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(2013) Fictional leaders, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
"What can I do? There is absolutely nothing I can change." This kind of statement will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a complex organisation. It denotes a vague feeling of helplessness brought on by one's perceived inability to influence the organisation or pursue meaningful courses of action in the face of its anonymous "hierarchy" and powerful bosses. However, the statement takes on a different order of salience and implication when uttered by a top manager. In a concrete case known to one of the authors, this crie de cour came from a director of what was, at the time, the second largest bank in Germany. The author was, himself, a member of the second tier of management and responsible to the executive board. Together with one colleague he was responsible for the complete back-office activities concerning transactions for securities, custody and payments. These departments had a combined workforce of about 3000 employees.
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Full citation:
Pelzer, P. , Case, P. (2013). Leadership and expectation: Thomas Pynchon, in Fictional leaders, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 155-165.
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