“Primus Inter Pares”: Leadership and Culture in Sweden

Abstract

The opening quotation provides a significant image of the enactment of leadership in Sweden: Vagueness, equality, and consensus are three of the notions that are crucial to (an understanding of) established leadership in the Swedish context. They are all rooted in an ideology that evolved over a period of many years between the late 1930s and the 1990s, permeating most, if not all, aspects of life in Sweden, and to a large extent in the other Nordic countries. This ideology, with its strong emphasis on the notion of the collective, emerged from attempts to combine economic growth with democracy and extensive programs for social development. During the 1990s a conviction arose in many quarters that this ideology no longer had a part to play in the increasingly globalized context of the day. In business management, for instance, traditional stakeholder perspectives were often being replaced by a focus on shareholder values, whereas in the management discourse organizations now take second place to the individuals who populate them. This shift is perhaps most clearly expressed in the economic vocabulary subsumed under the label of the “New Economy,” a phenomenon that has attracted enormous attention in the public space in recent years (Holmberg & Strannegard, 2002). As Sweden entered the new millennium, the ideological dissonance between the old and the new was reaching its peak. The implications of this ideological shift from the perception, enactment, and evaluation of leadership, is one of the several themes that is examined in this chapter.

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