Who do you think of when someone talks about strong leadership? Someone tall, able-bodied, probably white, speaking in a deep pitch – and probably male.
#Strong together uk election series#
The repetition of “strong and stable” is becoming important because it carries a series of assumptions with it. There’s another factor at play here, too. There’s plenty of evidence of the damage that strong leaders, in politics and in workplaces, can do. You don’t have to be a believer in “servant leadership” to doubt the idea of strong leadership. We are bombarded daily with implicit and explicit messages that strong leadership is the ideal. This is especially true of the idea of leadership. The implication here is that strong is better than weak. There’s usually a hierarchy in this way of constructing meaning. Conservative-sponsored adverts in this election and the last in 2015 are keen to tell us the parties and leaders who are weak and unstable.
The idea of “strong” is therefore understood in relation to an implicit idea of “weak”. Social theorists have been telling us for a long time that the meaning we derive from language is relational. “Strong and stable” tells us that the Conservative party strategists want us to think of all other options as weak and unstable. That makes language central to politics, as a means of persuasion as much as a means of communicating ideas or policies. This process of social construction happens mostly through language. Linda Smircich and Gareth Morgan, two of the world’s most prominent and insightful analysts of organisation, argued in the early 1980s that “successful” leadership (that is, persuading someone to do something they wouldn’t normally do) depended on a leader persuading people of a specific reality. What does Theresa May mean by “strong and stable leadership” – and why is it important? Constructing a reality?
But everything we know about leadership tells us that language is central, so we have to take this careful repetition seriously. Political history is littered with some far worse campaign slogans (remember the Conservatives’ 2005 “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” – an obscure slogan, to which the public’s answer was a clear “no”). It would be easy to dismiss this as just one of those irritating political hooks that are part and parcel of any election.
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