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Leadership-as-practice: Theory and application—An editor’s reflection
Abstract
In this review article, the editor of the new Routledge volume, Leadership-as-Practice: Research and Application, describes the foundation, thematic attributes, and critical uniqueness of leadership-as-practice, comparing it to related collective traditions in leadership and contrasting it to individualistic approaches that emphasize leader psychology. The review highlights the contributions of each chapter writer in weaving a tapestry of an emerging movement seeking to find leadership not in people but within the practices from which it springs.
... Second, exploring reflexive leadership in networks resonates with recent advances and emerging questions in the broader leadership literature, in particular in the emerging leadership-as-practice field (e.g., Denis, Lamothe, & Langley, 2001;Denis, Langley, & Rouleau, 2005, 2010Denis, Langley, & Sergi, 2012;Raelin, 2016). Leadership-aspractice scholars draw from social theories of practice (Bourdieu, 1990;Giddens, 1984;Reckwitz, 2002;Schatzki, 2002Schatzki, , 2012Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, & Von Savigny, 2001) and make the argument that leadership occurs as a social, collective practice, as opposed to residing in the traits and behavior of particular leader-individuals. ...
... Third, leadership scholars are increasingly interested in conceptualizing leadership from a practice-theoretical perspective. They assume that leadership occurs as a practice rather than from the traits or actions of individuals (Denis, Kisfalvi, Langley, & Rouleau, 2011;Denis et al., 2001Denis et al., , 2005Denis et al., , 2010Raelin, 2016). The emerging leadership-as-practice perspective thereby offers a potentially valuable theoretical alternative to individualistic notions of leadership in complex and pluralistic contexts such as networks (Denis et al., 2005(Denis et al., , 2010Denis, Langley, & Rouleau, 2007;Huxham & Vangen, 2000a;Vangen & Huxham, 2003). ...
... With these empirical findings, this book contributes several insights into current debates on leading in inter-organizational networks (Huxham & Vangen, 2005;Müller-Seitz & Sydow, 2012;Provan et al., 2007;Sydow et al., 2016), leadership-as-practice (Crevani et al., 2010;Denis et al., 2001Denis et al., , 2010Raelin, 2016), and reflexivity in leadership and management (Antonacopoulou, 2004;Cotter & Cullen, 2012;Cunliffe & Easterby-Smith, 2004;Gorli et al., 2015). ...
In view of the growing importance of network-based collaboration in both the public sector and private sector, it is quite surprising how little we know about how network member organizations actually practice leadership in the networks in which they are involved. This chapter lays the groundwork for the book, introducing the research question and key research issues in the field, highlighting the relevance of reflexive network leadership for research and managerial practice, situating the book in the recent practice-turn in the social sciences, providing an outlook on the two empirical case studies informing theory building, and summarizing key theoretical and practical implications.
... When working with collective leadership development, it is natural that the main body of development needs to take place at the very setting where the group is. For collective leadership development, shared norms and values need to be formed, such as openness and transparency in working relationships; mutuality of power and participation, open sharing of mistakes and valuing differences (Raelin, 2017). A challenge identified within the organizations was that they did some of these collective activities but they were not framed as leader or leadership development methods. ...
... A challenge identified within the organizations was that they did some of these collective activities but they were not framed as leader or leadership development methods. This is in line with previous comments that there is potential to use these for development, but they need to be deliberately communicated as such (Raelin, 2017). ...
The dialogue map is a new pedagogical framework that provides an overview of leader and leadership development methods and is designed to facilitate dialogues about how to promote leadership development. The aim was to create and test a dialogue map. This was accomplished through an iterative process using the literature, experts on leadership development, 45 interviews, 16 questionnaire responses and 6 workshops in three large organizations with managers, professionals and human resources experts. The dialogue map is designed as a table with five categories: developmental relationships, developmental assignments, feedback-intensive processes, education and self-development activities. Each category consists of individual leader development methods and collective leadership development methods. Thirty three methods are presented. The pilot test showed that the dialogue map increased awareness about available methods and enabled more deliberate choices regarding development activities. The dialogue map contributes by providing a systematic overview of collective leadership development, not only individual leadership development. Leadership development becomes more democratized because it focuses on activities that can be done in daily work, inside and outside work, at both an individual and collective level.
... In their work on grassroots associations, Jacklin-Jarvis and Rees (2021) adopt a Leadership-as-Practice perspective, which focuses on relational interactions rather than hierarchical structures, and also takes account of the influence of context on the practice of leadership (Raelin, 2017). The authors argue that this is suitable to studying small VSOs because of the relatively un-hierarchical, cooperative and localised nature of their work (Jacklin-Jarvis and Rees, 2021). ...
There is a growing body of research on small Voluntary Sector Organisations’ (VSOs) contribution to tackling complex social challenges. It focuses on how small VSOs work to address these challenges, as opposed to what the measurable impact of that work is. This article adds to that body of work by providing a new analytical account of how a small VSO works; in this case what shapes that work is the extent to which it is collaborative, responsive and collective, and voluntarily driven in nature. This article also takes the research to a new setting; that of small VSOs working to better the welfare of Asylum Seekers and Refugees (ASRs).
... These were, in turn, heralded by scholars such as Mary Parker Follet and her notion of 'power with' rather than 'power over' (Follett, 1940) and in Gibb's distinction between 'focused' and 'distributed' leadership (Gibb, 1954). In this paper, we specifically build on the leadership-as-practice stream of research (Carroll et al., 2008;Crevani et al., 2010;Raelin, 2016b) and approaches based on conversation analysis (Larsson & Lundholm, 2013) that have advanced an explicit focus on leadership as a process accomplished in interactions addressing 'how leadership emerges and unfolds through day-to-day experience' (Raelin, 2020, p. 3). Since leadership is theorized as located in the emergent and unfolding process of interaction, understanding talk has been key to understanding leadership (Crevani, 2018;Larsson & Lundholm, 2013;Simpson et al., 2018). ...
This paper addresses the need for further developing an understanding of leadership as practice in its multimodality by means of theoretically motivated qualitative methods, allowing researchers to come close to the doing of leadership. Empirical studies of this kind are still relatively rare. By articulating a micro-ethnographic approach, we encourage short-term-focused engagements in empirical work and the writing of closed vignettes. Through this, current theoretical developments are connected to recommendations for fieldwork and for writing practices. We thereby articulate one possible coherent and consistent position from which to study the multimodality of leadership and to understand leadership as an accomplishment of direction.
... At the same time, one might argue that the management challenge that many if not all managers face today, is to manage processes and practices across functions, preferably in strategic, well-executed and reflective manner (Horst, Järventie-Thesleff, & Baumann, 2019). This demands a good deal of leadership that can be conceptualized as a practice that aims to bridge all the messy tendencies across and within organizational functions (Raelin, 2017). Furthermore, the challenges that media managers face, such as eroding markets, new forms of competition, different workstyles, new technologies, and many other disruptive tendencies in the media industry, but also across markets on a global scale, certainly make it a daunting task to be a manager today, even if you are "just managing your startup" centered around digital media (Horst, Järventie-Thesleff, & Perez-Latre, 2019). ...
... [5][6] Therefore, some authors recommend the development of more meaningful approaches, because leadership occurs as a practice rather than from the traits or behaviours of individual. 7 As a global voice for the dental profession, the International Dental Federation advocates for dental leadership in its recently unveiled "2030 Vision: Delivering Optimal Oral Health for All." 8 Achieving these goals will be challenging and will not be accomplished by isolated individuals without the global involvement of the dental profession and networks for dental care at international and national levels. The Province of Quebec dentistry regulatory bodies and key stakeholders have been active in advocating for oral health and have shown leadership in projects such as Bouche B and the integration of dental teams in primary care. ...
Background
Dental leadership in different models of care is not well documented, and therefore the objectives of this study were to explore how dental leaders develop their own leadership and how they engage others to increase access to oral health services as well as to describe perceived challenges in developing coalitions for promoting oral health care.
Methods
We adopted a qualitative descriptive research methodology. We recruited dental leaders using a purposeful sampling approach and a snowball technique. Data were collected using a remote digital platform; we organised semi-structured interviews based on the LEADS conceptual framework. Saturation was reached after 11 interviews. Data analysis included the following iterative steps: decontextualisation, recontextualisation, categorisation, and data compilation. The analysis was performed manually, assisted by the use of QDA Miner software.
Results
Fourteen dental leaders participated in the study. Our analysis revealed 3 overarching themes: (I) lead self, with 3 subthemes: leadership insights; leadership traits; opportunity–role model dyad; (II) leadership strategies; and (III) challenges in leadership development, with 3 subthemes: limited engaged practice and workforce, valorise the image of dentistry, and lack of leadership training.
Conclusions
Our research findings showed that, despite a limited scope of leadership in dentistry, the dental leaders recognise its importance and acknowledge the need for formal training and mentorship at different levels. This study identified challenges in dental leadership development that could further orient dental education programmes and support the implementation of evidence-based, high-quality, and efficient oral health services.
... As Professor By points out in his article, newer models of leadership, such as Drath et al.'s (2008) DAC (direction, alignment and commitment) model and the new PAC model (replacing DAC's direction with purpose), attest that it is explicitly processes which produce these functional outcomes. However, these models, such as By's PAC, suggest that process is driven by purpose, whereas leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) is concerned with an unfolding and continual flow of processes whereby material-discursive engagements may contingently produce emergent meaning (Raelin, 2017). ...
The practice perspective of leadership de-emphasizes purpose and rather recognizes pre-reflective forms of intentionality carried out in embodied practices that may be subsequently guided by democratic, emancipatory and reflexive processes. Although leadership-as-practice should be classified as a descriptive metaethical theory, it can be animated by normative accounts derived from exploratory and critical discourses.
MAD statement
The contribution of the telos of social justice and sustainability needs to be accompanied by the exploratory study of the processes that detail social and material interactions that may alter the trajectory of the flow of practices within the organization. By focusing on process, we observe the actual doings or enactments of leadership that require mining prior to diving into goal attainment.
... Through a case study in three nursing homes in Oslo (Norway), this study explores implicit ideas of leadership at the multicultural workplace and the different sources that shape these ideas. In line with practice theory (Nicolini, 2012) and the 'Leadership-as-practice' tradition (Raelin, 2016), this study locates leadership in the practice as it unfolds at the workplace. The study analyses how leadership is negotiated in the everyday interactions of managers and employees. ...
Today, workplaces are increasingly culturally diverse, and organisational members interact across various societal cultures. Managers and employees bring with them implicit ideas of good and bad leadership, which are influenced by their cultural backgrounds. Facilitating communication and cooperation among individuals to accomplish shared goals is central to leadership, and the multicultural workplace represents new challenges and opportunities in this regard. The chapter explains how contextual factors at the institutional field and organisational levels along with individual experiences of leadership from the country of origin and the current country of residence shape the implicit ideas of leadership. This approach to culture and leadership, considering the dynamic cultural configuration, represents an alternative to the paradigm of cultural universals in cross-cultural management research. Inquiring into the implicit ideas of leadership at the workplace with loosely held cultural categories serves as an example of values work.
... Incorporating these traditions, the leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) movement represents the latest expression of this evolution in leadership models (Raelin, 2017). ...
Leveraging leadership capability is a critical challenge for contemporary organizations. Yet leadership development (LD) remains problematic because the existing multibillion-dollar leadership industry fails to deliver results. This paper contends that the underlying reason for this precarious state of affairs is that current approaches to LD are out of sync with our changing world. To address this problem, this paper offers a new model of “leadership-as-practice development” for consulting psychologists and organizational development (OD) practitioners. The paper provides a rationale for the need for the model based on extant literature, and consulting anecdotal evidence. The paper’s position statement is presented by outlining definitions, assumptions, and perspective. An overview of the evolution of leadership models is discussed with an emphasis on, and critique of, the competency movement and the use of competency-based models as the main approach to LD. Moreover, and taking a practice orientation, the theoretical foundations of the model, which identifies and integrates three components and 42 elements, is described and discussed. Various case examples are presented. Finally, the paper recognizes the limitations of the model and offers recommendations on how to address these.
... Furthermore, people's understanding of leadership and of its practice is changing due to digitalisation (e.g., Eskola, 2018: 3-7). Theorising on leadership has been transforming from a modern, static leadership theory emphasising the embodied leader-person (e.g., traits) to increased acknowledgement of the discursive resources and the organisational relationships involved in leadership practices (Northouse, 2016;Raelin, 2016;Salmon, 2017). This transformation is epitomised in storytelling literature distinguishing leadership power from an embodied leader-person to a discursive construction (e.g., Auvinen, 2012;Boje et al., 2011;Parry and Hansen, 2007). ...
As digitalisation is such a pervasive phenomenon in contemporary societies, the prefix
“digital” has become attached to organisational storytelling and leadership, too (Avolio
and Kahai, 2003; Dreon et al., 2011; Petry, 2018). Nonetheless, empirical studies at the
intersection of digitalisation, leadership and organisational and strategy narration remain
scarce. In this study, we are interested in the interplay of digitalisation and leaders’
strategy-related construction of meaning in the narrative form (e.g., Auvinen et al., 2018;
Fairhurst, 2011: 496; Jameson, 2001), that is, strategy narration (e.g., Barry and Elmes, 1997;
Sintonen and Auvinen, 2009). Our research questions are the following: 1) How has
strategy narration in the leadership context transformed in the recent past? 2) What are the
implications of digitalisation for strategy narration and leadership work? While we focus
on the evolution of strategy narration in the context of the finance industry’s organisation,
our occasional use of the closely related and overlapping concept of narrative is
unavoidable when dealing with our findings. When using the concept, we follow Gabriel
(2004: 4) and take narratives to be characterised by a temporal chain of chronological
events or actions that are undertaken by characters.
... In a similar way, post-heroic interest in "leadership as practice" (LAP) explicitly rejects any concern with the traits and behaviours of individual leaders (Raelin, 2016), preferring instead to view leadership "as an agency emanating from an emerging collection of practices" (Raelin, Kempster, Youngs, Carroll, & Jackson, 2018, p. 372). Whereas mainstream perspectives can be criticized for being narrowly focused on individual leaders, post-heroic theories such as LAP often focus on collective practices to the neglect of any examination of individual leaders. ...
This chapter explores the growing impact of Critical Leadership Studies (CLS). Covering a diverse set of theories and approaches, critical perspectives hold that, whether for good and/or ill, and whether focussing on individuals and/or collectives, power in all its forms is a central, under-examined issue for leadership studies. Problematizing the dichotomizing tendency in leadership studies, CLS also emphasize the value of analysing leadership power relations through dialectical perspectives. Critical approaches address the asymmetric interplay between leaders, managers, followers and contexts as well as their potentially contradictory conditions, processes and consequences. By addressing the dialectics of power, conformity and resistance, critical perspectives challenge conventional understandings of leader-follower dynamics. In so doing they open up new ways of theorizing, researching and enacting leadership.
... Seventh, this research enriches the nascent leadership-as-practice field by contributing a conceptualization of leadership in the context of inter-organizational networks. Scholars in the leadership-as-practice field, which has gained substantial momentum in recent years, view leadership as occurring as a practice rather than as traits or behaviors of individuals (e.g., Carroll, Levy, & Richmond, 2008;Denis, Langley, & Rouleau, 2005, Denis et al., 2010Raelin, 2016bRaelin, , 2016c. This research contributes to this field in two ways. ...
... Responding to these concerns raised by leadership and organization scholars, research has recently suggested reconstructing the notion of leadership as a social practice (Denis et al., 2001(Denis et al., , 2005Denis, Langley, & Rouleau, 2010;Endrissat & Von Arx, 2013;Raelin, 2016cRaelin, , 2016d. The following section will shed light on ideas from scholars of the emerging "leadership-as-practice" field. ...
This chapter provides important conceptual foundations for reconstructing leadership in networks from a practice-theoretical perspective. It introduces basic principles of practice and structuration theory, offers practice-theoretical definitions of inter-organizational networks and leadership, and explores the role and definition of reflexivity in network leadership.
... Promising learning methods among police leaders are therefore found to include learning from peers and other leaders, reflecting on one's own practice and learning from practices other than their own, in practising and gaining enough experience to develop their own unique practice ( Gaston and King, 1995;Meaklim and Simms, 2011). This is in accordance with a number of scholars who argue that learning and knowing are embedded in social practices at work and therefore what constitutes police practice and culture will strongly influence the type of leadership that is learned (Armstrong and Mahmud, 2008;Chiva and Ale- gre, 2005;Elkjaer, 2004;Filstad, 2016;Kempster, 2009;Raelin, 2016;Shotter and Cunliffe, 2003). It is about what capabilities the leader needs to learn (Herrington and Col- vin, 2015). ...
The aim of this article was to investigate how police investigation leaders learn leadership and whether the facilitation of learning activities and learning methods might bridge the well-known gap between teaching and learning leadership. Using action research, we constructed an ‘i-leader’ learning pool consisting of police investigation leaders. The pool provided interactive and collaborative learning activities that included reflection, knowledge sharing and social support. Participants were receptive to this learning initiative, but also argued that ‘learning by doing’ is most important because it allows for communication and cooperation between colleagues in the context of their everyday leadership practice. They acknowledged the need for reflection and argued that the pool provides important reflection time, which they lack in their everyday practice. Participants also found the learning methods, particularly the ‘group support methodology’ and the new network useful for their own leadership development. However, using these new learning methods ‘back home’ was more challenging. Participants did not have time to prioritize and develop this new network. Providing learning methods and building a network takes time and must be relevant to everyday leadership practice. The significance of their leadership practice and how to accumulate experience as the basis for reflection was acknowledged, but still needs to be applied within leadership practice. Bridging the gap between teaching and learning is not just about providing learning and reflection methods, but also about learning how to apply new knowledge through experience, where reflection ensures that learning in practice is not ‘due to change’.
We propose that what seems to be uniquely common to individuals
perceived as leaders is that they all either meaningfully challenge
the status quo or meaningfully resist challenge to the status quo
over a sustained period of time. While we note that a relationship
between leadership and challenge to the status quo has been
alluded to in the literature, especially regarding (but not
restricted to) charismatic leadership, a deeper theoretical
development has been missing, particularly addressing the
context of the social setting in which challenge may occur as
opposed to a leader-centric view. Moreover, we observe that a
commensurate connection between resistance to challenge and
leadership is relatively unobserved and unexplored.
We develop our argument drawing on Lewin’s field theory and
propose a theoretical explanation of how leadership emerges in the
perception of others consequent to the sustained invocation and
interaction of situational social forces, specifically meaningful
challenge, or resistance to challenge, of the status quo. The
theory lends itself to empirical study.
Why develop leaders? What politics are implicit in our practice? This paper uses the history and practice of Popular Education as a comparative framework to survey the politics of intentional emergence leadership pedagogy, surfacing potential alliances for building social change movements. Using a case analysis, the article elucidates the ways the classroom embodies an opportunity to explore and enact a prefigurative politics of significant social change that upends traditional relationships to authority, hierarchy, and decision‐making. Exploring the opportunities and dangers of connecting the classroom to broader social movements, the article concludes by advocating that such connections could offer a firmer and more explicit stance to the question: why develop leaders?
This article explores the practice of shaping the project portfolio direction through the lens of leadership. Focusing on a public setting, it uncovers three interrelated activities: developing ownership, networking, and de-personalizing. These activities can be accomplished through continuous balancing of substantive–symbolic and visible–subtle acts, institutional structures and their improvisations, and hierarchical and distributed leadership. The article contributes to (1) the project portfolio management literature by offering the concept of hybrid leadership and insights into the alignment of diverse stakeholder interests and worldviews, and (2) to the leadership literature by critiquing the leadership-as-practice movement and advancing explanations of the interplay between hierarchical and distributed leadership.
The current paper explores a transformative approach to leadership that integrates with a view of analog role‐playing games (RPGs) as a system for human interaction, aiming to leverage these experiences and foster collective creative leadership. In the face of urgent global challenges, traditional leadership models prove inadequate, necessitating a shift in understanding leadership as a process of adaptive change among human groups. Drawing on phenomenology, relational sociology and constructivist perspectives, I advocate for a conceptualization of leadership as a socially constructed, meaning‐making endeavor mutually embedded within and generating cultural context. I emphasize the essential role of collective cultural approaches and propose a co‐creative education process that incorporates play and creativity for effective leadership development. Then, I delve further into the intersection of leadership and play, highlighting the potential of RPGs in facilitating transformative, collective creativity. The proposed model views RPGs as Leadership‐As‐Practice Development (LAPD) and explores how analog RPGs can be employed as dynamic platforms for leadership learning, identity development, team‐building, and symbolic storytelling processes.
Despite the centrality of research phenomena, the process of their definition is often neglected and reduced to a simple choosing of pre‐established subjects of interest. However, good research not only includes empirical work aimed at more or less ‘given as fact’ phenomena. It also involves phenomena construction: that is, the process of generating and establishing phenomena to investigate and theorize. We contend that phenomena construction is not separate from, but integral to, both the empirical and theorizing phases in research. As few phenomena are truly ‘given’ or straightforward to observe, good research calls for careful and creative construction of the phenomenon under investigation. We propose and elaborate a framework that enables researchers to generate and establish research phenomena beyond those currently available in their specific area of interest and, based on this, to produce more imaginative and impactful research.
This chapter addresses the critical need for education for wisdom in business and management education. After a critical review of the outcomes of the traditional pedagogical tenet, an operational framework for practical wisdom education is proposed, suggesting three components of wisdom learning: wise knowing, wise feeling, and wise judging. The second part of the chapter discusses the challenges of implementing wisdom education in the business school context. First, the authors highlight the requisite paradigm shift from knowledge-driven learning toward wisdom-driven one and then present some initiatives for fostering practical wisdom in the business classroom. The chapter concludes by gesturing toward possible avenues for future research and empirical inquiry into wisdom teaching practices.
Based on empirical work at Greenlandic fish factories this article develops a more nuanced view on middle management activities. The empirical findings suggests that the leadership practice of middle managers invokes problematization as a collective achievement, based on experience and sensitivity. At the fish factory the middle management activities stand out as a bricolage practice happening as processual activities enacted in an interplay between many organizational actors. The processes where leadership emerges involves different perspectives that support appropriate problematization of the mundane activities as they unfold. Thus, the discussion of leadership is concerned with how middle managers emerge themselves in daily sensitivity work. This contrasts with conventional leadership research, much of which is turning leadership into an “it” assuming stable relations. The concepts of experience and sensitivity contributes to a more complex understanding of the mundane everyday leadership practice that unfold among various organizational actors.
The last few years has seen a significant increase in the attention paid to leadership in the New Zealand early childhood education (ECE) sector, particularly in guiding documents. While these provide greater clarity than previously on expectations around leadership practice, a greater understanding of what leadership means and how it is implemented in different contexts is still needed. This article is based on a study exploring how educational leadership is practised through internal evaluation processes in New Zealand ECE services, and how these practices support the professional capabilities and capacities of teachers. Previous research has highlighted that a practice approach to leadership removes the focus on the individual leader and allows leadership to emerge from collective action. The objectives of this research study were: to develop a better understanding of how educational leadership is practised through internal evaluation processes; explore what challenges or enables teachers to become involved and practise educational leadership through internal evaluation processes; and to understand how services monitor the impact of changes on teaching practice, made as a result of an internal evaluation. This qualitative research, which took the form of an interpretive case study, was framed around a single case design with multiple units of analysis. Data were gathered from three participating ECE services through interviews, focus groups and observations, and drew on the perspectives of both teachers and positional leaders. A reflexive thematic data analysis approach was employed, and four key themes were developed: identification with leadership; supportive workplace culture; continuous improvement; and effective leadership practices in ECE services. Seven effective leadership practices were also identified: relational leadership; creating the conditions for teamwork; engagement; knowledge expertise and sharing opinions; shared decision making; facilitating and guiding and accountability and organisation. This article contributes to our further understanding of educational leadership practices in New Zealand ECE services.
40 years ago, it was argued that despite years of research we still did not understand leadership. A similar argument was presented in this journal just last year. This article presents some reflections based on both my experience of researching leadership and of working with leaders. In doing this the myriad of theories of leadership are explored and key trends identified. Perhaps the most significant of these is the recognition of leadership as a dynamic relational process. This enables us to move from a leader-centric focus in research to one that recognizes the active participation of followers in the leadership process. In addition, the limitations of research to date, and its lack of relevance to practice are discussed, followed by proposed actions that could be taken to help develop a clearer understanding of the nature of leadership and improve relevance for practitioners. The article concludes with the view that we do know a lot about leaders and their impact on a wide range of outcomes. However, we still know relatively little about leadership.
Local leadership is increasingly recognised as essential to community-led development interventions. This exploratory qualitative study considers how such community leadership develops within rural Filipino communities. Informed by current definitions of community leadership, Leadership-as-Practice literature, and nine individuals’ experiences, emerging themes denote practices of capacity development, personal change, and relationship building as most significant to community leadership development. These practices happen within the context of collective action, and activities related to the identification and critical analysis of shared challenges; accessing resources communities need to address their identified challenges; management of locally owned projects; and structuring of local groups into formal organisations.
Journal IJSSHR 2022
This paper aims to report a study that develops knowledge of the geographic periphery as architecture for leadership practices by principals in small primary schools with no more than four teachers. The geographic periphery has different prerequisites from geo- graphic centers. Sweden is a rural country that also has large cities which attract people for economic and social reasons. There is limited research on the nature of school leadership in rural contexts. This paper addresses these limitations through an ethnographic study, with participatory observations in village schools and a follow- up conversation with principals and teachers. The main findings illuminate place as a physical as well as discursive and social dimen- sion. The rural leadership practices considered peripatetic differ in Sweden, and internal and external recruitment is of importance for leadership practice. To organize and ensure equality in education, more knowledge of rural education is needed.
In der aktuellen Führungsforschung erfährt vor allem geteilte Führung eine besonders starke Beachtung. Unterstützt durch den Konkurrenz- und Innovationsdruck auf Unternehmen sowie anhaltende Unsicherheit auf den Märkten, hat die Idee, dass Führung nicht mehr den einzelnen Individuen übertragen werden kann, sondern jeweils auf mehrere Organisationsmitglieder aufzuteilen ist, eine große Popularität erlangt. Die aktuellen theoretischen Ansätze hierzu reichen von denen der partizipativen Führung bei Entscheidungen, über geteilte Führungskompetenzen innerhalb eines Teams bis hin zu Konzepten der kollektiven Führung, die Mitarbeiterführung grundsätzlich als ein pluralistisches, kollektives Phänomen auffassen, sowie den Ansätzen zur demokratischen Führung, deren Ziel darin besteht, Organisationen zu demokratisieren und hierarchische Strukturen aufzubrechen.
Leadership is a frequently used term, but these uses include various definitions and applications; these uses are sometimes contradictory. This definitional vagueness can be a particular challenge for professions, including social work. In comparison to other similar professions, there is a lack of leadership knowledge generation in social work. In addition, the organisational context in England has been challenging in recent decades, likely hindering development and application of leadership models. Health care has a broader empirical and conceptual development of leadership as a topic of examination. In health care literature, compassionate leadership is gaining momentum as a useful way of developing good clinical leadership. There is a strong tradition in social work of engaging with compassion as an element of social work values. We present models of compassionate leadership and consider their usefulness for the current social work knowledge base. We suggest that compassionate leadership may prove useful for social work practice and academia.
In this chapter, Willocks and Moralee argue that, within the field of leadership studies, there has been a significant shift away from individualistic, trait and ‘heroic’ ways of conceptualising leadership towards what have been termed ‘post-heroic’ approaches. Leadership-as-practice (LAP) is one such approach that accounts for collective, collaborative and emergent aspects of leadership in the ongoing flow of organisational practices. This chapter attends to the current dearth of empirical examples of LAP, notably within healthcare, by drawing on a UK NHS case study. Their analysis offers insight into different healthcare leadership ‘practices’ and the intricate connections between them, considering conceptual implications by highlighting the tensions and complexities that underpin LAP and the way in which policy context, culture and history inform ongoing emergent leadership processes.
Scholars within the field of Leadership-as-Practice (LAP) address the way that individuals ‘transcend their own immediate embeddedness’ to achieve volitional coherence known as collaborative agency. The process of collaborative agency is described as inseparable from LAP, yet it remains a nascent field of enquiry requiring additional empirical research. This article presents an investigation of collaborative agency through an abductive case study using video ethnography and interviews. To interpret our results, we turn to the Japanese ideogram for ‘place’, known as ‘Ba’. Rather than a physical reality, Ba is considered an existential space in which leadership groups weave together to create and ripen collaborative agency. Ba guides us to look across and around a group and its socio-material practice. We find that collaborative agency is trans-subjective in nature and sits on a spectrum on which we identify the outer reaches, from one end where Ba is woven through to the other end, called Collapse. We suggest that the place of leadership is within the warp and weft of collaborative agency, including but not limited to a special place woven in Ba where collaborative agency is high and where the group reports they are able to transcend their individualism.
Objective: Although midwifery-led continuity of care is associated with superior outcomes for mothers and babies, it is not available to all women. Issues with implementation and sustainability might be addressed by improving how it is led and managed – yet little is known about what constitutes the optimal leadership and management of midwifery-led continuity models.
Design: Following a systematic search of academic databases for relevant publications, 25 publications were identified. These were analysed, thematically to clarify (dis)similar themes, and lexically, to clarify how words within the publications travelled together.
Findings: The publications were replete with three key themes. First, Leadership – Important yet Challenged. Second, Management of organisational change; barriers and enhancers. Third, Promotors of sustainable models of care. Complementarily, the lexical analysis suggests that references to midwives and leadership among the publications did not typically travel together, as reported in the publications and were distant to one another, although management was inter-connected to both and to change. Leadership and management were not closely coupled with midwives or relationships with women.
Key Conclusions: Midwifery leadership matters and can be enacted irrespective of position or seniority. Midwifery-led continuity of care models can be better managed via a multipronged approach. Improved leadership and management can help sustain such care. Although there was a perceived need for midwifery leadership, there did not seem to be an association between leadership and midwives in the lexical analysis. Many publications focused on the style theory of leadership and the transformational style theory.
Implications for practice: Instead of focusing on leaders and the presumption of a leadership scarcity, it might be more beneficial to start focusing within, looking with a new lens on leadership within midwifery at all levels. It might also be constructive for the profession to investigate a more progressive form of leadership, one that is relational and focuses on leadership rather than on the leader.
This chapter explores coproduction through a collective leadership lens. It draws from the public administration and leadership fields and a 2019 empirical study of public service collaboration in Scotland, UK. It is suggested that tensions generated by working within a new public management model combined with frustrations felt from current collaborative practice have motivated an exploration into alternative conceptions of leadership and different ways of working when collaborating. The findings reveal that collaboration can be strengthened through the application of four key processual and attitudinal modifications. This approach is described as working in an emergent and relational way while applying a systems and inquiry mindset. It is the effect of the sum of these parts that boosts the intensity of collaborative work, offering a number of benefits, including an enriched and dynamic coproduction process embedded within its practice.
It has long been presented that leadership roles in health care are held by individuals who have a formal title and responsibility to hire, to monitor, and to evaluate those under their direct supervision. Theories of leadership have usually considered describing a leader as an individual who has some characteristics that are associated with leading or using skills to guide others. More recently, leadership scholars have challenged this view in light of the shifting trends towards team based practice in organisations and in particular health care settings. Since the early twenty-first century a shift in viewing the leader as working with followers through a relational perspective is being proposed.
This paper strives to extend knowledge about tensions in heroic and post-heroic leadership. Previous studies have focused on one overarching context rather than explained how these tensions interplay in diverse contextual circumstances. This paper adopts a Goffmanian perspective and explores the tensions between heroic and post-heroic leadership in onstage and offstage contexts. By drawing on semi-structured interviews and an ethnographic observation of ice hockey teams, the paper proposes three dynamics by which these tensions are manifested in offstage and onstage contexts, namely: ‘Coaching over-the-others’, ‘Starring up-to-the-others’, and ‘Doing self in-the-others’. The paper concludes by discussing the importance of looking at the dynamics by which tensions between heroic and post-heroic leadership are manifested in multiple circumstances of team leadership.
In this introductory article we explain the impetus for creating the Special Issue, along with its goals and the process by which we created it. We present a map of the terrain of collective leadership (CL) that builds on earlier frameworks, recognizing that the terrain is expanding and has become increasingly difficult to traverse. The map is comprised of two axes or dimensions. The first axis, the ‘locus of leadership,’ captures how scholars conceptualize where to look for manifestations of leadership. That is, does the leadership reside in the group or does it reside in the system? The second axis is the view of ‘collectivity’ that plots how scholars conceptualize the collective. Do they see it as an empirical type of leadership or a theoretical lens through which to study leadership? We then plot distinctive CL research into four cells, providing definitions and references to empirical work emblematic for each cell. In introducing and summarizing each of the five articles we have selected for this Special Issue, we show where each of these is located on the CL research map, and distil how each provides a clear connection between theory and method in a way that advances our understanding of CL.
Purpose:
The purpose of this paper is to introduce virtue epistemology as a complementary approach to how we learn and make wise decisions within organizations.
Design/methodology/approach:
Drawing on a philosophic history of intellectual virtue and recent research into virtue epistemology, this article presents an applied theoretical approach for practitioners to use in developing a more robust learning environment.
Findings:
With robust market and operational databases of information, organizations continue to face the difficult decision of what this data means and what they can do with it. This article suggests intellectual virtue as a tool to develop appropriate knowledge, informed practical actions and sustainable outcomes.
Practical implications:
Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity have led to increasing rates of change in organizations. Organizations rely increasingly on their ability to observe, analyze, interpret and ultimately make decisions and act in ways that ensure sustainable results. This article provides an alternative perspective to complement traditional problem solving and decision-making processes.
Originality/value:
There is currently limited research into the applicability of intellectual virtue or virtue epistemology to the field of organizational development and learning.
This article makes a case for investigating leadership from a micro-interactional perspective which integrates discursive, sequential and multimodal analytical layers. It thus builds on existing discursive leadership research by demonstrating that leadership is not achieved only through talk, but by means of a complex interplay between verbal and non-verbal resources. Focusing on video-recordings of authentic meetings, I investigate the interactional interplay between the superior, the meeting chair and the other participants by means of a deontic perspective. Drawing on the status–stance distinction and teasing out how proximal and distal deontic rights are enacted and how these relate to leader and follower identities when conceptualized from a social constructionist perspective, I demonstrate that leadership is an essentially collaborative accomplishment in which all participants play a crucial role. Finally, I argue that this can only be uncovered fully when attention is paid to the variety of means – verbal as well as non-verbal – that interlocutors have at their disposal when attempting to influence each other towards achieving organizationally relevant goals.
This article is intended as a conceptual and practical foundation for those who wish to conduct research in the area of leadership-as-practice. Rather than offer a single methodology for studying how social and leadership activity is carried out in everyday life, it details a pluralistic set of methods and presents a series of theoretical guidelines through its phenomenological form of inquiry. In particular, it endorses discursive, narrative, ethnographic, aesthetic, and multimodal methods to attempt to capture concurrent, collective, and dialogical social practices. After providing an overview of praxis-oriented research as the methodological basis of leadership-as-practice, the article turns to the conceptual building blocks that can provide some guidance in selecting an appropriate methodology for study. These building blocks incorporate issues of agency, identity, materiality, context, power, and dialogue. The author hopes that researchers will take up the challenge of examining leadership dynamics “from within” to co-participate in working with actors engaged in projects of significance advance their mutual endeavors.
Leadership performances develops closely connected to the institutional behaviour and societal culture given the permanent trends to implement changes to update standards according to existing norms and rigors existing in any company. The styles adopted in managing or leading the activities influences the tasks’ achievement, the future path to take and the way success is understood, accepted, shared and disseminated. Nowadays, companies face compulsory the influences of more cultures, given the temptation of delocalisation, the curiosity of working with immigrants, the advantages provided in different situations of accepting a higher exposure of leader to different sides of performance, different dimensions of market and financial profits, new behaviours in managing the employees. Starting from this idea, the purpose of this study is to identify and enquire into the hidden dimensions of organizational culture and how the leadership style impacts the strategic developing and let effective relations spring out.
The research is built on a survey based on designed questioner applied to 550 leaders and employees, members of the operation and Maintenance Company of MAPNA (Q&M) in Iran. Data collected refers to MLQ leadership style and Denison's Organizational Culture Questionnaire, and the responses received were analysed with SPSS and Smart Plus software. The findings reveal that the relationship between the leadership style and the organizational culture are strongly linked to each other. Therefore, those leaders able to change and accept to use a transformational style will assist the company to move forward faster that those who adopt and keep the transactional style as the single one to prove important.
The purpose of this article is to contribute to a more robust theory of leadership that shifts the frame of reference from leadership as exclusively facilitated through a single inspired leader to one that includes the view of leadership as an emergent and complex social phenomenon.
The article begins with a review of the leader-centric approaches that dominated much of twentieth century leadership studies then moves on to present contemporary critiques of leader-centric approaches leading to an alternative perspective of leadership as an emergent and complex social phenomenon. Viewing leadership as an emergent and complex social phenomenon changes our attitude regarding the roles that leaders and others play in the creation of leadership. A central theme of this article is the impact that the concept of emergence has on leadership theory. In response to this changing attitude, the article then moves to return to and reassess the ontological, epistemological and ethical grounds of leadership and concludes that there is an underlying philosophy that supports viewing leadership as an emergent social phenomenon and further suggests that recent work in virtue epistemology along with Calvin Schrag’s theory of communicative praxis and transversal rationality, can facilitate a better understanding of leadership as an emergent social phenomenon.
This study examines the phenomenon of ‘liberating leadership’, an emerging trend promising self-mastery and collective unity, resonating with the literature on post-heroic leadership. We evaluate the claims of liberating leadership from a psychodynamic perspective, using a Lacanian approach. We examine how post-heroic forms of leadership reconfigure symbolic and imaginary aspects of follower identification, with ambivalent effects. Drawing empirically on the case of a Belgian banking department, we trace how a ‘liberating’ leader was able to garner intense psychological attachment among followers, accompanied by the ‘dark sides’ of personal exhaustion and breakdown, normative pressure to be overly happy, and the scapegoating of contrarian managers representing symbolic prohibition.
Artikkelen retter fokus mot ledere som praktiserer delt ledelse i form av et samlederskab. Den bidrar til vår forståelse av hva ledelse er som praksis ved å se nærmere på hvordan ledere som deler en lederposisjon, samhandler med hverandre og får til å utøve ledelse sammen. En analyserende beskrivelse av et samlederskap fra en offentlig etat i Norge danner grunnlaget for å drøfte samhandlingen mellom ledere vil kunne bidra i forhold til en profesjonalisering av ledelse og utvikling av ledelse som profesjon.
This paper summarizes and elaborates the findings of a research project on leadership as an enabler of professional agency and creativity in information technology organizations. The synthesis in this paper is based on a summary of three primary studies. Each of the studies approached leadership, creativity and/or professional agency with a specific focus. Leaning on a mixed‐methods and ethnographic approach, including various empirical data collection and analytical tools, the project investigated the relationship between professional agency and creativity; issues that frame professional agency and creativity; and the meaning of leadership practices for the enhancement of agency and creativity. The findings highlight a strong connection between professional agency and creativity and their context‐ and situation‐specific manifestations. The findings also address creativity that manifests itself in interaction, processes and collaboration. Further, the findings discuss the role of agile human resource development for professional agency and creativity, and show that flexible leadership practices are necessary in supporting professional agency and creativity.
The most prominent theory in leadership studies is transformational leadership. Ironically, however, scholars who subscribe to transformational leadership have left the concept of transformation itself, unexamined and lying dormant in the background. In response to this neglect, I propose a Meadian framework of leadership that is centered on the nature of transformation in both leaders and leadership trans-actions. I present a framework that is Meadian, and not exclusively from Mead, by integrating contemporary scholarship from a range of disciplines that corroborate and complement Mead’s work and provides transformational leadership scholars a new way forward. I use Mead’s I/Me distinction to answer who transformational leaders are in their embodied social selves and Mead’s role-taking notion in the social act to answer what transformational leaders do in relation with followers. In doing so, I provide leadership scholars a “third way” between dichotomous conceptions of singularly influential leaders on the one hand and leaderless leadership processes on the other.
Despite the long history of globalizing political relations, world politics can still not be described as a comfortably integrated system. There is, for example, little possibility – even on the far horizon – of the emergence of a single global government. Neither can it be simply said that there is a single co-ordinated system of global governance. Even the United Nations, for all its globalizing reach, does not constitute the overriding locus of global governance. The closest we have come to an integrated system in the political-cultural domain is the global system of nation-states organized around the now-global principle of state sovereignty. However, in narrow political terms, each nation-state continues to treat its own political and legal foundations as self-generated and self-constituting. The faltering political (including legal) co-ordination between the world’s nation-states continues to mean that it is possible to negotiate many different political (and economic) outcomes by moving either between different nation-states or between different levels of jurisdiction – national, regional and global. This is, for example, the modus operandi of globalizing corporations as they optimize their situations by constant legal adjustment and movement of capital. This volume explores these issues.
This chapter explores the growing impact of ‘critical leadership studies’ (CLS). The term CLS refers to a broad, diverse and heterogeneous set of perspectives that share a concern to critique the power relations and identity constructions through which leadership dynamics are often reproduced, frequently rationalized, sometimes resisted and occasionally transformed. Critical studies challenge hegemonic perspectives in the mainstream literature that tend to take for granted that leaders are the people in charge who make decisions, and that followers are those who simply carry out orders from 'above'. After considering the weaknesses of mainstream perspectives, the chapter outlines some of the key themes and concepts that inform more critical approaches. It concludes by arguing that the CLS challenge to contemporary leadership studies has the potential to open up important, new and innovative lines of enquiry.
Fearing that our overreliance on an individual, heroic model of leadership will only continue to dampen the energy and creativity of people in our organizations and communities, this essay proposes a practice perspective of leadership based on a collaborative agency mobilized through engaged social interaction. After briefly reviewing the emerging practice tradition in leadership studies, the article turns to the inseparable connection between leadership and agency and discusses how structure may pacify but, under dialogic conditions, release agency. Acknowledging the cultural constraints against collaborative agency, the account affirms its potential realization through interpersonal interaction and sociality. Specific leadership activities associated with collaborative agency and their conditions are illustrated. The paper concludes by showing how the collaborative agentic model might produce a more sustainable future for our world while suggesting avenues for future research of a collective rather than a personal approach to leadership.
Minor shifts in emphasis between the process and entitative dimensions of management constructs can be an effective method of theory generation. However, such shifts require corresponding adjustments in both ontology and epistemology. Where ontology and epistemology drift out of alignment, there is significant potential for confusion. I describe and illustrate four kinds of epistemic-ontological movement using a range of examples, particularly from the communities of practice literature, and I discuss implications for both theory and practice.
This article examines the practice of leadership in organizations characterized by ambiguous authority relationships. Drawing on three empirical case studies illustrative of a long-term research program on change in health care organizations, we examine leadership as a practical activity focusing particularly on its dynamic, collective, situated, and dialectical nature. We invite researchers on leadership to look carefully at the embeddedness of leadership roles in context and at the type and consequences of practices that leaders develop in such contexts. Implications of these ideas for further research and for would-be leaders are discussed.
In this paper a new role for managers is advocated to create conditions for genuine collaborative engagement in Twenty-First Century organizations. The new role is as a facilitator of emancipatory dialogue, a discourse among parties that can lead to mutual learning, deep understanding and insight, and collaborative consciousness and action. The facilitator role is described and illustrated in the article as a means to encourage free expression and inquiry, but the article also warns about the imposition of coercive norms within the work group that might be externally imposed or even self-imposed. As managers promote an emancipatory form of dialogic engagement, conversations ensue that bring out people’s individual and collective wisdom, creativity, and dignity.
If our task is simply that of theorizing process, then there are many brilliant writers and thinkers in the recent past to turn to. But as I see it, these writers are mostly oriented toward helping us think about process 'from the outside', about processes that we merely observe as happening 'over there'. But if we are to rethink appropriate styles of empirical research, then we need a different form of engaged, responsive thinking, acting, and talking, that allows us to affect the flow of processes from within our living involvement with them. Crucially, this kind of responsive understanding only becomes available to us in our relations with living forms when we enter into dialogically structured relations with them. It remains utterly unavailable to us as external observers. I will call this kind of thinking, 'thinking-from-within' or 'withness-thinking', to contrast it with the 'aboutness-thinking' that is more familiar to us. What we can gain in our understandings-from-within, is a subsidiary awareness (Polanyi) of certain 'action guiding feelings' that can play a role in giving us an anticipatory sense of at least the style or the grammar of what is to come next in the ongoing process in which we happen to be involved, feelings which are lost in descriptions 'from the outside'.
Established methodologies of leadership research have placed unnecessary constraints upon our capacity to examine creatively actual leadership practices and to generate fresh insights into their dynamics. A regeneration of leadership research depends upon the development of new frameworks of interpretation which yield new or deeper understanding of processes to which the term ‘leadership’is usually attributed. To this end, the article presents a conceptual framework founded upon well established traditions of social enquiry which have been underutilized in leadership research. The value of this framework is demonstrated through the analysis of data taken from an intensive field study of leadership processes amongst senior managers. It is argued that this methodology for leadership research serves to answer calls for increasing the practical relevance of leadership research without making unacceptable sacrifices to its intellectual credibility.
This article begins with the presumption that action learning has not made as deep an impact in promoting participatory social change as its supporters may have hoped for, but nor has its cousin action modalities, such as action research and action science. These action strategies have evolved separately along distinct traditions and, rather than focus on their commonalities, their proponents have tended to cite their differences from one another. As a result, they have seldom stood together to advocate for their shared epistemology based on practice as the fundamental unit of analysis.Accordingly, after briefly summarizing the history and differences among these action modalities, this article will focus on their potential confederation. It cites ten unifying elements that may construct an agenda characterized by the value of learners collectively reflecting on planned engagements that can not only expand but can create knowledge while at the same time serving to improve practice.
In this paper, we suggest a perspective within leadership research that has an analytical focus on leadership as it is practiced in daily interaction, rather than on individual leaders. We draw upon recent developments in leadership research that emphasize leadership as processes, practices and interactions in formulating basic scientific assumptions of such a perspective. The suggested perspective will enable us to gain new understandings of how leadership activities emerge in social interaction and of how institutionalized notions of leadership are brought into – and re-constructed in – these same activities. Given this reasoning, we would suggest that the empirical study of leadership should be based in a process ontology, focused on leadership practices as constructed in interactions.
The leadership literature typically talks about the discrete "individuality" of its subject and particularly the personal qualities and capabilities of a few key people occupying top positions in a hierarchy. Current leadership research now has begun to generate new knowledge about leadership practice in relations of interpersonal exchange. Nevertheless, there is an urgent need for the ramifications of this insight to be more sufficiently developed. The current discussion explores how a perspective of process studies challenges the dominance of the field by individual social actors and discrete schemes of relations. Its aims are twofold. First, it will show how both of these latter "epistemologies" are lacking and suggest that current leadership research and development activities must rise to the "ontological" challenge of "processes" rather than "things". Second, it looks at some methodological implications of this way of thinking as a productive incitement to future management studies. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005.
The process of theory construction in organizational studies is portrayed as imagination disciplined by evolutionary processes analogous to artificial selection. The quality of theory produced is predicted to vary as a function of the accuracy and detail present in the problem statement that triggers theory building, the number of and independence among the conjectures that attempt to solve the problem, and the number and diversity of selection criteria used to test the conjectures. It is argued that interest is a substitute for validation during theory construction, middle range theories are a necessity if the process is to be kept manageable, and representations such as metaphors are inevitable, given the complexity of the subject matter.
The article proposes that patterns of dominance and deference have changed throughout human history. It further proposes that in the last half century such change has – due to culture and technology – accelerated. These fundamental shifts have not, however, had an impact on the leadership industry, which continues, erroneously, to presume that leaders are all-important, that followers are unimportant, and that context is other than central. It is concluded that leadership education and development must themselves adapt to the changing times – times in which leaders generally are losing power and influence, while followers generally are gaining.
This text offers an understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical and engineering practice, and the production of scientific knowledge. The author presents an approach to the unpredictable nature of change in science, taking into account the number of factors - social, technological, conceptual and natural - that interact to affect the creation of scientific knowledge. In his view, machines, instruments, facts, theories, conceptual and mathematical structures, disciplined practices and human beings are in constantly shifting relationships with one another - "mangled" together in ways that are shaped by the contingencies of culture, time and place. Situating material as well as human agency in their larger cultural context, Pickering uses case studies to show how this picture of the open, changeable nature of science advances a greater understanding of scientific work both past and present. He examines the building of the bubble chamber in particle physics, the search for the quark, the construction of the quarternion system in mathematics and the introduction of computer-controlled machine tools in industry. He uses these examples to address the most basic elements of scientific practice - the development of experimental apparatus, the production of facts, the development of theory and the interrelation of machines and social organization.
One symptom of individualism in liquid modernity is the search for `identity'. Using the five theoretically discrete articles in this special issue as both a `rich' discursive resource and a point of departure, we develop a supplementary reading of the narratives which appear to inform identity research. We suggest that, while social agents in pursuit of `identity' draw on a cacophony of discursive sources, it is the varieties of `self—other' talk which emerge as the critical ingredient in processes of identity formation. The dualities that all such self—other talk articulate can be seen as discursive reflections of the more fundamental relationship between the individual and sociality. In turn, this is seen to refract one of the persistent problems of organizational analysis: the agency—structure issue. In addition, while we argue that deploying a discursive perspective to analyze identity work offers distinctive insights, such an approach carries with it an epistemological consequence. For what the articles also indicate is that in any attempt to delineate the `identity of identities', researchers need to be aware of not only the reflexivity displayed by social actors constructing `identity' but also of their own role in `re-authoring' such scripts. We briefly explore the implications of this for identity theory and organizational analysis more generally.
The process of theory construction in organizational studies is portrayed as imagination disciplined by evolutionary processes analogous to artificial selection. The quality of theory produced is predicted to vary as a function of the accuracy and detail present in the problem statement that triggers theory building, the number of and independence among the conjectures that attempt to solve the problem, and the number and diversity of selection criteria used to test the conjectures. It is argued that interest is a substitute for validation during theory construction, middle range theories are a necessity if the process is to be kept manageable, and representations such as metaphors are inevitable, given the complexity of the subject matter.
No Participatory approaches to natural resource management encompass ideas about the desirability of citizens actively engaging in the institutions, policies and discourses that shape their access to resources. Underpinning such approaches are assumptions about the nature of human agency. Purposive individual action is seen as instrumentally desirable as well as potentially radical and transformatory. Through participation in collective resource management it is claimed that people can re-negotiate norms, challenge inequalities, claim their rights and extend their access. This paper draws on insights from theories of structuration, governmentality and gendered empowerment to explore understandings of how individual human agency shapes and is shaped by social relationships and institutions. It outlines six factors that constrain and enable the exercise of agency for different people; cosmologies, complex individual identities, the unequal interdependence of livelihoods, structure and voice, embodiment and emotionality. The paper concludes by considering some of the implications for research and development interventions.
Obra teórica de una sociología de las asociaciones, el autor se cuestiona sobre lo que supone la palabra social que ha sido interpretada con diferentes presupuestos y se ha hecho del mismo vocablo un nombre impreciso e inadecuado, además se ha materializado el término como quien nombra algo concreto, de manera que lo social se convierte en un proceso de ensamblado y un tipo particular de material. Propone retomar el concepto original para hacer las debidas conexiones y descubrir el contenido estricto de las cuestiones que están conectadas bajo la sociedad.
According to the advocates of a "Generalized Darwinism" (GD), the three core Darwinian principles of variation, selection and retention (or inheritance) can be used as a general framework for the development of theories explaining evolutionary processes in the socioeconomic domain. Even though these are originally biological terms, GD argues that they can be re-defined in such a way as to abstract from biological particulars. We argue that this approach does not only risk to misguide positive theory development, but that it may also impede the construction of a coherent evolutionary approach to "policy implications". This is shown with respect to the positive, instrumental and normative theories such an approach is supposed to be based upon.
Global social movements and global civil society: A critical overview
- James P Van Seters
James P and van Seters P (2014) Global social movements and global civil society: A critical overview.
In: James P and van Seters P (eds) Globalization and Politics. Vol. 2. London: Sage, pp. vii-xxx.