Charisma

Every so often you come across a study that sheds so much light on a field that you don’t understand why it’s not more widely cited. Raymond Bradley’s The Social Structure of Charisma of 1987 is such a book – it manages to be both deeply rooted in the Weberian theoretical tradition and strikingly original in its contribution to the field. (I feel it over-reaches itself theoretically a bit towards the end, but then ground-breaking studies often do have cracks in them, and that’s no reason to disregard what they do achieve.)

However, I recently came across a Masters dissertation by Dushyant Singh that builds on Bradley’s work to theorise not only the ways in which Al Qaeda is a charismatic organisation, but how security forces might use these ideas to damp down the charismatic effect in order to reduce its violence. Fascinating stuff, but not primarily why I’m mentioning it here.

One of the things we talked about in last week’s ‘Conduct with Charisma’ workshop was the idea of ‘communion’. This is the particular form of social bonding identified by sociologist Raymond Bradley in charismatic groups whereby all members bond with all other members. This sets up the free-flow of affection and fraternal love that is experienced as a state of euphoria or exaltation.

We identified a number of different activities and structures you can set up within a choir that will either promote or inhibit the building of these bonds. These included social events (particularly those in shared social spaces, and in which the director schmoozes widely, not just hanging out with the same people each time), changing rehearsal layout/groupings so that people stand with and sing with different people, and a culture of knowing and using each others’ names.

Well, the day after the workshop, Chris Rowbury published a post over on From the Front of the Choir on why he doesn’t get people to introduce themselves at workshops until after they’ve had a good sing together. And it is a textbook example of practices that promote communion.

What is the collective noun for charismatic directors?
Saturday saw leaders of singers from around the country meeting in Birmingham for my workshop ‘Conduct with Charisma’, which regular readers will have seen advertised on my front page for the last few months. As you know, I have been blogging on this subject since last summer – and I have been researching it for over 3 years now. It started out as an off-shoot from my choral conducting book, and has developed into a fully-blown fascination in its own right.

Charisma is one of those things that a conductor is supposed to have, but is usually placed in a box marked ‘magic – do not think about’. Not helpful, especially to someone starting out in the craft, since it can so easily undermine your faith in your own legitimacy as a director. (Or is it only me who worried about this?)

So the day’s central theme was to explore the social dynamics of charismatic encounters, to understand that it’s not just about what the director does, but about a particular type of relationship between leader and group, and within the groups itself, that arises in particular types of situation.

My recent posts about the recruitment techniques used by new religious movements and their parallels with choral recruitment practices made an implicit connection between the sociology of religion and the sociology of charisma. I thought it might be useful to make this connection a bit more explicit, but didn’t want to get distracted in the midst of all the choral detail, so the subject has a separate post of its own.

Now, both branches of sociology have a common origin in the work of Max Weber.* But they’ve not been as closely interlinked in the literature (as far as I can see) as you might expect from that. Weber was the first to propose the distinction between church and sect that has informed much of the sociology of new religious movements, but he stopped writing about it once Ernst Troeltsch picked it up and developed it.

This is a continuation of my last post on the techniques cults use for thought reform and their parallels in the worlds of choral recruitment and choral discipline.

Reminder: while it does make somewhat disturbing reading in places, we need to remember that new religious movements aren't necessarily or inherently malign. And, whilst I first started down this track of using the sociology of religion to analyse singing organisations because of the evangelical language used by choral enthusiasts ('Let's spread the word!'), I am of course using the word cult for deliberately provocative purposes. I find it challenges me to think more deeply, and am hoping it has the same effect on you.

So, to continue our list:

I was listening recently to a Stuff You Should Know podcast about cults and thought reform, and it made me notice how a number of areas I have been interested in as both scholar and musician interact even more than I had already noticed.

The first is my discussion in my first book of how barbershop positions itself relative to the musical mainstream in analogous ways to the way a sect positions itself relative to established churches. The second is the discussion in my second book of the disciplinary techniques that choirs of all kinds use to ‘convert’ the raw material of people into appropriately thinking and behaving choral singers. The third is my current research interest into the mechanisms of charisma in conductors and performers – which has led me right back to the sociology of Max Weber I was dealing with in the first.

The stories of many charismatic leaders feature a period in the wilderness. In the case of Jesus, of course, the wilderness is literal, and provides both the archetype and metaphor used to describe the experience in others. Hitler, for example, spent much of the 1920s as an obscure, fringe political figure - indeed, he wrote Mein Kampf in prison; you don’t get much more marginalised than that. Churchill, meanwhile, spent much of the 1930s out of government and swimming against the prevailing political tide in his criticism of the appeasement policy.

(As an aside: it is a truism that charisma itself if morally neutral, and can be turned to positive or malign effect. A corollary of this is that a useful initial-plausibility test for any theory that purports to explain charisma is to see how well it generalises to both Hitler and Jesus.)

So, there are two dimensions to the wilderness phase that I have been trying to tease out which may be significant.

The importance of mythology for the experience of charisma can seem like a circular argument. In order for people to experience a leader as charismatic, the proposition goes, they need to believe in the existence of charismatic leaders. Well, er, yes.

The business management literature has gussied this up a little with the term ‘Romance of Leadership Disposition’, which is basically a measure of how much people are inclined to believe in the existence of and need for inspirational leaders. People with the disposition are more likely to find leaders charismatic, whilst those without it are the ones who cross their arms and sniff mistrustingly.