Mapping Institutional Impacts of Lean Communication in Lean Agencies: Information Technology Illiteracy and Leadership Failure

Information technology’s (IT) influence on formative contexts and on requisite leadership roles is conceptualized both as an enabling force for organizational networking and a reducing force for diversity in leadership functions and cultural contexts. The contemporary “New Age” leadership literature calls for personal and ideological leadership unencumbered by issues of cultural context, communicative complexities and the need for more comprehensive and sophisticated global social analysis. At the same time, this literature punctuates a noticeable indifference to the issue of strategic IT literacy on behalf of agency elites. A preoccupation with “lean and mean”, unbridled managerial prerogatives, competitive rhetoric overstressing means at the expense of legitimate ends, business process re-engineering, downsizing, and IT-mediated globalization can be construed as an abject failure of agency elites to understand and protect distinctive competencies in governance and in organized action. Administrative theory urgently requires a renewed understanding of vulnerability and resilience in agency behavior and the need for renewed institutional and IT-literate leadership.