Charismatic Leadership in Singapore Three Extraordinary People
Charismatic Leadership in Singapore: Three Extraordinary People Hava Dayan and Chan Kwok-bunWhat makes some lead while others follow? How do the great leaders keep their influence over the long term? These questions may be simple, but the answers hav
- PDF / 1,854,660 Bytes
- 257 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 35 Downloads / 278 Views
Dayan Hava
●
Chan Kwok-bun
Charismatic Leadership in Singapore Three Extraordinary People
Dayan Hava Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem, Israel [email protected]
Chan Kwok-bun Chan Institute of Social Studies Hong Hong, China [email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4614-1450-6 e-ISBN 978-1-4614-1451-3 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-1451-3 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2011940694 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
This book offers a narrative of the unusually transformative lives of three extraordinary Singaporeans: community work volunteer Sister Prema, dramatist Kuo Pao Kun, and architect Tay Kheng Soon. With a few exceptions, sociological studies have neglected the concept of charisma, and the idea has never been incorporated into other major theoretical sociological discussions. Although Weber’s definition of charisma1 forged what is for many writers the starting point for any appreciation of the concept, his conceptualization of charisma has not been very useful to sociology because it deals with charisma more as a psychological than a social phenomenon.2 Even the growing interest in leadership and charisma within organizational behavior studies3 is mainly oriented to messo level analysis and is still principally concerned with psychological concerns rather than sociological ones. With the exception of Edward Shils and Smuel Eisenstadt who employ charisma as a concept to analyze power in terms of the symbolic social order, the interest of mainstream sociology in charisma studies ended before the end of the 1960s.4 In contrast to the prevailing attitude of sociologists, the basic assumption of our book is that the study of charisma can make a significant contribution to several central sociological topics because, in the real world, charismatic leadership is closely related to important sociological concerns such as action, power, and influence and to social symbolic meaning, the social construction of reality, and transformation. But, by way of its nature, the concept takes in the individual, small groups, various social institutions and organizations, and the macro social system. That means aspects and agents from different social le
Data Loading...