Advancing commission scholarship by inferring leadership legacy motivations from commission reports: The case of Sir Michael Lyons
| Author | Tor Brodtkorb,Joe Wallis,Brian Dollery |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076717699261 |
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Public Policy and Administration
2018, Vol. 33(2) 216–237
! The Author(s) 2017
Advancing commission
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scholarship by inferring
DOI: 10.1177/0952076717699261
journals.sagepub.com/home/ppa
leadership legacy
motivations from
commission reports: The
case of Sir Michael Lyons
Joe Wallis and Tor Brodtkorb
American University of Sharjah, UAE
Brian Dollery
University of New England, Australia; Yokohama National
University, Japan
Abstract
This article contributes to commission scholarship by exploring how and why chairs use
their reports to shape their leadership legacies. It distinguishes two types of legacy –
fiduciary and expressive – that chairs shape through their reports. The expressive legacy
of the chair can be shaped through judgements about the scope of stakeholder engage-
ment and agenda adjustment that generate four types of leadership identity: conserva-
tor, consolidator, advocate and catalyst. We explore the particular ways in which the
chair of the Lyons Inquiry into Local Government in the UK used his three reports to
shape his legacy. Through his distinctive integration of historical and contemporary
perspectives into a leading vision for local government, he expressed a consolidator
identity with his short-term recommendations and a catalytic identity with his far-reach-
ing envisioning of the institutional space within which a greater place-shaping role for
local government could be established.
Keywords
Commissions, interpretive authorities, leadership legacies, local government, Lyons
Inquiry
Corresponding author:
Tor Brodtkorb, School of Business Administration, American University of Sharjah, PO Box 26666, Sharjah,
UAE.
Email: tbrodtkorb@aus.edu
Wallis et al.
217
Introduction
If a legacy is ‘something transmitted by or received from a predecessor’ (Merriam-
Webster Dictionary), a commission of inquiry report1 can be seen as a legacy
bequeathed to other policy actors. This article explores the ways a commission
chair may seek to shape this legacy through judgements made about the conduct
of the inquiry during its planning, investigative and persuasive phases. We apply
this analysis to a single person inquiry where such judgements can unambiguously
be attributed to its chair and argue that its report can function as a ‘sense-making
narrative’ (Brown, 2000) to shape the fiduciary and expressive aspects of the chair’s
leadership legacy as it relates to this episode of leadership authority (ELA).
In particular, their judgements can shape the type of legacy they want to leave –
conservator; consolidator; advocate; and catalyst. In the case we are considering,
both consolidator and catalytic identities were expressed through different aspects
of the chair’s conduct.
In exploring these issues, this article will seek to make a contribution to two
strands in the policy literature: policy leadership and commission scholarship.
Policy leadership
The first draws on the work of a number of policy scholars (Goldfinch and Hart,
2003; Goldfinch and Wallis, 2010; Wallis et al., 2007) who have drawn on the
interdisciplinary literature on leadership (see surveys by Bass and Bass, 2009;
Van Wart, 2013) to explore the role individual actors play as leaders in the
policy process. In doing so, they have grappled with the contested nature of
leadership concepts. These are reflected in two major paradigmatic divisions:
(i) ‘essentialists’, who view leadership as residing in the ‘traits’ of leaders
(Kirkpatrick and Locke, 1991), the behaviors they enact in a particular situations
(Fiedler, 1978; Hersey et al., 1979) and/or the functions (including transform-
ational as opposed to transactional leadership) they perform (Bass, 1985; Burns,
1978) and (ii) ‘relationalists’ and ‘social constructionists’, who find leadership in
relationships of ‘emergent co-ordination and change’ (Uhl-Bien, 2006) in which
shared meanings are socially constructed (Fairhurst and Grant, 2010; Ospina and
Sorenson, 2006). One way these actor-centric policy scholars have sought to resolve
this definitional conflict is to treat policy leadership, like other forms of leadership,
as a relational process in which social constructions of shared meaning take place,
while highlighting the temporary opportunities such processes give individual
actors to demonstrate the ‘essential’ qualities they have to take the lead, by
making judgements that influence the direction of policy leadership processes
(Wallis et al., 2007: 87).
The ELA that commission chairs are given when leading the conduct of an
inquiry exemplifies this type of agency in a way that, to our knowledge, has not
been explored in this literature. The typical parameters within which chairs can
act as policy leaders appears to have remained stable over time and similar across
different institutional contexts (Inwood and Johns, 2014; Prasser, 2006; Rowe and
218
Public Policy and Administration 33(2)
McAllister, 2006; Zegart, 2004). Chairs are typically appointed from outside gov-
ernment circles to lead ad hoc bodies that have an official status and are charged
with a discrete task, the scope of which is defined in advance, and a limited time to
complete it, usually through the submission of a report with factual analysis and
recommendations, after which they are disbanded with no subsequent role in
implementing policy.
This leadership perspective raises the types of questions considered by leadership
scholars who are interested in the degree to which such actors seek to shape the
legacy of their ELAs (Gardner and Laskin, 2011; Kouzes and Posner, 2008; Shamir
and Eilam, 2005). Their motive may be stronger when they see the potential for the
legacy to be subject to misattribution and misrepresentation. Misattribution arises
when outcomes are attributed to the leader’s agency that could arguably be caused
by other factors (Meindl, 1995; Popper, 2011). However, this bias can work in the
opposite direction, with opponents or critics downplaying the agency of the leader
in producing positive outcomes. Misrepresentation relates to the intentions of
leaders. It may arise when actors are unclear about the leader’s actual intentions
and engage in projection, treating the leader’s intentions as approximating what
their own would have been in similar situations (Popper, 2011).
The leadership legacy of commission chairs may be subject to misattribution in a
number of ways. Firstly, inquiry reports are often publicly attributed to the chairs,
even when they reflect the deliberations of multiple members, due to the role com-
mission chairs play in steering the inquiry process to the production of a text in the
form of a ‘sense-making narrative’, that ‘is a monologue, a univocal representation
that omits, marginalizes, and selectively highlights in its suppression of interpretive
plurality’ (Brown, 2000: 30). Secondly, governments may claim to be influenced by
them, even where they learn little new from commission reports, because the
reports recommend policies the governments intended to implement anyway.
Thirdly, in cases where their recommendations are largely rejected by the appoint-
ing governments, successor governments, opposition parties and opposing advo-
cacy coalitions may cite their reports as an influence on policy changes that may
already have been on their policy agendas.
What makes the role of commission chair distinctive, however, is that the
requirement to submit a report gives them an ex ante opportunity to shape their
legacy in a way that is resistant to misrepresentation. Unlike political or adminis-
trative leaders, who are often motivated to write memoirs to ‘set the record
straight’ about what they intended while in office, the report of a commission
chair is itself the work product the inquiry was intended to produce, and so its
explanations and justifications of judgements made during the course of the inquiry
cannot be dismissed as misattribution or misrepresentation.
Commission scholarship
In exploring how a report gives chairs the opportunity to shape the legacy of their
ELA, this article will seek to extend the scholarly literature on commissions that
Wallis et al.
219
has tended to study their policy role and impact from the point of view of the
governments that appoint them. Within this literature can be found both in-depth
case studies (see, for example, Brown, 2000; Clark and Trick, 2006; Inwood, 2005;
Owens, 2012; Resodihardjo, 2006; So¨derblom, 2001) and comparative studies that
are often undertaken in the context of particular countries. For example, the classic
works of Gosnell (1934), Clokie and Robinson (1937), Sulzner (1971) and
Chapman (1973) have more recently been updated by Rowe and McAllister
(2006) and Sulitzeanu-Kenan (2010) in the UK; Gilligan (2002) and Prasser
(2006) in Australia; Berger (2003) and Inwood and Johns (2014) in Canada; and
Campbell (2002), Zegart (2004) and Kitts (2006) in the United States. Moreover, in
the last decade, the deployment of investigatory commissions in the aftermath of
crises has received some attention from policy scholars (see Boin et al., 2008;
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 2011; Sulitzeanu-Keenan, 2010).
A recurrent theme of this literature is that beyond the official rationalization of
their appointment, governments have other reasons for appointing them. For
example, if they are seen as a ‘venue-alteration mechanism’ that replaces ‘one
volatile critical audience (the media, the opposition and the public) with a much
slower-moving and predictable...
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