Moderate Bravery: Learning through Mundane Experiments and Storytelling
Developing Public Managers for a Changing World
ISBN: 978-1-78635-080-0, eISBN: 978-1-78635-079-4
Publication date: 17 December 2016
Abstract
Purpose
The ability to act in a purposeful and effective way amid institutional tensions and paradoxes is, right now, a highly prized quality in public leadership. The purpose of this chapter is to qualify moderately brave acts as a learning format that combines the analytical and performative skills implied in this kind of agency.
Design/methodology/approach
The chapter explores the engagement with paradoxes as a narrative praxis. From existing literature, it sums up an understanding of agency as a social process of mediating paradoxes in order to make action possible. Drawing on Northrop Frye’s theory of modes, the chapter explains this praxis as a narrative endeavour balancing the dynamics of tragedy (disintegration) and comedy (integration). Moderately brave acts are formed as a kind of low-mimetic synthesis – very much akin to comedy and realistic fiction. The narrative dynamics of low-mimetic synthesis are pursued in the case story of Christian, a Master of Public Administration (MPA) student from Copenhagen.
Findings
Moderately brave acts appear as a learning format that can inspire a less idealised, but not entirely ironic approach to the paradoxes of management. In this way, they can foster a nuanced and pragmatic agency that combines analytical reflexivity with the ability to take practical action in problematic situations.
Practical implication
The chapter may inspire teachers to use narrative techniques to allow students to deal with real problems of daily praxis in a way that embraces the tension between idealisation and deconstructive irony.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
This chapter owes a lot to students on the MPA programme at CBS, especially to Christian Irving, who chose to be the main character of my case study and the artist Martin Enggaard, who has let me use his drawing. Working on the chapter, I have received very valuable feedback from professor John Sillince and visiting fellow Ben Golant from Newcastle University. In the same way, the anonymous reviewers have inspired me with constructive critique.
Citation
Majgaard, K. (2016), "Moderate Bravery: Learning through Mundane Experiments and Storytelling", Developing Public Managers for a Changing World (Critical Perspectives on International Public Sector Management, Vol. 5), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 205-229. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2045-794420160000005011
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
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