2.3 Global spaces
Not many of us have an opportunity to influence leadership on a global stage… or so we think. In fact, the next time you are out in your community or workplace, take a closer look around you. The products you consume, music you listen to, colleagues you work with, friends you socialise with and family you love, will be ‘from’ so many parts of the world.
The contemporary world – at least our part of it in the UK – is very global, and the opportunities for making your leadership global are almost endless. To help you think about ways in which leadership can have a global impact and reach, three focuses are now introduced, drawing on the work of the geographer Doreen Massey.
Firstly, leadership can target centres of global power, whether that’s through working in, with or against such power. Doreen Massey (2007) makes the point that although the world is now more global than ever before, it also features discrete centres of power that have an oversized influence over the rest of the world: centres of finance, industrial complexes, fossil fuel sites, centres of international politics. People who want to change the world tend to focus on influencing one or more of these sites – through protest, subversion or working from within, climbing the corporate ladder to make a difference.
Secondly, spaces never exist in isolation but are always codependent. In this way, workspaces in the UK can depend on the hard work and creativity of people originally from spaces far away – the prime example being the National Health Service (NHS). Globally spatial leadership can therefore work towards enhancing the vibrancy, energy and wisdom that can come from diverse experiences and backgrounds.
Thirdly, however, organisations can use the uneven opportunities available to people in various global spaces to fill lower-paid jobs, or simply to squeeze out more profit (Massey, 2005). For example, in most large offices, women originally not from the UK disproportionately occupy crucial but low-paid cleaning roles. The shipping and cruise ship industries are notorious for employing people in the same jobs on quite different wages, depending on the type of passport they hold. In this way, companies can take advantage of well-educated and capable people from countries with lower wages. There is a role for leadership in challenging and overturning some of the ways in which uneven spaces are leveraged by exploitative employers.