Research Paper Series #1, March 16, 2022

March 16 2022 at 12:00-14:30, Augustinus Room (SP D4)

PROGRAMME

12:00-12:15: Lunch is served
12:15-12:30: Introduction to CBS Leadership Blue Ribbon
12:30-13:25: “The play’s the thing – Hamlet and the question of leadership”. Presentation and discussion

13:25-13:35: Break

13:35-14:30: “So I just sit there and laugh at jokes that aren’t funny: Dealing with tension and Gender in the Danish Workplace”. Presentation and discussion.

PAPER 1

"The play’s the thing – Hamlet and the question of leadership”  
As a play, the genius of Hamlet lies in the indefinite space it leaves around its themes, into which all manner of opinion forming might spill. Though the play cannot be reduced to its eponymous lead character, it is around this figure that the vagaries of the world turn; Hamlet distils the indefinite. He is a spoilt princeling who vacillates and whinges (an introspective sponger in a shirt, said Brecht). He is a renaissance figure snuffed out by the backwater that is the Danish court. He is an apogee of disciplined self-reflection. He is a cunning trickster ever alive to the inevitable tedium of ritual and the stupidity of innovation. As a proto leader, a leader forever in waiting, a figure on the brink of power that tips into ruins, the paper examines what, if anything, we might take from this equivocal fictional character when attempting understand the condition of leadership.

Presenter: Robin Holt, Professor, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy
Discussant: Dan Kärreman, Professor, Department of Management, Society and Communication

PAPER 2

“So I just sit there and laugh at jokes that aren’t funny: Dealing with tension and Gender in the Danish Workplace”
Using Complexity Leadership Theory I argue that to change and adapt to pressures for gender diversity in the top echelons of Danish organizations requires a perspective on leadership that values tension. I share the journey of thesis as a geography of what happens in between and around my interactions and conversations about gender diversity, and the way I analyze and write about the role of tension in the adaptive process towards gender diversity in Danish organizations.

Presenter: Edmonia Baker, PhD Fellow, Department of Management, Society and Communication
Discussant: Signe Vikkelsø, Professor, Department of Organization

Nicole Ferry, Assistant Professor (Department of Management, Society and Communication) will facilitate the discussions.