I, the first time we gave a draft of that paper, was at a BSA conference.

.

(PAUSE)

Collinson:After the presentation, somebody who I knew quite well came up to me and said, “Oh, it is Jeff gay?” Well, they knew I was married to Margaret at the time, but they were trying to make… why is he talking about… why is he critiquing hegemonic masculinity, what's going on here? Is he gay? We added that, so that that's how the paper starts. We were trying to unpack these deeply gendered assumptions that people didn't even realize they were gendered assumptions.

Scarpino:Well, that made your point for you, didn't it?

Collinson:Very, very good. It was perfect. Yeah. And that was in a sociology conference, where you would expect they would have gotten beyond that way of thinking.

Scarpino:Well, and you expect at least they'd know enough to think before they open their mouth.

Collinson:Yeah. So that paper really got onto the idea, building on hegemonic and subordinate masculinities, of what we called multiple masculinities in organizations. What we were trying to do in the last part of that paper was link these different masculinities to different elements of the hierarchy of an organization. So shop-floor, obviously, I could talk about that, middle managers and senior managers and the leaders possibly espousing different kinds, but shared in some ways, similar and different types of masculinities.

Scarpino:But a good part of masculinity is cultural. 

Collinson:Yeah, socially constructed.

Scarpino:You have to grow up and people teach you what it means, what they think it means to be a man.

Collinson:Yeah, older men usually. Maybe some women, but not a lot…

Scarpino:And of course that's changed a lot. When I was a kid, boys don't cry. You have to figure out something else.

Collinson:Exactly.

(PAUSE)

Collinson:Yeah, so different cultural ideals of what masculinity is. You were talking about the military. Well, David Morgan, who was a great sociologist, now deceased sadly, Jeff and I both loved this man. He was a fantastic sociologist at Manchester University. He was so kind to me over the years, a real tribute to him. He wrote a quite interesting autobiography and history, and he wrote about his experience of being in the military. The title was It Made a Man of You, exactly as you said. And that was the idea of all this military training, it made them men.

Scarpino:What happens now that we have all these women in the military? We're not trying to make them men, at least I hope we're not.

You authored a piece in Organization Theory published by Sage, it's called “Only Connect!: Exploring the Critical Dialectical Turn in Leadership Studies.” I think you were the only author on that.

Collinson:I was. 

Scarpino:For the benefit of somebody who is going to use this oral history, we hope, and who has not read “Only Connect!”, what do you mean when you talk about the critical turn in leadership studies?

Collinson:Yesterday I talked about the three lenses, as I see it, in leadership studies. The mainstream perspective which is largely leader-centered, all about the traits, the styles, the behaviors, the personalities, different but looking to crystallize what is a great leader? If we can put that in a bottle and sell it, we'll make an absolute fortune. There are consultants desperately looking for this silver bullet or whatever it is. What is the perfect leader? What sort of informs the leader-centered or heroic perspective. Then you've got a post-heroic perspective that says, no, no, no, it's not just about leaders, it's about relationships. It's about context. Distributed leadership happens at all stages of the organization. It's not just individuals. So that emphasizes relations. So you've got Leadership as Practice ideas from Joe Raelin and some of his colleagues. And shared leadership and collective leadership could all be put under the banner, I would say, of post-heroic. It's not focusing on the individual. It's saying there's more to it than that. And followership obviously. And when I talk to my students, and I do that in my second lecture, followership, it's like “Oh, we never thought about that. It's not just about leaders? I thought leadership was just about leaders.” And then it's like “Oh wow.” But then I say, however, a lot of this post-heroic literature doesn't look at questions of power and identity in the way that we need to do. We have to understand that not always, but in many, many contexts there is an asymmetry, that there's not an equality between leaders and followers that post-heroic perspectives often seem to presuppose. There's a hierarchy and there's a legitimization of power, and power can be applied in positive and disruptive ways. And we need to embrace that and not say, as Burns said yesterday, well we've got leaders and then we've got power wielders. For me, that's a total false dichotomy. Then I got into this thing of, well actually, the more I look at the leadership literature, it's full of these dichotomies, whether it's leaders and followers, whether it's transformational leadership and transactional, theory X, theory Y. They're creating distinctions all the time but then over… They're exaggerating them, creating a false choice and not seeing, yeah there are distinctions but there are also overlaps and relationships between these concepts. And it's in those overlaps where the interesting dynamics often are in organizations. You distinguish between, well, there's leaders and then there's managers. As we discussed yesterday, in order to be a good leader, you need to be able to manage and vice versa. It's those interesting creative overlaps, which is why I called the paper “Only connect!” which goes back to the famous phrase from English literature in the book. Yeah, as I was saying, we slice reality into these different sections in order to study. We split everything up. And I say this to the students in my class, “Look, each week we're going to take a different topic. And that's the only way I can do it. But don't think that when we're talking about followership, we're not also talking about leadership. They're interconnected dimensions, and it's the interconnections that I want you to really explore as well as the distinctions.”

Scarpino:That's the hardest thing for people to get is, what's the big picture, how do they all fit together?

Collinson:Yeah. So that's why I called it “Only connect!” and tried to explore leadership from a…. But then, you see, what I was trying to do in that paper was not just outline a critical perspective, because I'd been kind of been doing that; there was a chapter in the first Sage handbook that we edited, and it was a group, and they asked me to do a critical leadership studies chapter. That paper just keeps getting read. On ResearchGate it's like 26,000.

Scarpino:When I looked at ResearchGate, that was way up there.

Collinson:It's unbelievable. What people thought of it, it doesn't matter, but they are reading it. But then, I seem to get involved with… There was some criticism from people who want to adopt a Marxist perspective. And that goes back to the Labor Process Theory that I'd been involved with many years earlier. And they want to say leadership is irrelevant. When you're looking at power, you should be looking at what management and the control that managements have. And all this talk about leadership is just commercialization and it's just language, it's not real. I had a debate with some of these people. I just think they're so fundamentally wrong. If you look historically, leadership's a much… The notion of management is a 20th century problem. Leadership goes back into antiquity. So there's that issue. But equally, I've sat in meetings with colleagues and they've said, “Oh, leadership's overrated, it's not that important. Leave that to the psychologists.” And we'll go outside, we'll have a drink and they'll spend two hours complaining about their vice chancellor and what damage he or she is doing to the organization. That's leadership. That's why it's so important. It's not just in the positive, when it's inspiring and it has a tremendous impact, which it can do, but we've got to look at the negative effects of leadership as well. Studies of Enron were some of the early ones that we published in the journal. That was a great paper on…

Scarpino:Enron?

Collinson:Yeah, and how that was a toxic leadership and led to the downfall of this once powerful company.

(PAUSE)

Collinson:Yeah, so you were talking about “Only Connect!”

Scarpino:Yes.

Collinson:The only problem, speaking personally about that, was that in the middle of writing that paper my wife died.

Scarpino:Oh.

Collinson:And I didn't think I was ever going to finish it. But the editor came back to me a few months later, Penny, and she said, “You've got a great paper there, will you please…” Actually, it was hard to do, but it did turn out to be quite therapeutic for me. And I appreciated Penny. I said to Penny, “I can't do this now,” and then she came back later and helped me get through it.

Scarpino:I mean sometimes when something horrible happens it's just good to have something…

Collinson:Exactly. Yeah, and that's exactly what it became. So it's quite a personal paper, that one, in many, many ways.

Scarpino:We were talking about “Only Connect!” So again, for the benefit of anybody who uses this interview and sees the reference to “Only connect!”, one of the things you talk about in there is critical dialectical perspectives for leadership research.

Collinson:I knew there was something else I wanted to say. Yeah. I'm saying there's these three lenses, but let's not homogenize. Let's not pretend that the critical is some sort of unified greed perspective because it isn't. Because the Marxists who are critical, there's no doubt about that, because they do engage with the issue of power. Power and identity, that to me is the defining feature of critical. But as you know, in the history and the theory of power, there's loads of different ways of looking at power. The Marxist one is to focus on the structure of the organization, to focus on ownership and control obviously, but also management. And it somehow misses out on leadership and they dismiss leadership. To me, that's a very deterministic approach. The mainstream perspective on leadership tends to be quite voluntarist because it's focusing on the individual leader, his or her choices and how they choose to lead. So you've got voluntarism at the one extreme, but with the more critical Marxist, you've got determinism, where everything's controlled by capitalism as if there's no agency at all and no free choice.

Scarpino:It's capitalism.

Collinson:So you've got volunteerism, so you've got another dichotomy here. It wasn't just being critical, it was saying no, we need a dialectical approach which looks at the dialectical mutually reinforcing connections between structure and agency. So it's not deterministic, because there is agency. But equally, agency isn't free-floating, it's in context, it's in a set of power and cultural relations. Dialectics was inspired there by Anthony Giddens, who was a very famous, in Britain, British sociologist. He's in the House of Lords now. But he wrote some fantastic stuff called structuration theory, which he was really talking about the dialectic between structure and agency or control and resistance. And I just tried to use that, because I always liked his work in the leadership context, to say, you know, determinism is just ridiculous. And anyway, leadership's really important; it's not just management. But equally, volunteerism is problematic in all sorts of ways. That's why I was trying to set out… that's why the title says critical dialectical, not just critical. Since then, I've had some good interactions, and we've written a couple of papers together, with Gail Fairhurst who you probably interviewed last year.

Scarpino:I did.

Collinson:Yeah, a wonderful lady.

Scarpino:I didn't interview her last year, but I talked to her for background.

Collinson:Yeah.

Collinson:We seem to write really well together, and we both share the same interest in dialectics, so I've loved working with Gail recently on these things. That's what I was trying to do with that paper, to say, hold on a minute, we've got to look at the issue of dichotomization and how do we get beyond that, because both volunteerism and determinism are just perpetuating false dichotomies. We need to look at them all, for want of a better word, dialectical approach. I left this out because… There's an old book here by Baxter and Montgomery going back to 1996, and I just like the way they talk about that dialectical approaches highlight the importance of deep-seated tensions and contradictions in relationships. It's not just based on opposing but independent forces that produce conflict and change. And then they say the dynamic knot of contradiction, a ceaseless interplay between contrary or opposing tendencies. And I just like that. It captures a lot. They were talking about family life, which is interesting. (laughs) A whole set of questions. But I thought that fits so well with leadership and followership dynamics.

Scarpino:It does.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:I want to talk to you about power, which you've written about. And I talked to Yannis Gabriel. He told me that one of your strengths and contributions as a scholar of leadership is the way you look at leadership, followership and the intersections between the two through the lens of power in all its forms. He emphasized that your use of power involved a kind of push/pull, cooperation/resistance type of relationship between leaders and followers, which you've already been talking about. He said this meant that both the leaders and the followers possess and exercise power.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:He described your model of the interplay between leaders and followers as a kind of dynamic dialectic, which you've already brought up. A little bit of background then for anybody who looks at this, could you talk a little bit about how you understand the leader's possession of power? And then I'll ask you about followers.

Collinson:Obviously, there is a multiplicity of levers that the leaders can use to try and influence what's happening in organizations, whether it be defining strategy, whether it be defining the structure of the organization, influencing the culture. They might not be able to control it, but they can certainly influence it. They recruit people, they praise people and, or their managers do, and they can fire people as well. There's a whole range of powers there that leaders can use to influence and to try and encourage people, he was saying, whether reluctant or not, to do what they want them to do in organizations. Appraisal has become very, very pervasive, hasn't it? The annual appraisal is a very big influence there. One of the writers who's been very influential on power is Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, and his focus on the panopticon and the surveillance as a form of power, and how surveillance gets embedded in people's minds, a bit like hegemony, I was talking about. As an academic, we know that at the end of the year we're going to be appraised. So we internalize the discipline, is what Foucault would say. And we think, well we've got to do something that will look good on our appraisal at the end of the year. So it's a real good source…. Again, it's not using a gun to frog march people to do what you want. You get them to internalize the discipline, which is what Bentham's panopticon was. Do you know the image of the….?  So Foucault's ideas were prompted by Jeremy Bentham's perfect prison, where you have like a big circle and you have the prisoners in their cells, and in the middle are the guards. And the lighting and the structure is such that the guards can see into every cell. They can see exactly what's happening. But the prisoners can't quite see if they're being monitored or not. There’s a state penitentiary, I've got a picture that I use in my lectures, in the U.S. of exactly that structure, the perfect kind of prison where you need few supervisors and you can monitor a lot of people. A very interesting example of how power can work that generates either conformity or commitment to whatever, but it's certain. In that sense, it’s a metaphor of surveillance there as a form of power. But then there is also how power is embedded in architecture of organizations as well. Typically, the leaders are up in the top, they're in the top office. Amazingly, in some organizations, certainly in London where I've been, they have a different lift. They have a completely separate lift, so nobody can get up there. They have total control. So there's a different element of power, it's embedded in the architecture of the organization and there's lots of gatekeepers, so they control who they talk to. But I think that's counter-productive. Again, I wouldn't want to be on this deterministic idea of power because it has unintended consequences that are really important to consider. One of those is that those leaders are then detached. They don't know what's going on. Going back to Undercover Boss, the TV show, the same is true, it can be in the same organization at the top floor and all the action is at the bottom. Or it could be that they're in the head office in New York and they don't know what's happening in Los Angeles or New Orleans or wherever. They're detached, they become detached. They're powerful, but there's a paradox and a contradiction in it that they’re leading an organization that they don't quite know what's happening at the coalface, as it were. So I'm very interested in the distance. Obviously, the leadership/followership dialectics is insisting that there are interconnections, but certainly going back to the… Did we talk about the oil rig research?

Scarpino:No.

Collinson:No, we haven't. So that's where that issue of distance really started to become clear to me as a problem for being a leader and a manager. If you become very detached geographically, culturally, hierarchically, psychologically, probably some others as well, from the people that you're managing or leading, you're not in control of your organization. You don't know what's happening. If you say, “What should good leaders or good managers do?” I say get closer to the people that you manage. Listen to them.

Scarpino:Some of the most interesting and effective leaders I've talked to are the ones who make an effort to…

Collinson:Exactly.

Scarpino:Not that they go have lunch with the workers, I'm sure the workers you know … it's not the same as if you're not there but…

Collinson:Yeah. I was talking to people on the oil rigs and they were saying… I said, “Well thanks, you've given me two hours of your time.” Oh, it's 24-hour production process. So as long as I could stay awake, I could interview people.

Scarpino:North Sea?

Collinson:North Sea oil rig, yeah. They said, “You know, I've really enjoyed this. Nobody's ever asked my opinion on anything.” And they’ve got really good opinions on how to improve things. “I really enjoyed just getting this off my chest.” People are not heard. There's so many voices in organizations where they're not heard because of this distance. Obviously, in an oil rig, you've got the platform out in the North Sea, then you've got, in the case of Conoco, I was a Conoco lecturer on management at St. Andrews, they've got the head office in Aberdeen. The other rig they talk about on the beach, what's happening on the beach? Then you've got the head office down in London. But then you've got the head office of the owners of Conoco, which is DuPont who are absolute sticklers on safety. And yet still, out here, I was finding clear actions, but also good reasons why workers were either not disclosing accidents or near misses because they knew they would get penalized. But these guys in Aberdeen thought there was a learning culture, not a blame culture. They didn't understand what was happening on the platform. Conoco gave me access to the rigs. They said, “Lolk, we've got a problem, one of our teams has got a poor safety record compared to the others, and we don't know… can you help us?” I said, “Well, I can write some sort of academic piece for you on safety issues, but really I need to go on the platforms. I need to listen and see what's going on.” And so amazingly, they said okay, because they usually, North Sea oil companies don't like research. Aberdeen research had been trying to get out there. But I think because I was a Conoco lecturer, I had a special connection so they said okay. So I went out for a few weeks on those two platforms, and it really was fascinating. Anyway, I found a lot of issues. It was all anonymous again, but I wrote up a paper outlining:  you think you've got a learning culture out there, you've got a blame culture, or it's perceived as a blame culture. That's the thing. That's the important… Whether you would agree with these workers or not doesn't matter, that's what they think. 

Scarpino:That's a really important thing to understand. It doesn't matter what's true, it matters what people perceive and what they believe.

Collinson:Yeah, and that affects their actions then. So in a way it becomes their truth, doesn't it? And of course, on the platforms you had maybe 200 guys on each of the two platforms, very few women, 30% Conoco employees, full-time employees, the other 70% were sub-contract workers, very insecure contracts. One of the big fears of a contract worker… and they might be on a Shell platform one two-week shift, then a Conoco, then a BP. They’re like gypsies of the North Sea. The fear they had was at the end of the two-week shift, NRB. If a Conoco supervisor wrote NRB on that appraisal, that person would never be allowed back on a Conoco platform. It meant “not required back.” Didn't have to explain why. It could be because they had a disagreement over something, anything. So there was a lot of insecurity out there. Anyway, I took my report to London to the head office, and I presented it to the senior management team of Conoco. And the finance director said, “Well, I've read your report from word to word, and I'm sorry I don't recognize… I've worked for this company for 25 years and I don't recognize it from this report.” And then it became evident that he'd never been on a platform in his life. He was the finance director, so he had a theory of how this organization worked based on finance. And these minions out there should just do what they're told. And it's just a totally false…

Scarpino:There was no sense that in order to do a good job, they should know what's going on, on those platforms.

Collinson:You would think so. That's the voice of sanity. Yeah. But he was in London. He was on a very nice salary and doing what he'd always done on finance. But when he was confronted… “I feel like I’ve got no axe to grind in this. I'm doing this for the people out there and for the company. You've asked me to do this and this is what I've found. I’ve got 10 proposals here to make things a little bit better, and I think would be productive for the company as well as the employees.” Some of them they did enact, which was great. We're talking about the issue of power. The oil rigs case illustrates very well this issue of distance. That's why I mentioned the finance director. He was so distant from what was happening at the coalface or the frontline.

Scarpino:Literal and figurative distance.

Collinson:Yeah, absolutely. Culturally, psychologically, hierarchically, in every way, but he genuinely believed -- even having read my paper, and I had quotes in there, it was a qualitative paper -- that he knew better. His theory of the organization. I would say that comes down to a kind of wishful thinking of how you would like reality to be. That got me thinking about excessively positive managerial and leadership discourses, you know, of how they want things to be, but it's not like that. You’ve got to grasp the nettle sometimes.

Scarpino:It’s a created reality.

Collinson:Yeah, and a delusional one.

I like what Yannis said. I thought that was a really nice summary.

Scarpino:It was. Again, reading your piece, I know for any future users of this interview, that Kadri Aavik and yourself…

Collinson:and Jeff…

Scarpino:… and Jeff Hearn wrote a piece called “What Have Leadership and DEIB got to do with men and masculinities? Challenges at a time of growing authoritarianism”, in Jennifer Martin and Monica Wirz (editors) of Inclusive Leadership:  Connecting Theory and Practice of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, Cambridge, 2026.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:Is it out?

Collinson:Nope. It is definitely 2026.

Scarpino:In press?

Collinson:Yeah, yeah, we've finished ours.

Scarpino:Just to be on the safe side for anybody who looks at this in the future, DEIB stands for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. I'm particularly saying this because Americans don't do the B. They talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, nobody talks about belonging. I've never heard anybody bring that up. I can see why it's here, but most Americans would not see that as part of the great triumvirate of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Collinson:Interesting.

Scarpino:You use the term inclusive leadership. What do you mean by that?

Collinson:Well, funnily enough, it's a good question. The editors came to us and said, “Would you be interested in doing a paper on inclusive leadership and masculinity?” I said, “I don't want to do that because I think they're completely missing the key dimensions in what's happening in leadership today.” If they come to us -- I didn't say this to the editors -- but it seemed to me that inclusive leadership was very much part of the post-heroic approach that was very, very influential through the 2000s up to about 2020, this notion of shared leadership, including people in, you know, not excluding. It's a simple, simple term. It's another way of talking about post-heroic shared leadership, I would say. And being inclusive in the way that you engage the organization. So we talked about it and we talked to the editors, and all power to them, they could see what we were saying and what we wanted to talk about was actually, well these issues in the context of this re-emergence of authoritarian leaders who no longer want to negotiate; they just want to tell people what to do. From our perspective, alongside that is a reassertion of a very strongman leadership idea that espouses hegemonic white masculinity.

Scarpino:Why do you think… I mean it's not just the United States.

Collinson:No.

Scarpino:Why do you think that there's this resurgence of hegemonic leaders. What's going on?

Collinson:Yeah, what is going on? It's Hungary, and you could say Putin, you could say China, Belarus, and then Brazil. There's been many examples of this phenomenon. Why now? It's a good question, isn't it? I'm not sure I've got all the answers for that one. I'm still thinking. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, I think she's in New York, wrote a fantastic book on this. I'm halfway through it. But why now? They sense a weakness in democracies, because there is. Fundamentally, as I think Churchill said, democracy is the worst sort of governance except for all the others. And I think that's about right. There are fundamental issues and potential contradictions if you don't have a very engaged population, for example, who are exploring these issues. If they're distancing – it’s not just leaders who can be distant; followers can be distant as well, but that can leave them vulnerable, I think, if you don't have an engaged population… The original Greek definition of democracy was that all citizens were highly engaged in processes. Without that, then it leaves the society open to a takeover by a strong individual with a group behind them. Why did Hitler rise when he rose? Well, probably because of what happened at the end of the first world war, and the shame and humiliation the final agreement imposed on the Germans. It was like a bubble that he … I'm not a historian in that sense, you probably know more than me on that, but those identity issues, that's how I'd read them, that sense of humiliation was captured by the fascist Nazi movement, wasn't it? And it was all about a reassertion of an identity of the purest Aryan race, wasn't it? It was the true Germans, we want true Germans, and we're going to exclude everybody else. That was very much exclusive leadership rather than inclusive leadership. So context is very important, but like you say, at the moment there seems to be a rise in different countries at a similar time. And obviously we've got to take technology into account and social media and how that's playing a crucial part in changing the nature of communication. It's enhancing communication in one way and then polarizing at the same time in so many other ways and creating more conflict.

Scarpino:Do you think that the rise of social media has fundamentally changed leadership?

Collinson:Hmm. Yeah, well, I think it is an ongoing process, leaders trying to keep up with the changing technology. The pace seems to be getting faster and faster. So yeah, I think it is changing the nature of leadership. And the danger is that it encourages leaders to lead from a distance because they can send emails, they can phone. Instant communication with Australia or wherever is quite feasible now, so they don't have to go to places as much. They can be more detached. It's the danger of it, I think, or one of them, that it will lead to leadership by distance even more than we've got, say, with the oil rig case that I mentioned before.

Scarpino:But then again, during the pandemic, we all moved our lives and our careers to Zoom. And it all went on.

Collinson:It did. As academics, we really rushed fast to deliver these courses in a completely different way. We had to learn Zoom pretty quickly.

Scarpino:I was in Sacramento in March of 2020. Went to a meeting, people were talking about…

Collinson:You were actually there, were you?

Scarpino:Yeah, in person. And people were talking about the virus and so on. By the time I got back, within a day or two, the entire country goes down.

Collinson:Yeah. But if you take the pandemic as an example, the rise of strongman leaders was very evident there. You had Boris Johnson in the UK, Donald Trump obviously, Putin, and Bolsonaro in Brazil, and a few others as well who… you know, time's gone on a bit… but they were all saying the same thing. “Don't worry about this virus. Don't worry, it's a cold, it'll go away. By Easter, it will go," he said. Boris was advised, all his advisers said, “When you go into this hospital, do not shake anybody's hand.” What does he do? He shakes everybody's hand. These are the strongmen. They're trying to portray this image of hegemonic masculinity. In a way you could argue, well, they're trying to reassure their population. Yeah, but you're underestimating the problem. You're way underestimating the seriousness of this issue.

Scarpino:Or maybe they weren't listening.

Collinson:And they weren't listening as well.

Scarpino:My son is an epidemiologist and before it hit, he said, “Dad, this is going to get really bad.”

Collinson:Yeah, he knew. And they weren't listening to the scientists because they were looking…

Scarpino:And they knew.

Collinson:By this time, strongmen believed that they shouldn't listen to scientists. Experts were the problem. That's what Michael Gove said in the UK about Brexit. “Oh, don't listen. All the experts are saying we're going to lose out financially. We're sick of listening to experts, what do they know?” So it's this notion of the strongman, I know everything, I know better than Fauci. And Trump, what about bleach? Let's pour some bleach down people's throats. But the final point I want to make on that is then Boris nearly died.

Scarpino:Yes, he did.

Collinson:He nearly died.

Scarpino:So did Donald Trump.

Collinson:And so did Trump. So my notion of power isn't all determining like the Marxist or even some elements of Foucault's approach. You've got to take into account the counterproductive effects of power. It doesn't always have the effects that it intended, thank goodness. There are unintended consequences, one of which can be resistance in a way that they never expected.

Scarpino:Do you think unintended consequences or unanticipated consequences are all part of the leadership process?

Collinson:Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's one of the big challenges for leaders. You can only anticipate so much. That's why humility is a pretty good part of leadership, and honesty. “Look, I got that wrong,” or whatever. “I didn't expect that.” The idea that any human being can control and predict the future, you know more about history than me, but history always defies prediction, doesn't it?

Scarpino:It pretty much does, yes.

Collinson:But we never predicted the pandemic.

Scarpino:No, I mean, we should have.

Collinson:We should have. Well, Fauci was warning.

Scarpino:I remember for probably 10 or 15 years before the pandemic hit, telling my students when I taught environmental history, it's just a matter of time. We live in an interconnected and interdependent world. And at some point we're going to have a virus that doesn't kill everybody, so it'll pass from person to person, it’ll spread around the globe.

Collinson:You were right.

Scarpino:I wasn't the only one who was saying that.

Collinson:Yeah. Plane flight obviously enables all those viruses so much more, doesn't it?

My notion of power is a dialectical one. That's what I was trying to say in “Only connect!” It's not voluntaristic. It’s trying to avoid voluntarism and trying to avoid determinism, the two polar extremes. Get away from the binaries.

Scarpino:I want to talk to you about some of the things you've written and not abuse the time here. You published what I thought was an interesting piece, so, and I'm doing the interview. It was in Sage Publishing, 2024, November, and the title is “Why Organizational Sex Abuse Scandals Keep Happening.”

Collinson:Oh. Yeah.

Scarpino:I'd just like you to answer that question. I don't think that you could possibly have a complete answer. Nobody does. But just would like to know your take on that.

Collinson:Sure. There is something called The Conversation. Have you come across this publication called The Conversation? These are short pieces now. You've got a thousand words to make your point. It's all funded by the universities. The great thing about The Conversation is that there's no copyright. They publish it on their website, and newspapers, authors, consultants, academics all around the world can see it within a nanosecond, and a newspaper can syndicate it and republish it. It’s a great way of reaching a big, big population, global population if you get an interesting piece. So there have been a lot of scandals. Obviously, the Prince Andrew, Epstein case. There are so many scandals in the UK in the last few years where famous people were found to be engaging in sexual abuse in all its forms, in so many different forms of that, adults, children, whatever, male or female. There's the chief executive of Abercrombie and Fitch who had a gay… I think it was a gay abuse system he created as the chief executive. There are all sorts of examples. I kept reading about these, but the one thing that was missing was the one thing I've been talking about. But these are men that are doing this. So really, I was just saying let's name men as men. Because nine times out of ten, these issues… So I went through some of the cases. It's men in positions of power in organizations, positions of trust and power who are using their hierarchical status and legitimacy to benefit themselves sexually in some bizarre, totally inappropriate way. That really was the main theme I was trying to get across, and went into some more detail, obviously. But yes, it sort of seemed to hit a nerve. There was a couple of guys who run a podcast called The Why Podcast, and they had one of their…. We had about a 45-minute interview. I was at home doing it, but we did it online. Then Professor Gammel (spelling?) from Toronto University said, “Oh, a really fine new piece, very helpful, I want to show the students this. Would you do a Zoom in one of my classes?”

Scarpino:Did you do it?

Collinson:I did it, yeah.

Scarpino:I don't do this anymore, but when I got into the field of public history, probably seventy or more percent of the students were female. Now that's changed. There's a better gender balance now.

Collinson:Is there?

Scarpino:Much better. 

Collinson:Why the change?

Scarpino:I think for a while people thought that jobs in museums and stuff were for girls.

Collinson:Well yeah, there was that.

Scarpino:But there's been a huge cultural change.

Collinson:Good.

Scarpino:What happens is now that men want these jobs, and sometimes they get them even though they're not as well qualified as the women who are applying. My colleague in the program, Rebecca Shrum, who is obviously a woman, once a year we used to hold a workshop together about sexual harassment and sexual responsibility and telling these students, “If anybody approaches you in an inappropriate way when you're out on your internship, the first call is us. And then we're going to call Affirmative Action and we're going to call the university's Human Rights,” and whatever, “but you just don't take it.”

Collinson:Really good advice. But then there are other cases… a lot of TV personalities, I mean there was a terrible case of Jimmy Savile a few years ago. But then there had been a newscaster, he was on BBC News every night, and then he was found to be using images of children and all sorts of… And you think oh my goodness. Then there was another one of a TV show called MasterChef. That was the one where he said, “Oh, I was only joking. I was only joking.” But there were so many complaints. When you get one complaint, then… “Oh yeah, that happened to me, it was terrible.” He tried to use humor as his alibi or deflection. It wasn’t, “I apologize,” but no, eventually he got sacked for it. And now he's taking the BBC to court because he feels he's been victimized. This is what happens. As I was trying to say in the paper, this little paper, that so often the disguise or the excuse that the perpetrator uses is: I was a victim of this. They try and say the opposite of what they were; they were not the perpetrator, they were the victim. The other big one was… You've obviously heard of Harrods, the big shop, very expensive shop in London. The old owner of that, Muhammad Fayed, after he died, the female employees started slowly to say that he used to come down into the shop every day and he'd pick a young woman that he wanted to have sex with and take them up to his office. This had been kept secret, and the whole organization had colluded in the secrecy of it. Only around the time of writing this article was it becoming clear that it was like every day, an epidemic of sexual abuse by this man whose son was dating Princess Diana.

Scarpino:Yeah. We even heard about that in the United States, not Princess Diana, but his abuse.

Collinson:That was another case that was prompting me think, we’ve got to look at this from the point of view of rethinking… not just to criticize men or masculinity…. trying to help with the idea, well what is a good way to be a man in the 21st century?

Scarpino:Right.

Collinson:What are the values of caring and insight and guidance, and just what does it mean to be a good man, not just men are terrible. I'm not trying to say that, obviously, why would I be saying that? But there are different ways of being a man, and I think that's a really positive message. This is not appropriate.

Scarpino:Teaching men that that kind of behavior is not okay.

Collinson:Exactly.

Scarpino:I certainly had that talk with my sons.

Collinson:Good.

Scarpino:So did their mother.

Collinson:Yeah, and we're fighting people like Andrew Tate who are going on the internet. He's got a massive following because he's telling them just the opposite, exploit women.

Scarpino:Telling young men kind of what they want to hear.

Collinson:Yeah, yeah exactly. It’s harder now because of social media, I think.

Scarpino:Yes, and if you want to think that that's okay, you can find somebody like him who will tell you that it's okay. 

I want to ask you about a couple of things going on in the world and get your perspective as a leadership scholar. The first one is climate change. I don't like to lead the witness, but I'm going to pose two questions. One, is the problem of climate change partly a result of a failure of leadership? And number two, what's the role of leadership in figuring out how to solve it?

Collinson:Yeah, I would say it definitely is. Really what I'm saying about everything is it's about ways of thinking. How are we thinking about leadership? How are we thinking about followership? How are we thinking about concepts? How are we thinking about resistance? What do we mean by resistance? What do we mean by leadership, which you asked me. If we just lead in ways where we extract and disregard the consequences, the effects, the ecological effects in this case, but consequences can take so many different forms. They might be unintended, they might be unanticipated, but we disregard them. That's the point. And we adopt basically an exploitative relationship with our planet, and we don't care about the consequences. We think climate change is… All these scientists, it’s almost universally agreed now, the planet is warming and if we carry on as we are, we're in real trouble. If we dismiss all the experts again, like I said about Michael Gove, this is reckless leadership in the extreme, I would say. Whereas, to answer your second question, excellent leadership is saying, okay, yeah, we need to take account of the consequence, we need to listen to the experts. We've got all sorts of natural resources that we can use that we're not using. if we shift away from carbon and move to renewables, and obviously in the UK we’re this little island, it's cold but the winds… I know from golf there's winds going all over the place. With those, we could have tremendous wind energy. If we can power, use sunlight to some extent…  but the wind power out in the… You've got more and more wind farms out there, but then don’t….  President Trump came the other week and said we were completely misguided and deluded. I don't know why he would say that, because it's clean, it's advanced technology. It's like Musk’s Tesla. He was on the White House lawn the other week as a salesman. He demeaned himself to become a car salesman.

Scarpino:Right.

Collinson:And those cars are cleaner. I haven't got an electric car, but I wonder about it. My friend's got one and he thinks it’s a fantastic vehicle. 

Scarpino:My son-in-law has one. If I could afford it, I'd have one. 

Collinson:Yeah, yeah. They're so much cleaner and they're pleasant to drive. We went on the river on Monday in the city, and it was an electric driven boat. It was so lovely and smooth. It just added to the relaxation of the whole process.

Scarpino:And it's quiet.

Collinson:Yeah, totally quiet and you're not polluting the river. It's a win-win. Why would anybody be against, unless you said financially it doesn't work compared to… You could argue that and we'd have to go into the debates about carbon versus renewables. But to dismiss it, why would you do that, unless you're being funded by the old carbon-centered companies to say these things. But then you're not speaking what you really think, you're just a puppet.

Scarpino:Right. The other thing I wanted to ask you about is AI, artificial intelligence. Again, nobody can know everything about this and it's a rapidly evolving area, but based upon what we know about AI right now, what do you think has been its impact on leaders and leadership?

Collinson:As of now?

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:Or in the future? As of now.

Scarpino:I'm not going to ask you to predict the future unless you want to give it a try.

Collinson:(laughs) It's really hard to predict. So much of academia is about trying to predict and I just think it's a fool's game most of the time, because so many things… We didn't see Putin invading, you know, why would he invade? He says he's not going to, but then he does. All these things that we get wrong in our predictions, don't we? 

AI, algorithms, surveillance of the… It brings with it tremendous opportunities in terms of just being in this city, Pam and I just saying, “Oh, let's check with AI which is the way….” A second, it's there. It's incredible. We don't have to ask anybody, and they might not speak English. It's got amazing potential. But then the downside is intensified surveillance, I would say, and issues of privacy and the individual citizens. We've had Orwell and other writers predicting this dark future of big brother and, you know, Brave New World of Aldous Huxley. We need politicians and we need the architects of these programs to be fully aware of the dangers. And they're not. You can see the way that Facebook operates and the way that X operates now. They don't care about all these crucial issues. All they're wanting is more clicks and more drama. The more extreme, the better for them.

Scarpino:Right, the more attention it gets, the more…

Collinson:That is reckless. That's irresponsible leadership in the extreme, I would say. It's an open question, isn't it, whether… At the moment in the universities, the issue for us obviously is how do we engage students? We can't deny AI. But we don't want students just sending an essay that's not theirs, you know, that they just bought off the internet or whatever. Well, you don't have to buy them now; they used to do them that way. So if they do that, have we got the technology to identify plagiarism and artificial intelligence? But if we say, no, you can't use anything like AI, then we're not teaching them about how to live in the future. So that's a real dilemma for us there. 

Scarpino:My last few years teaching it was a real challenge to give paper assignments that you knew they couldn't just go on the internet and find one.

Collinson:Yeah. Did you manage it? 

Scarpino:Yes, I did.

Collinson:That’s a great one. Well done.

Scarpino:I want to ask you a few questions about the UK, the US and the world. Then I'm going to wrap up here. Just looking at the United Kingdom for a while, do you think the UK faces a leadership crisis now?

Collinson:Well, crisis is an overused word, I think.

Scarpino:Okay, but I used it on purpose.

Collinson:Okay. But ding ding ding ding alarm bells went up because strongman leaders operate through crisis that they have defined and created. You saw that with the way that Hitler rose in Germany. He artificially manufactured crises. And there's still the debate - was it the Reichstag fire - who actually lit the proverbial fire there? Because then, once they've got a situation of crisis, then they can justify their individual exercise of power in an autocratic or authoritarian way and crush dissent, and we're seeing that. You're asking about the UK, but just one point about, you know the obvious point that Trump is saying there's a crisis in Washington, Chicago, LA he’s been to. He’s been to…

Scarpino:Portland.

Collinson:Portland, yeah, in the northwest. Firstly, they're all blue states.

Scarpino:They're all democrats.

Collinson:They're all democrats, that's the way to put it. Yeah. And if you look at Washington where my partner's daughter lives, the level of violence and crime is lower than it's been for thirty, forty years. He's artificially manufacturing a crisis, but he's doing it for a bigger reason, which is to get people used to having the military on the streets.

Scarpino:Right.

Collinson:And that then can lead to intimidation when there's a vote next year, I think. Naomi works in a restaurant and she says the number of people in the restaurant is halved since the military has been on the streets. So I don't know, but the notion of crisis is itself a contested term. Like so much of all we've discussed, everything is contestable and can be redefined. So would I say we've got a crisis of leadership in the UK? I would say no, not at the moment. But it's certainly in flux. We've had fourteen years of a conservative government that really had an agenda of cutting back on the public sector. The public sector is creaking, creaking at the edges. It's only, I would say, because of the tremendous commitment and goodwill of so many people, public sector workers, that the NHS is still going, which we're all very proud of. 

Scarpino:NHS?

Collinson:National Health Service. But Labour have now got into power with a big majority, but they are being criticized. They've been only in power a year. After fourteen years of cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, what can they do in twelve months? Probably they need two terms and it's five-year terms. Whether they'll get a second term is an open question obviously. But the Conservatives are discredited, particularly for all the corruption and the parties during the…

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:But obviously you've got the rise of Reform, this Reform party led by Nigel Farage who's a close friend of Trump. The problem with Labour, where the crisis could come, is these illegal immigrants coming across on the boats from France. That was one reason why Labour got in, I think, because they said, “Look, we don't want to be sending them off to Rwanda,” which is what the Tories were planning, but I think they spent four hundred million on this Rwanda and then nobody'd gone. It was an incredible waste of public money, ironically for a party that has been cutting back on public money all the time. But Labour haven't quite got on top of that issue. That's the one issue that Farage can rightly say, “We want our borders.” The thing about the UK is that it is an island obviously, and that affects people's frameworks as well, their thinking. We want to control our borders, and that's why I think Brexit happened, because the European Union created this open movement, but then they had all these immigrants, refugees coming in from different wars, like in Syria. Then the British people thought, well, Angela Merkel's saying that they're all welcome in Germany, but they're coming into Germany and they're attacking the German women. This is what they were thinking, I'm not justifying it. We don't want this open movement across Europe. We need to be able to control… I think controlling the borders is a strong, very powerful thought in the minds of the British because they are an island. A party that speaks to that will do well in an election. That's why Reform could get very strong. If Labour can get on top of the issue, they've still got time to say, “We've done it. Farage’s policies are naive and ridiculous.” And many of them are, and they're not enactable in practice.

Scarpino:No, I mean we have huge issues with border security in the United States which is being exploited.

Collinson:Yeah, very much so. But the Democrats, they didn't sort that one out. They gave them that weapon. And that's what I'm saying about Labour. You've got to understand your people want border control. Doesn't matter what party they perhaps are loyal to, they want to know that their country… the people who come in … We’re a welcoming society I think, but we want to know that they've come through legal means and that they are going to make a contribution and not going to be just living off the State, and is that why they're coming in, you know?

Scarpino:In the United States, the people who build houses and do yard work and all that stuff, they all habla Espanol. 

Collinson:Yes.

Scarpino:When I have workers come to my house, it's a good thing that I can speak a little bit of Spanish because a lot of them can't speak English.

Collinson:Interesting.

Scarpino:Sometimes they'll have a crew chief who can and that's it.

I'm going to ask you a couple more questions and we're going to wrap this up. One is, as you look around the world and the situation in the world and you as a member of the club of leadership scholars…

Collinson:Very fortunate.

Scarpino:We're all fortunate as academics. We live in a world that's divorced from…

Collinson:From a distance. (laughs)

Scarpino:… but do you see a way forward for society, particularly as it relates to leadership? How do you see society moving from now into the future and the role that leaders and leadership scholars could play in that?

Collinson:Yeah, well I think leadership could play an incredibly powerful role, but it needs to take a different form than the strongman leaders. They're taking us back fifty years, you know, very conservative. They want women in the home and all sorts of conservative policies that are not progressive. I think progressive leaders have great potential still to move societies forward. They can be more transparent. Going back to James MacGregor Burns, they can be transformational. They can generate trust in their followers, and they can be more honest and say, “Look, yeah, I got that wrong. This is what I thought at the time. I didn't know this and I didn't know that, and I would have made a different decision. But now that I know that, let's move on. Nobody's perfect. I'm not trying to set myself up as a strongman who knows everything. But I am experienced, I have been a governor of California for a number of years now, and I think I can do this job, and do it…” There's lots of ways of doing leadership, just as we've said about lots of ways of doing masculinity or lots of ways of doing resistance. There's still tremendous potential, because people do want to believe in leaders. That's an important issue, isn't it? 

Scarpino:They do want to believe in leaders, that's right.

Collinson:Yeah, and so that can empower people, I think. When I've worked in universities where I've really got on very well with my leader, department head or dean or whatever, it's empowering. And if you don't get on with them and you think that you're being devalued or disrespected or they just don't care, it's just the opposite.

Scarpino:Mm-hmm.

Collinson:It can take different forms, can't it? But certainly, empowering leadership, let's call it, and eco-empowering leadership I think has tremendous potential.

Scarpino:I'm going to ask you a few questions about you and we're going to wrap this up. The question I want to start with is, professionally who do you look up to? Who do you admire? Who inspires you?

Collinson:In leadership?

Scarpino:Yeah. You could pick anybody, but I mean I just…

Collinson:Yeah well, Keith. Keith's a great inspiration for me.

Scarpino:Keith Grint.

Collinson:Keith Grint. I'm proud to call him a friend. Yeah, I really admire Keith's work and his continued commitment and productivity. It's incredible what he does. Joanne Ciulla. You will have interviewed Joanne, I'm sure.

Scarpino:I know her, yes.

Collinson:She's arrived only this morning, but I've had a nice chat with her already. Fantastic ethics professor who has tremendous insight and an eye for understanding leadership I think in new and interesting, innovative ways. And very ethical herself obviously. Ron Riggio, Claremont. I’m sure you've interviewed Ron.

Scarpino:I have.

Collinson:We've got this shared interest in followership, but it goes beyond that. I’ve written a few articles and chapters in some of his books and he's written articles in the Leadership Journal. We've collaborated over the years. And Gail Fairhurst, so there's four, well five with Keith, five ILA Lifetime Achievement Award winners there. Gail, as I said, has done some great work, but she's in communication. There's an interesting issue as well. I did a paper at a communication conference and it was in London, big hotel. I'd never been to a communication conference, but yeah, I think communication is really important, really important, especially for leaders and leadership.

Collinson:Absolutely, yes.

Scarpino:Yeah. I thought well there's not much on that directly, explicitly. So we were in a session and Gail did a presentation with a colleague, and I did a presentation. It was just the leadership group. There must have been -- bigger than this -- there must have been 1,000 academics, probably 950 Americans and Canadians. It was like Little America suddenly walking into this conference, but none of them were interested in leadership. So we did our presentation, but it was probably 20 people. It was a nice group, we had a really good discussion, and it led to us publishing papers in Leadership. So Gail did the paper and then I did a kind of rejoinder -- not rejoinder --bounced off her work looking at dialectics and dichotomies. But the interesting dichotomy there for me was that you had all these people interested in communication, but they weren't looking at leadership. And then you've got all these people in leadership generally, and they're not thinking about communication. Here we go again. Here’s another dichotomy.

Scarpino:Professionally what sustains you? What keeps you going?

Collinson:I do enjoy writing. I really enjoy the writing. I've done the service when I've had to do that, with the head of department, different promotions committee representatives and things. That's okay. Teaching I really enjoy, face to face, great. Marking drives me bonkers. 

Collinson:Do you know the word bonkers? 

Scarpino:That's the thing about being an emeritus professor is I don't have exams to grade anymore.

Collinson:Fantastic.

Scarpino:I'm still working with some thesis students and so on, but that's not somebody's written test.

Collinson:The writing and the research is what sustains me. I've always enjoyed that part.

Scarpino:Do you think of yourself as a work in progress?

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:In what ways?

Collinson:Keith and I were just talking about doing another paper. I've got something with Keith going on there. We've got the one with Jeff and colleagues for the new journal on feminist organizations. That's going to be a more academic one. I think one with Keith it'll be one with conversation. That's the kind of thing I'm enjoying doing now, you mentioned about the other abuse one. I've done ones on music and leadership. Actually, Keith talked this morning and I whispered to Pam when he did it, he said that… It was about the resistance movement. He was saying that V in the Morse code is da-da-da-da. So people to communicate were whispering the first few notes of Beethoven's Fifth, da-da-da-da as a way of saying, “Look, I'm on your side,” and the Germans had no idea what that meant. And I said to Pam, “leadership and music.” Again, it seems like two separate, totally detached issues. What's leadership and music got to do with each other? But actually, the more you think about it, obviously in campaigns…

Scarpino:They use music.

Collinson:Yeah, there's all sorts. The censorship, in totalitarian leadership situations, cutting back on music and what they saw as subversive music, and only certain types of music being popular. Same in Russia, and controlling again the creative process.

Scarpino:When I was in China and working with -- I may have told you I had undergraduate students assigned to me to keep me out of trouble and translate while I was there.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:They had found their way onto the internet and downloaded a bunch of U.S. and British music, and that's what they listened to.

Collinson:And they loved it. Yeah.

Scarpino:Technically they weren't supposed to have it in China, but they figured out a way to get it.

Collinson:That’s an act of resistance, isn't it? So, music and resistance…

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:It’s a case example. Yeah, and course as I said to you yesterday, my father and grandfather were professional musicians. Writing on music had a personal element to it as well for me. I could well go back to looking again at the issues of music. Whether I could write a paper about Neil Young and leadership and music, I'm not sure.

Scarpino:Maybe you could figure out how to do it. 

As you think about your career, and obviously as we get older, we have more distance, but how do you feel about what you've accomplished?

Collinson:Well, overall, I'm delighted and I'm so pleased that I did that football hooliganism, football crowd behavior dissertation. Because otherwise… I wouldn't be sat here now if Mr. Harper, the economics teacher in the 6th Form, hadn't told me, “Why don't you think about management rather than economics?” Because I would have done economics.

Scarpino:Changed your life.

Collinson:Yeah, absolutely. That one suggestion.

Scarpino:When I was a master’s student at University of Missouri, I did a master’s study of slavery because there was slavery in parts of Missouri and it's a good master's thesis. But the same year that I showed up, the university hired a woman named Susan Flader, who was one of the first environmental historians in the country. As soon as I took a course from her, I said that's it. I went out and I got a PhD in that field.

Collinson:You did?

Scarpino:Yeah. She changed my life.

Collinson:Which part of Missouri were you?

Scarpino:Columbia. Right in the middle of the state. Big university.

Collinson:I spent the bicentennial summer in St. Louis.

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:That's where my cousin was then, yeah, that I'm close to. I had a great time.

Scarpino:I spent a lot of time in St. Louis.

Collinson:Yeah, the Gateway Arch.

Scarpino:Yeah, and I used to go watch the Cardinals play.

Collinson:Yes, yeah.

Scarpino:My wife and I would go all the time.

Collinson:I used to go caddying at Bellerive Country Club.

Scarpino:As you live your lifetime of work and so on, is there anything that you regret or anything you wish you would have accomplished that you didn't?

Collinson:Well, there's always other papers to write. I always wanted to write… I've got loads of stuff on, say, the importance of toilets in organizations. There are all sorts of different processes. It's there, and maybe I'll get to it one day, but I haven't done it. Refuse is a source of resistance. All sorts of issues happen in toilets, and nobody ever talks about them in organizations. It speaks to the…

Scarpino:(laughs) It's kind of true.

Collinson:Yeah.

Scarpino:I don't want this to sound like a sexist remark, but I think that women are more likely to be chatting and talking with each other. Most guys don't go in there and strike up a conversation because it's likely to get misinterpreted.

Collinson:Well, that's true, except Keith and I, it was in the gents toilets where we started talking about maybe we should do a paper together on this. We're good friends. We don't care what people say about us. But yeah, so I'm delighted to have done the career I did. I probably would have made different... Hindsight's a wonderful thing, isn't it?

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:Maybe it would have been nice to stay in the States. I could have looked harder for a post in the States, I don't know. I'm glad I went to St. Andrew's, it was a good experience, and now I still go back. I was there in the summer because we’ve got friends from when I lived there. I think writing, it's enabled me to do writing which I've really enjoyed, which is what started me off when I did the dissertation on football crowd.

Scarpino:At some point in the future, what do you want your grandchildren to know about you? How do you want them to remember you, understand you?

Collinson:My wife was seven years older than me, so I have a 22-year-old granddaughter called Emily. I'm quite close to her and she's doing great. If she remembers me as a kind man who helped her along the way and loved her, that would be fine.

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:Funnily enough, because she wouldn't really know a lot about my career, she sees bits and bobs. Because you kindly prompted me to update my CV, I did send it to her and she said, “Oh wow, you've done so much.” So she knows that side of me now. You helped there.

Scarpino:My grandkids have two dads and they're happy that I'm their kids’ grandfather. They really didn't know anything about me until they came to my retirement.

Collinson:Yes, fantastic.

Scarpino:They knew stuff about me but not my professional life.

A couple of final questions. Is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn't? Anything you wanted to say that I didn't give you a chance to say?

Collinson:No, I brought up the issue of the oil rigs. And we talked about dialectics. The latest chapter in the edited handbook that we did, I tried to then apply the “Only connect!” critical dialectical perspective to men and masculinities, because I do think you've got the same problems in the men and masculinity literature. Some of it's a bit voluntaristic, but some of it, like hegemony, hegemonic masculinity is a bit deterministic. It's not allowing space for agency, men's agency, women's agency. We're not all determined… These ideologies of gender are not just programming us like we're robots. They influence us, but we interpret them and we have agency and choice. So I've tried to argue -- which is against the current almost total acceptance of hegemonic masculinity as the concept to start from. I probably need to write that again in a different place because it's a book chapter so not everybody reads book chapters these days. 

Scarpino:They're a little harder to access, because you have to buy the book…

Collinson:150 pounds!  How much?

Scarpino:Yeah.

Collinson:And the publishers don't like you sending out a PDF of the paper. You've got to send out an earlier Word version these days. It's a bit tricky. But I’ve perhaps not got the message across on that one. But I do think there's a lot more work to be done on thinking about men and masculinity that is neither voluntaristic nor deterministic, that brings in structure and agency, and also perhaps… In the last few years, there's been quite a lot of work on caring masculinity, which I think is positive and good. But I think that can be extended more than it has been as well. Lots of work to work on, but hopefully in a slightly less stressful way, when I want to squeeze it in on a Sunday afternoon. I think in the end I chose the right career. As I say, I wasn't too sure at first because St. Andrews was a bit of a trial by fire at the beginning, but USF really helped me clear my mind on, yeah, I think I enjoy this work.

Scarpino:When I got out of the army and decided to go to graduate school and get a PhD in history -- and I knew that there weren't a lot of jobs -- I remember telling myself I can do this, and if I can't get a job, I can do something else. But of course that wasn't true.

Collinson:(laughs) Yeah.

Scarpino:And it all worked out. Listen, thank you. 

Collinson:My pleasure.

Scarpino:While these recorders are still running, I want to thank you on behalf of myself, on behalf of the Tobias Center, International Leadership Association for giving me all this time to record your oral history.

Collinson:My pleasure. I really enjoyed every moment of it.

Scarpino:At some point, I don't know, it might be a few months, the recording and the transcription will be on the websites that I mentioned.

Collinson:Oh great, so I'll be able to access them somewhere.

Scarpino:Yeah, and we usually try to send the person copies.

Collinson:Oh super.

Scarpino:We can't email them, they're just too big, so we have to figure out a way to set up something that you can download. Some people want them or they want to give them to their grandkids.

Collinson:Yeah, I'd like Emily to have a copy of it.

Scarpino:I don't know, maybe when the grandkids grow up they'll look at it, but…

Collinson:Well, she's 22, so she's very grown up now.

Scarpino:Oh, there you go.

Collinson:Thank you.

Scarpino:Thank you for bailing me out. 

Collinson:We found a way, didn't we?

(END INTERVIEW PART 2)