Introduction to Public Leadership

Contents

• What do we mean to focus on "Public" Leadership?
• Public Matters/Private Matters
• Public Communication/Mass Communication
• The Public Sphere
• Public Address
• The History of Public Address
• Public Leadership

• Our Perspective on "Rhetoric"
• Rhetoric I: Community
• Rhetoric II: Seeking Meaning
• Rhetoric III: Motivating Common Action

• A Short Introductory Chart to Twentieth Century American History

What do we mean to focus on "Public" Leadership?

There are several terms that we need to understand and clarify.

Public Matters/Private Matters

Think about issues that you take to be private matters and those you think call for attention from your community. You have the distinction between public and private matters. We take "private matters" to be "none of your business." But other matters we take to be things we share with the community, or we think that we should approach these matters as a community rather than as isolated indivduals or families. One of the struggles that characterizes discourse is over which matters belong in which domain.

Public Communication/Mass Communication

Source: C. Wright Mills, "Mass Society and Liberal Education"

We will be interested in studying the distribution of power between these two modes of communication in the 20th century. Mills argues that the century has moved in the direction of mass communication. Our starkest image of mass communication is in George Orwell's 1984, but Mills stresses that the century's fascination with mass communication has not been restricted to totalitarian states, but has had its own form in democracies.

The Public Sphere

The public sphere is where public concerns are formed and addressed. Note that this is not necessarily governmental. Indeed, much of the things that we turn to others to share, we do not share through government. But government may offer itself to arbitrate or provide leadership in the public sphere. So government's role is not a given of the public sphere, but one of the items about which we communicate.

Public Address

The use of the voice to perform our public lives, when we use our voice to respond to events with others. Note that this is not just speaking from the platform or the speaking of one standing before many. Discourse is used to construct the public sphere.

History of Public Address

• Different times and different places construct public address differently.
• Different subject matters are public at different places and times
• Different people are granted power to participate in discourse at different places and in different times
• Different institutional forums are active at different places and times.
• Styles of discourse differ across place and time.

• We will track these changes across the 20th Century

Public Leadership

• Leaders must draw power of public acknowledgement to them.
  • By "public acknowledgement" we refer to a willingness to listen to them and to be influenced and coordianted by them.
  • By "power" we mean this acknowledgement. Power is best when it is acknowledged, not when it is imposed.
  • We say that leaders who possess this quality have legitimacy.
• In studying public leadership we are interested in the use of the voice to motivate, inspire, and organize public action. Thus, our interest is exclusive to the leadership that stimulates coordinated response to the problems that the public accepts.
• Public leadership pulls a group of people (a society) together and coordinates their response to their world.

Our Perspective on "Rhetoric"

We will approach the study of discourse this semester using three different perspectives on rhetoric and questions which come from them. In doing so, our perspective is most informed by the third cluster of definitions explained in Reid and Klumpp: rhetoric as a means of inducing cooperation.

Rhetoric I: Community

• We are interested in how communities use language to construct their public life.

• Definition: Rhetoric is the use of discourse to understand and influence the quality of our lives through interaction and cooperation with others.

• We study the rules, places, subjects, characteristics, & strategies with which communities construct the public sphere.
• Rules: A community establishes ways in which people are allowed to use oral discourse to address public matters. We need to understand discourse to understand these rules in a particular community. Such rules specify who may speak, who is listened to, when one can speak about what.
• Places: There are certain places and forums that society establishes for oral discourse. These are fairly easy to see. They may be informal (we encourage the discussion of public matters around a coffee pot, but not on a bus) or formal (public matters are discussed in legislatures, but not in confessionals).
• Subjects: Some things are talked about in a community and other matters are restricted to private occasions.
• Characteristics: Discourse varies from community to community in style, appropriate argument, and other descriptive elements.
• Strategies: We account for the fact that discourse is generated in response to situations. Which situations become public and how we go about establishing their public character differs from community to community.
• Language: We observe that rhetoric involves a linguistic response to situations. We react in other ways, but that complex of reaction is coordinated and motivated by acts of language.
• Communities construct: Finally, we observe that responses are constructed by communities -- by people interacting with other people.

• Questions we will ask to study rhetoric in this sense:
• Where are the places for speaking about public matters?
• Who is allowed to speak?
• Who is listened to when they speak?
• What subjects are talked about in public?
• What situations are addressed appropriately as public?
• What rules govern speaking in the community?
• How do speakers establish authority?
• What characteristizes the public speech of the community?
• What strategies are common in speaking in the community?
• How does a community motivate public action?

Rhetoric II: Seeking Meaning

• When we confront events that demand our attention, we turn to others to try to understand them. We use discourse to exchange views, to agree on what we saw and how it relates to other things that we have seen or know.

• Definition: Rhetoric is the use of language to negotiate the meaning of events & coordinate response with others.

• Questions that we ask to understand rhetoric as a method of seeking meaning:
• How does the discourse construct the event?
• Is that construction typical of this community & time?
• What response is motivated by this meaning?

Rhetoric III: Motivating Common Action

• A community that provides a quality of life that carries its members beyond their private matters must be able to organize and motivate working together to achieve common goals. Discourse is the means of provide this need. With rhetoric, leaders unite the public to focus their attention and motivate them to joint action. Note that this invokes the most common definition of rhetoric.

• Definition: Rhetoric is the strategic use of language to motivate the public to coordinated action.

• Questions we will ask to study the motivating power of discourse:
• How does the speaker construct his/her authority?
• How does the speaker construct an appeal to his/her public?
• What is the basis of the motivational power of the speaker's message?