Old wine in a new bottle: Revisiting organisational conceptions of leadership to understand what place leaders ‘actually’ do to make things happen

Place Leadership, as ‘a specific form of leadership at the urban and regional scale’ is
considered central to urban and regional growth because it brings together actors from different backgrounds, operating at different scales and with differing levels of power and authority, to work in partnership with others, who may not share their ideological views or business interests. But despite knowing much about what leaders do in organisations and where matters of governance might sit, we’ve never fully understood ‘what it is that place leaders actually do to make things happen at the sub-national scale’. In this chapter, I return to the Organisation Studies literature to see how leadership is ‘actually conceptualised’ and use this to analyse ‘actually existing’ case of place leadership, to show how these specific talents, need to differ, in different contexts, in order to get the job done. What this shows, is
that, in keeping with Critical Management, it is only through discursive analysis of place leaders’ accounts of their practice, that we are able to reveal how these attributes and processes ‘actually come together’. This is in keeping with the observations of Beer (2015) that only by acknowledging that regions are construed both materially and discursively through a myriad of processes (Lagendijk 2007) will we succeed in better aligning policy to the specificity of place.