CULTURAL MYTHOLOGY AND GLOBAL LEADERSHIP

Description: BOOK REVIEW

CULTURAL MYTHOLOGY AND GLOBAL LEADERSHIP

Edited by Eric H. Kessler and Diana J. Wong-Mingji

ISBN: 978 1 84720 403 5

Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd

www.e-elgar.com

LEADERS & CULTURE: REALITY & MYTHS- A CRITICAL 21st CENTURY COMMENTARY

An appreciation by Phillip Taylor MBE and Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green Chambers

Quick! Take this quiz, or half of it anyway now. It’s on the dust jacket of this rather intriguing and worthy book which postulates for the most part that there is a direct link between leadership style and cultural influence largely led by a society’s mythology.

So try linking these up:

1. King Arthur - a. Germany 2. Evita Peron - b. India 3. Osiris - c. England 4. Frederick the Great - d. United States 5. Superman - e. Greece 6. Moses - f. Japan 7. Achilles - g. Israel 8. Rama - h. Egypt 9. Shinto - i. Argentina

Scroll down to the end of this review for the answers. Hope you’ve got them all. We can imagine, though, that some of you are arguing that Prussia would be slightly more accurate for Frederick (Germany was not a state until 1870) and that Moses is specific not just to Israel, but to the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic world. But as we’re not going to let pedantry stand in the way of jolly good fun, even though it could be said that this little exercise does point up the delights and also the limitations of this book.

This is a multi-authored work in nearly 400 pages which brings together the scholarly endeavours of some 33 academics from an eclectic collection of universities worldwide. Each article is written in support of the thesis that the myths that pertain in your culture make what you are. The sub-text here is that cultural mythology exerts an all pervasive influence which affects attitudes and behaviour -- and therefore leadership and management styles of yesterday and today.

If you are a leader, or aspiring to be one, it stands to reason that mythological references on which your culture is based will affect the direction of your decision making, whether you or anybody else actually believes in these myths. They’re out there and they’re a part of you.

As Theodore Peridis explains in his article on Greece, that myths narrate a popular view of how practices, events and phenomena unfold. He also suggests myths, such as the Olympian Gods, demi-gods and heroes in the Iliad and Odyssey, for example, reflect and are reflected in a society’s deep cultural and spiritual values.

He goes on to attribute many of the Greek attitudes to leadership to the influence of that country’s mythological heritage. The Olympian gods were heroic and horrid; as brutal as they were brave, with a sense of justice that was rather capricious to say the least. Paridis points out various linkages between all this with the world view of contemporary Greek society – a culture which he says is: ‘opportunistic, relying on only broadly stated rules and which accepts fluidity and uncertainty.’

Whether you agree with this assessment or not, Peridis argues his case rather persuasively as do all the other authors in this compilation who similarly analyse at least 20 countries in the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East and Asia and the Pacific rim along the same lines, each article being structured more or less the same. The inherent limitation of this approach is the tendency to compartmentalize.

Each country appears to be influenced by a cultural mythology specific to it alone. The