62 LEADERSHIP QUARTERLY Vol. 2 No. 1 1991

examples of moral imperatives (edging the lawn, cleaning up a small amount of oil spilled next to a plant operator’s machine) that turn me off to this utopia, but it is

difficult for me to appreciate a world where all my neighbors are dead certain about what is right and about what is best for me. How far might they go to make certain that I experience pride and dignity? Are they leaders with moral vision and high integrity

if they manipulate or coerce me to do the right thing (e.g., increase my productive output at work despite the negative effects of this on my health status, family commitments, and spiritual growth)? In Herrmann’s ideal community, means are justified by ends. This will always be a dangerous philosophy despite the constraints placed on it in this book with the spiritual directive to build trust.

Recently, I viewed Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”, a critically acclaimed film that flopped at the box office. The film ends with contrasting quotations from Martin Luther King and Malcomb X: the former advocating non-violence in all situations; the latter leaving vague circumstances under which violence might be justifiable. In the film’s last major scene, “Mookie” (played by Spike) appears to initiate destruction of his boss’s

pizza restaurant. An angry crowd of community residents had just finished watching police brutalize and kill a young, black man who started a conflict in the restaurant.

The conflict was escalated by Mookie’s boss when he smashed the man’s radio with a baseball bat. I have been thinking about Mookie’s exercise of leadership in this situation. He threw a garbage can through the restaurant’s front window, fueling the riot. I have also been thinking about who did the right thing in this script . . . and about how we can know the answer to this question. I do not think Herrmann’s book provides any defensible answers to complex questions such as these. The social world of a leader is full of morally ambiguous situations where there is no intuitively obvious solution. By writing as if doing the right thing in the right way is automatic, Herrmann side- stepped the central issue in moral discourse about leadership.

REFERENCE

Burns, J.M. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper and Row.

Planning in the Face of Power, 1989, Berkeley: University of California Press.

283 pages -I- xiv. by John Forester

Reviewed by Stewart R. Clegg, University of St. Andrews, Scotland

What this book does is to enlarge progressively upon models of decision-making from the organizations and political science literatures. Starting from “muddling through,” it moves on to “conflict” and “negotiation” models, in order to prepare the ground for a perspective developed from Habermas’ “critical theory.” It applies each of the perspectives that it deploys to the urban planning process in the United States.

It may come as a surprise to many readers of this journal to find that a book which explicitly applies “critical theory” to an understanding of the planning process is an

Book Reviews 63

immensely readable and practical book, rather than merely an excursus into abstract theory. It is based not only on a well-honed intellect, versed in the complexities of contemporary social theory, but also the author’s involvement in considerable field- work experience of the urban planning process as well as a great deal of experience in the teaching of planning. Each of these elements has entered into the composition of the book.

The role that “critical theory” plays is decisive. Readers of this review may not be familiar with “critical theory” and what it tries to achieve. Essentially, it is an attempt to construct a social theory which provides reasoned grounds for the critique of existing institutions and practices in society: that is, a critique which is based upon premises that none can deny, that works through arguments that all can accept to conclusions which none will dispute. In fact, this is a pretty tall order as one might expect. In practice, critical theorists try to achieve these requirements not just in what they say in their work (see, for example, the work of writers like Habermas f19791, but in how these writers would want to see an ideal argument constructed. The desiderata is called an “ideal speech situation”: one where there are no barriers to entry to a discourse and where there are no impediments to the participants working out what their real and true interests are in whatever topic is under consideration. As a model of what an authentic, genuine consensus would be like in a democratic society this is supposed to function as a model by which existing practices can be evaluated.

This ideal allows Forester to constitute a subject to whom his text is addressed- the “progressive” planner, a person of some considerable integrity in Forester’s view. Progressive planners will be the practical embodiment of a critical theory. Such people will seek, as a matter of course he suggests, to ~nimize systematic sources of distortion in their interpe~onal communications with others. The possibility of “undistorted communication” is essential to critical theory in its search for the holy grail of pure practical reason. However, in this text, no more than in any other with which I am familiar, the pure progressive planner is a somewhat worthy and pious fiction whose reality always remains less than evident. This is particularly so in the last chapter of the book, a “supplement” on planning education, in which the practicalities of the (unpure) planning process are clearly evident in ways which contradict the highly moral tones deployed earlier in the book.

The progressive planner is someone. who has a strong sense of knowing what are the best interests of the unrepresented and under-represented in society and how to aid their realization. “Citizens” become the “angels cast in marble” of the critical planning project. The possibility that the people constituting this category of “citizens” may not have any short-cut to a coherent, consistent and consensual truth is hardly entertained. For an example of the rhetorical way in which populist and amorphous categories function decisively in the discourse consider the following, with its rhetoric of the public welfare, the poor, citizens and planners: “By learning how the public welfare is threatened, how the powerless are kept powerless, and how the poor are kept poor, planners can also learn how to counteract these conditions: to organize, politicize, and empower citizens to create the possibility of genuinely democratic politics” says Forester (p. 82). It is never clear why in practice actual planners would want to do all these things: but then, the subject being addressed is not an actual planner but a “progressive planner.” Such an entity is no more a singular, unitary category

64 LEADERSHIP QUARTERLY Vol. 2 No. 1 1991

than are the other abstractions which are marshalled here: the citizenry, the poor and the public welfare.

If there is some ground which enables one to sort out the ranks of planners, their knowledge and their planning into the unambiguously “progressive” and “non- progressive” (‘regressive?), it is not clearly enunciated in the text. Instead, one has an account which makes moral assumptions about its audience and in consequence makes similar assumptions about the nature of their being in the world. Despite being a frequently empirical piece of work, in the final analysis, this book is a profoundly idealist contribution. It assumes that its audience knows what virtue is, agrees on a common definition of it and will have this uppermost as a requirement of practice. I find this somewhat implausible in terms of the empirical knowledge that is available. The ways people actually go about constructing work are often glossed in highly moral terms, such as the activity of science (see Barnes 1981, for instance). I can think of no reason why the work of planners should be any different. Perhaps, as Cornelis Disco (1979) once suggested, critical theory is the ideology of the new class? In this case, one wonders exactly what it is that students of the planning process will take from this book? They may learn the appropriate liberal responses for the catechism of the seminar but will they build practical foundations for later morality or secure moral cornerstones for the achievement of later practice? The hope is clearly that they will.

Contemporary critical theory is invariably represented as progressive, as liberal, even as radical. Yet this is not the whole story about critical theory. There has been more than one critical theory, not only a critical theory of left and liberal auspices but also one of somewhat fascist and right-wing predilections (Brand 1982). The invocation of a progressive planner, as a fiction, constituting an actual historical will is no bulwark against the fictions that others of a different persuasion as to the historical will of the people might invoke. What place this kind of moral work has in social science, in which representations of the interests of others are freely entered into, is not explicitly addressed in this text. Nor, to be fair, is it in many others. Perhaps the ‘new class’ project of social science has become all too effective an ideology after all?

From the standpoint of power (which this reviewer would prefer to see developed and endorsed), one would seek to duck the moral certainties of any positions which presume to know what the best interests of subjects are and which then uses its evaluation of these to proclaim on the adequacy of existing practice. Does social theory really need to provide new moralities, to strive to be a new church, particularly in the postmodern age? Max Weber warned us against this all those years ago in his essay on “Science as a Vocation” (Weber, 1948). What he did not provide us with, however, was any method for avoiding the sirens of moralizing thought, other than an “ethic of responsibility,” a kind of lonely, existential independence appropriate to rugged individualists and intellectual pioneers. Today, social science can be less moral in its anti-moralism. This does not mean the embrace of some dessicated and disguised morality of positivism masquerading as empirically honed common-sense. On the contrary, where power is involved, what is required is an analysis of the actions of the agents themselves in their construction of a world in which they seek to configure their power and resist that of others. Such a project can, in fact, be attempted using an intellectual armoury which does not leave one hostage to whatever the ideals followed in theory are. Instead, it seeks to trace out how the actors themselves project these ideals

Book Reviews 65

on to the world, how they shape their practices and try to enroll others to these projects,

to translate their representations into terms privileged by the “obligatory passage-

points” of reason, meaning and discourse, which they strive to secure and reproduce

upon the social terrain. From this perspective, leadership and authority and the like

cease to be moral projects and terms. They are practical accomplishments in which

various moral terms used by the actors will have their political role to play the

reproduction of whatever terms they would privilege. Some of these actors will be

planners; some will be other agencies with interests to pursue in and around the actual

planning process. Amongst these some will produce academic writings like the text

under review. Power resides as much in the practices of a text such as this as it does

in the material which it chooses to review. It too is an intervention into the planning

process, seeking to configure them in accord with its own moral lights.

There is much in the book to recommend it, despite the inevitable pieties which

the critical apparatus introduces. The discussions of listening and of designing as a

process of making sense together are first rate. The contribution that the book makes

to an analysis of some of the strategies of power is excellent. The informed account

of the planning process is a timely contribution to the analysis of organizations. Yet,

the book remains framed by a theory which at every turn pushes it into a highly

moral mode of discourse, one which systematically undermines those other forms

of discourse which do not correspond to the critical self-understanding of the liberal

intellect.

We would do well to resist all moral projects, even ones as worthy as the one under

review. Instead, analysis might focus on the ways in which moral and other political

projects work. While remaining agnostic about the views under analysis one would

concentrate on the strategies that the actors use to try and secure them. These are the

views which I have advanced elsewhere (Clegg, 1989) drawing on the work of writers

like Michel Callon (1986) to do so. It is not a new mode of analysis; Machiavelli (1958)

at least, was familiar with it, but it is one more honoured in the breach than the

observance. Represented as an ideology of the “new class,” this book is a suitable case

for treatment, as well as a therapeutic regime in its own write (to borrow a pun from

John Lennon).

Having made a number of what might be construed as quite critical remarks about

the book, it is only fair that I conclude by once again stressing the general readability

of the book, the wealth of detail it contains, and the extremely useful contribution it

makes to the literature of organization analysis, planning and the study of power. In

the latter field, at least, it is hardly unique in forging an explicitly moral project (see

Clegg 1989 for further elaboration of this point). Moreover, from the standpoint of

readers of this journal, it is a morality which at least runs counter to the implicit and

(sometimes explicit) moral authoritarianism of a great deal of the redpolitik endorsed

in much of the leadership literature associated with the planning process. Strategic

planning often becomes a metaphor for the imposition of one’s will in the form of an

executively sanctioned strategic vision. Anyone who desires to resist this turn of events

in the contexts in which they live, work and play, will find this an immensely useful

book.

66 LEADERSHIP QUARTERLY Vol. 2 No. 1 1991

REFERENCES

Barnes, B. (198 I). T.S. Kuhn and social science. London: Methuen. Brand, A. (1982). Critical theory in context: The political cabaret of pre-war German sociology,

AuStralian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 18( 1): 3143. Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops

and fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (ed.), Power action and beliefi A new sociology of knowledge?, Sociological Review Monograph 32. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Clegg, S. R. (1989). Frameworks ofpower. London: Sage. Disco, C. (1979). Critical theory as the ideology of the new class: Rereading Jurgen Habermas,

i%eory and Society, 8(2): 159-214. Habermas, J. (1979). Communication and the evolution of society. London: Heinemann. Machivaelli, N. (1958). 77re prince. London: Everyman. Weber, M. (1948). Science as a vocation. In Gerth, H.H. and Mills, C.W. (Eds.), From Max

Weber: Dsays in sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 129-156.