Don’t lose sight of context: a commentary on mobilizing cities and regions

Whilst many variables play through explanations of effective cities and regions, Andrew Beer and Terry Clower, in their article ‘Mobilizing leadership in cities and regions’ (Beer & Clower, 2013), tell us that enquiry into the leadership question provides useful insights into the place of human agency in urban and regional development – and these insights complement others derived from related types of enquiry, e.g. into formal governance arrangements or economic geographies.

Reflecting critically on how sub-national leadership is enacted allows us to explain, at least to some extent, how and why some places are able to adapt to ever-changing economic, social and environmental circumstances. Equally, by situating enquiry into leadership in complex urban and regional settings, we can also elucidate spatially contextualized features of leadership that can enrich conventional organizational studies. Beyond this, deeper critical appreciations of leadership can provide us with another way of revealing and explaining the interplay between power, resources and ideas – and can shed penetrating light onto the questions of why, and in whose interest, leadership is enacted, in different places and at different times.

Beer and Clower are, however, a little gentle in their assessment of the state of this emerging leadership subdiscipline. The role of formal and emergent leadership in the making and shaping of better cities and regions remains highly contested. Leadership is a ‘baggy’ topic and recent research has confirmed the need to improve the theorizing of leadership in the unique context of sub-national territorial development – and argues for a more substantive evidence base to be assembled. Precisely what works, why and for whom? And how can we know any of this with any certainty?

Crises in leadership have always been with us – but the current generalized lack of confidence in the value and quality of leadership across political, business, public service and organizational life is provoking calls for a major rethink and for some improvement. From an urban and regional development perspective, before engaging in debate around the best-suited leadership approaches for the economic, social and environmental challenges of the 21st century that will take us beyond the limits of organizational leadership ‘think’ (and that can also offer accessible learning to urban and regional development practitioners), the regional studies community must develop far more contextually nuanced and empirically rich explanations of leadership.

Rising to this challenge, there have been some important and distinctive contributions to understanding and explaining leadership in the urban and regional studies literature – and it is timely that Beer and Clower’s survey looks to take stock of the last two decades or so of this work. A contextual reframing of leadership enquiry – particularly where urban and regional researchers seek to draw upon a polymathic appreciation of the conditions of economic, social change and environmental change – will no doubt take a little time to become fully embedded into the leadership studies firmament. Mabey & Freeman (2010) have suggested elsewhere that to study leadership in the unique settings of complex large-scale social co-productions – otherwise known as cities and regions – requires researchers to be comfortable with the interdisciplinary method if reductionist insights are to be avoided. Importantly, Beer and Clower’s review acknowledges the theoretical value of this relatively new and original urban and regional development studies leadership subdiscipline. They provide a good sense of the breadth and depth of the intellectual project and suggest that it has analytical promise and explanatory power.

The authors point out that, with some notable exceptions, leadership has been something of a missing variable in the urban and regional development debate. They tell us that a growing body of urban and regional researchers are now beginning to turn their attention to exploring the leadership ‘question’ – but remind us that the subdiscipline is relatively young and at this early stage in its evolution remains somewhat fragmented in terms of definitional positions adopted by different researchers, the methodologies applied and the variety of discourses drawn upon. Nevertheless, Beer and Clower are clear about the significance of the sector’s contribution. They suggest that the literature is already providing useful complementary perspectives alongside more longstanding types of urban and regional studies research and argue for the value of a research agenda that seeks to reveal the role of leadership in mobilizing the ‘messy’ power of human agency in cities and regions.

Beer and Clower are clearly championing an urban and regional leadership research agenda in this piece, but there are weaknesses in the literature to date that are skimmed over by the authors. Nevertheless, reading between the lines, there are a number of key messages embedded in this review that can serve to inform future research.

Without necessarily setting out these items as explicitly as they might in their paper, Beer and Clower tell us the following:

• That urban and regional development leadership is not a neutral project – and so we are wise to approach it critically.

• To understand leadership is to recognize that context matters a great deal – cities and regions provide context – but there are, of course, contexts within these contexts.

• There is much leadership variety across approaches to urban and regional leadership identified in the literature to date – and as yet there is no theoretically informed categorization of urban and regional leadership ‘types’.

• We are still unclear about the extent to which leadership makes any meaningful or measurable difference to urban and regional development outcomes – or the extent to which this might be true (or untrue) in different places at different times – and why?

• We might need to think more about how different places might shape leadership approaches differently.

• We might need to think more about the effects of scale on leadership – and also consider the inter-scalar dynamics that may influence leadership interactions.

This is a very timely survey that takes stock of some of the literature highlights – but in the space available to the authors it cannot be comprehensive. Without doubt, the urban and regional leadership literature has been influenced by (and continues to read across from) leadership research that has been conducted across a number of other disciplines including public policy, organizational studies, business studies and psychology. If there is an important omission in the piece, it is perhaps the recognition that not all the thinking here is entirely new – albeit that the blending of insights from multiple leadership discourses to engender an important reframing of the ‘leadership research question’ is certainly original and has been essential to revealing the unique features of so-called place leadership. Place matters – and for leadership. But to provide a comprehensive review of the intellectual antecedents of this particular approach to the leadership question would require more than one paper.

What Beer and Clower’s early survey of the ‘state of the art’ does do is to inspire those interested in developing the potential of this subdiscipline to work towards greater theoretical and empirical rigour.