Leadership Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 1(3): 353–374 DOI: 10.1177/1742715005055962 www.sagepublications.com Leadership Voices: The Ideology of ‘The New Economy’ Ingalill Holmberg and Lars Strannegård, Centre for Advanced Studies in Leadership, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden Abstract This article explores leadership voices in the so-called new economy. For approximately half a decade, influential business leaders, authors of popular management texts, politicians, journalists and scholars preached the dawning of a new economic order and a corresponding new leadership practice. The article examines influential leadership voices and the ideology claims being expressed in Sweden during a particular time period. By bracketing the epochal claims in time and space, the dominating leadership ideology is examined. The results show a clear influence of market rationalism, but with a twist of community, emotions and recip- rocal individualization. Keywords leadership ideology; new economy; reciprocal individualization; surges of managerial control The new economy: the social construction of a new social order A decade ago, the public space began to be filled with actors preaching the message of a new economic order. Kevin Kelly, author of the best-selling book New Rules for the New Economy, stated boldly that the new economy would change our lives dramatically by unleashing opportunities never seen before (Kelly, 1999). Much of the talk about the new emerging world attributed the abrupt changes to the wonders of information technology and, more specifically, the internet. During the 1990s, the rhetoric of a rupture with the past, of a new era, could be found in business leaders’ presentations, popular management texts, mass media and scholarly texts. Epochal narratives on a new era flourished. Technology-related stocks soared, the business media pumped out portraits of the ‘new economy’ companies and business leaders, a new leadership was to supersede an old, new recruitment practices were called for, and the notion of hierarchy was presented as being replaced by the notion of network (e.g. Garsten, 2002; Holmberg & Stran- negård, 2002; Nordström & Ridderstråle, 1999; Strannegård, 2001; Strannegård & Bergström, 2004; Thite, 2004; Thrift, 2002). In the introduction of his already classic volume The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells (1996) summarized the ongoing social changes: