- 23/11/2012
- Posted by: essay
- Category: Free essays
Our society is experiencing more and more metamorphoses and it’s quite natural that the laws and patterns used before are getting out of place at the moment. Hence, there are numerous sociological, psychological and market investigations concerning these or that aspect of society evolution, and gender aspect is normally one of the most popular.
The model of woman behavior, her role and status in the community has seriously changed. The circle Kinder, Kueche, Kirche is working no more, women not only go upstairs in their careers, but they are jostling for CEO positions with amazing intensity. Still they claim to face a lot of barriers and preventing factors on their way to leadership, therefore the books like Enlightened Power by Coughlin et al. are just the call of the time. The editors have collected inspiring stories of “40 extraordinary men and women who individually and collectively represent the most powerful voices in the emerging field of women in leadership.” (Coughlin et al. 2005). The book is made up of three comprehensive parts: Reimagining Power, Paths of Power and A New Power in the World.
The main part of the book is to give examples of how women get success throughout the United States and overseas. These “women pathbreakers” are heads of courts and headmasters of schools, leaders of non-profit organizations and political parties, owners of wineries and stock holders. The thesis to be supported here is: “All over the world, then, women have proven themselves to be good leaders.” (Coughlin et al. 2005).
To begin with, it is stated that “leadership is a journey that starts from within” (Coughlin et al. 2005). It means that to gain power over others we first of all need to get power over ourselves. We need to know ourselves and make sure we control ourselves. There is a famous expression that if you subdue others, you will get others, and if you subdue yourself, you’ll get a way. Only when we are confident and self-reliant, when we have what to give others, we have right and capability to lead the way, to fugle and sparkplug, and finally to make the running. In this way only “after learning self-leadership, one must learn to lead this larger group” (Coughlin et al. 2005).
The first part, entitled Reimagining Power, shares the ideas why it is so important to look at the term of power broader. The authors derive the definition from the “way of being.” It refers to new type of thinking and behaving, where the person distinctly knows what the goal is and what are his or her personal capacities to achieve it while being a part of the community.
Further the authors explain why the society needs a new type of leader. The information post-industrial age puts us in the conditions of interconnected environments. We get only fragments of information and have to build the entire picture from those pieces. The authors tend to think women have more potentialities to cope with this defragmentation: “women do in fact possess innate leadership qualities and the potential to lead in support of breakthrough results.” What is more, earlier the employees were just to execute definitely stated tasks and to think. Scientific and technological revolution, globalization and other tends require a new type of person who is able to learn and interact, relate and generate ideas, work in teams and cope with tasks creatively and quickly. To support the expressed ideas, Riane Eisler reviews technological and economical changes which have led to social shifts; she considers the domination model and partnership one to show the difference and the effectiveness of the latter; she describes why and how the status of women is raised, and introduces new model of “hierarchies of actualization” which comes to replace masculine guidance based on prepotency and control. (Coughlin et al. 2005).
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