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The performativity of leadership talk
Abstract
Leadership-as-practice holds great promise for the re-theorisation of leadership in ways that reflect the dynamics of ongoing practice in the day-to-day realities of organising. However, in order to progress this agenda there is an urgent need to develop more dynamic theories and complementary methodologies that are better able to engage with the continuities of leadership practice. This paper responds to this need firstly by teasing out the conceptual implications of the practices/practice duality, differentiating between leadership as a set of practices, and leadership in the flow of practice. Then, drawing theoretical insights from Austin and Mead, the performative effects of turning points in the flow of ordinary conversation are examined in the context of the leadership talk of a senior management team. The paper makes contributions to both theory and methodology, which are elaborated empirically to show how different types of talk relate to different phases of leadership practice.
... With the increasing tendency to view leadership as a plural accomplishment (Crevani, 2018;Simpson, Buchan, & Sillince, 2018), the question of leadership within a hierarchy has received renewed attention. If leadership is not associated with particular individuals or their formal rank, then how does it manifest in teams where a strict division of labour exists and where those in formal supervisory positions are expected to lead the way? ...
... As a result, very few researchers have empirically studied the processes of leadership by focusing on the primacy of movements and fluctuations (for notable exceptions, see Carroll & Simpson, 2012;Crevani, 2018;Simpson et al., 2018). In addition, the rare case studies that have been carried out have adopted a discursive or conversational approach to examine the 'turning points' in conversations, meetings, and so on. ...
... For instance, Crevani (2018) identified trajectories of meanings in conversations as expressions of leadership work. Simpson et al. (2018) studied how the juxtaposition of remembered past and anticipated future (in the same speech act) created performative turning points in conversations. ...
This paper employs a strong process approach to leadership – one that focuses on leadership moments in action – to explore how collaborative leadership emerges within a hierarchical context. Drawing on observation in three Haute Cuisine restaurant kitchen brigades – highly hierarchical teams that deal with intense time pressures – we document empirically in the ongoing flow of experience how leadership moments reorient collective action as a response to an unstable environment. Moreover, we show how collaborative leadership emerges from a hierarchical structure, counterintuitively, during the most critical period of the service. Our contribution is twofold. We offer a novel conceptualization of the emergence of plural leadership within a hierarchical context, one that highlights the capacity to reframe the way of working together during the most critical moments of an unfolding situation. In addition, our work contributes to the strong process approach to leadership through the methodology adopted: rather than exploring how turning points are discursively enacted, we focus on these as manifested in action and in the non-verbal aspects displayed at such moments.
... The aim is to stimulate more empirical research based on practice perspectives by describing one possible way to study and write about leadership. We thus respond to recent calls for more consistency between theoretical conceptualization and methodological approach in leadership studies (Ashford & Sitkin, 2019;Gardner et al., 2020;Simpson et al., 2018). ...
... 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). More recently, leadership researchers have also brought attention to material dimensions of the leadership process by building on the more general turn to materiality in organization studies (see Carlile et al., 2013;Czarniawska, 2013;Gherardi, 2001;Robichaud & Cooren, 2013;Schatzki, 2006;but also Turner, 1971). ...
... This empirical strategy depends on utilizing a sharp theoretical lens in order to identify changes (or lack thereof) in direction, however, as the researcher can no longer rely on the informants to determine if leadership was accomplished. Recent studies have used conversational turning points (Simpson et al., 2018) or body positioning and spatiality (Carroll, 2016), for example, to identify any such changes. Simpson et al. (2018, p. 656) show how different kinds of 'turning points in the flow of talk' affect 'movements and changes in trajectory'. ...
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.
... Denis et al., 2012;Friedrich et al., 2009;Pearce and Conger, 2003;Spillane, 2005), also consider leadership as collective, but they keep such classic shibboleths as leadership requiring an influence relationship between entities, namely leaders and followers, intact. In a play on words, Simpson et al. (2018) suggest that in the case of L-A-P, the prevailing property would not be influence, but "in-flow-ence," signifying movement constituted and emergent within the practices. L-A-P differs from classic leadership in other conceptual domains, to wit, instead of linearity characterizing relations, it is more typified by recursiveness; instead of being concerned with expertise, it focuses on meaning making; or instead of studying decision-making models, it is concerned with collaborative learning. ...
... Through the idiom of performativity, language is not used to represent a reality; rather, actors and objects (including words) derive meaning through the continuous flow of practice (Austin, 1962;Barad, 2007;Gond et al., 2016). By flow of practice, Simpson et al. (2018) refer to the "real-time doings" of human and material agency during which there is no meaningful starting or ending points, only unfolding action. ...
... Rather than look for exchanges between entities, L-A-P researchers are interested in the turning points in the spaces between people or in emergent entangled intra-actions. It is in these spaces where agency may materialize as the realization of social choices as conditioned by structure (Simpson et al., 2018). Agency can be both individual and collective and is mobilized as a social interaction as people come together to coordinate their activities. ...
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.
... As Raelin (2016b: 12) notes: 'It is in the trans-action mode that we may find leadershipas-practice as a perpetually unfolding dynamic in which it is the action itself that re-orients the flow of practice towards new directions. ' Simpson et al. (2018) highlight the 'performative dynamics of practice' in a world that is ontologically continuous in motion. They suggest that we can notice when leadership is appearing in performative talk, by paying attention to directional shifts in the flow of ongoing action as it surfaces and falls away. ...
... The second complementary coaching intervention was to get Luciano to see the performative potential of social talk or conversation (Simpson et al., 2018). Conversations are a common thread that, to a greater or lesser extent, run through leadership (Carroll and Simpson, 2012;Fairhurst and Connaughton, 2014;Tourish, 2014). ...
... As we set out to analyse the data, we asked ourselves: How do we identify acts and processes of leadership? Simpson et al. (2018) suggest that we can see leadership in shifts in direction during the flow of ongoing action (in-flow-ence). Ramsey (2016) suggests that leadership, being socially constructed, is borne out in conversations. ...
This study emerges from a co-constructed autoethnography by a practitioner and two academic facilitators studying the leadership-as-practice processes within a small-to-medium sized private wealth business. The study set out to explore the performative dynamics of conversation constituted in, and emerging from, socially engaged talk through leadership in the flow of practice, referred to as 'in-flow-ence'. The study proposes a dynamic metaphor theory that builds on inflow -ence to capture the complexities of conversation and offer thoughts about ways to reconstitute leadership practice to bring about changes in trajectories of social action.
... Language and politics is interconnected, as one may implicate from the definition of Aristotle of man as a political animal (Chiron,2004;Simpson et al., 2018). The political language has the power to manipulate the minds of recipients and inflict the so called 'true' ideas of the ones that are in power (Hashim, 2015, p. 699). ...
... The literature clearly illustrates these idiosyncracies among speeches of different politicians. Simpson et al. (2018) highlights the speech analysis of a conversative British politician Enoch Powell by Chilton. The results of the analysis demonstrate that Powell seems to have used 'indirect-meaning strategy' to give the impression that the immigration will bring off a race war within the nation. ...
Pragmatics is an interdisciplinary subfield of applied linguistics that investigates the meaning in context. One of its research areas, speech acts, provides important implications on how the meaning behind the utterances is perceived and what effect it may have on the hearer. Theories and classifications proposed by Austin (1962) and Searle (1979) are particularly useful in understanding the hidden meaning and its effect on the audience. Political discourse is directly connected with speech acts and there is a body of research that focuses on the classification of illocutionary acts embedded within speeches of politicians. In this regard, the present research aimed to analyze illocutionary speech acts of two speeches of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk;speech at the 10th anniversary of Turkish Republic and Address to Turkish Youth which was a part of his great speech that he delivered to deputies and representatives of the Republican Party on 15th-20th October 1927 by employing qualitative content analysis on English translations of the speeches. Subsequent to meticulous analysis, the present qualitative study concluded that Ataturk used more speech acts in his speech at the 10th anniversary of the Turkish Republic than his Address to Turkish Youth. Speech acts in his speech at the 10th anniversary of the Turkish Republic primarily featured expressive, representative, commissive and directive speech acts while his Address to Turkish Youth featured representative and commissive, directive, expressive speech acts, respectively.In total, the most used speech acts were representatives, followed by expressives, commissives and directives. No declaration speech act was observed in either speech.
... Así, el principal rasgo del líder es su capacidad para movilizar la construcción conjunta de nuevas realidades organizativas. Se trata de un liderazgo transformacional que "no es un liderazgo personal, sino que se comparte, que ayuda a todos los miembros, que se transmite el entusiasmo y se logra una identificación con la visión" (Villa, 2019, p.320-321) El liderazgo se entiende como una práctica enmarcada en procesos continuos y emergentes de interacción entre los interlocutores en los que se va configurando la realidad a partir de una construcción compartida y constante de significados (Simpson et al., 2018). Paralelamente, la propia identidad de los partícipes en esta interacción adviene como un trabajo progresivo y negociado, configurado a partir de los esfuerzos de cada uno, de su pasado, presente y su futuro que puede comprenderse en términos de una construcción narrativa que conecte sus distintas dimensiones (Crow et al., 2017). ...
... Ambas directoras comparten el ser portadoras de valores muy claros que han sabido transmitir a sus comunidades escolares, haciéndoles partícipes de esa visión para construir entre todos la organización escolar deseada y mostrando, como enfatizan Candela, Jiménez y Blanco (2021) el valor de la cooperación y el trabajo en equipo. Asumen un liderazgo transformacional (Villa, 2019) que, sobre la base del empleo de estrategias -sobre todo, de orden discursivo (Altopiedi, 2013;Floyd & Preston, 2018;Simpson et al., 2018)-conduce a una cierta re-culturización de sus organizaciones. ...
Este artículo tiene como objetivo describir cómo construyen la identidad profesional los directores escolares y sus implicaciones en el desarrollo del liderazgo y la gestión emocional. La literatura actual señala que la construcción de la identidad profesional tiene un gran impacto en el desarrollo organizativo, el clima y la cultura de los centros. La construcción de esta identidad, fuertemente ligada al liderazgo, se conforma como un proceso gradual donde interviene la comunidad educativa en su conjunto. La información se ha recabado en dos centros educativos, indagando cómo su funcionamiento y clima se ven influenciados por la identidad profesional de los directores, así como por sus habilidades emocionales y la formación recibida. La metodología, de corte cualitativo, ha empleado entrevistas abiertas realizadas en distintos momentos y a distintos informantes de cada comunidad educativa en dos centros escolares liderados por directoras consideradas eficaces. Entre los principales resultados destacan la importancia de la motivación en el acceso al cargo, la preocupación por el logro de resultados favorables, la resiliencia para la gestión del estrés, la eficiencia profesional, la resolución rápida de problemas, la actitud positiva y la iniciativa para la gestión de Proyectos. Como conclusión, se aborda la necesidad de una formación en los procesos de dirección y gestión en las escuelas eficaces y la importancia de la capacidad de resiliencia como medio para promover la construcción de una identidad profesional que contribuya a mejorar el funcionamiento de los centros escolares en situaciones difíciles.
... Process researchers have developed innovative theoretical perspectives and methods to incorporate process thinking more deeply in studies of power and performativity, and have examined their dynamic interplay across a range of related phenomena, including resistance, strategy, activism and leadership (Esper, Cabantous, Barin-Cruz, & Gond, 2017;Harding, Ford, & Lee, 2017;McCabe, 2010;Nicholson & Carroll, 2013;Simpson, Buchan, & Sillince, 2018a). Recent developments in process philosophy and theorizing have clarified the distinction between process thinking as an ontological position and process thinking as an orientation to study organization and organizing, and they have highlighted several modes of process thinking and doing process research (Helin et al., 2014;Langley & Tsoukas, 2016;Sergi, Crevani, & Aubry, 2020). ...
... Third, performative power highlights that change can be transient, contingent and provisional, but needs to be consequential for the ongoing flow of organizing, that is, meaningful for the actors involved so as to shape their future actions (Carlile & Dionne, 2018;. Consequences can be seen as changing directions in the flow of trans-actions (Simpson et al., 2018a) and as creating provisional stability and facilitating action in situations of intense uncertainty. Thus, performative power points towards a view of power that is more nuanced and not as 'powerful' as we expect it to be, but still consequential and potentially creative. ...
This article seeks to open up new possibilities for process organization studies to reimagine power and performativity by exploring the potential of Mary Parker Follett’s pragmatism as process philosophy. I revisit her body of work to show how she translated her process ontology into theoretical resources and practical insights that allow for new ways of understanding power and performativity together and explore them as mutually constituting processes of organizing. In particular, I mobilize Follett’s view of conflicts as emerging differences in the world and frictions as constructive conflicts with the potential to generate something new in order to introduce and conceptualize ‘performative power’, that is, the power emerging from relating and integrating differences in organizational situations that are experienced as frictions by people involved. Drawing on my ethnographic study of an entrepreneurship accelerator – a training programme for innovators and start-up projects – I discuss and illustrate empirically how performative power is generated from frictions that arise in ordinary lived experiences. This conceptualization of performative power is an attempt to develop a processual and performative understanding of power, and a useful lens to conduct process research. Making a connection between performative power and the experience of frictions provides a new way to see, talk and study processually power in contemporary organizations.
... Echoing the fluid and fast-changing nature of today's society, contemporary organisational theory has brought forth a notion of leadership that denies leader-centrism and its associated glorification of individual leaders (Simpson, 2016). However, scholars have recently started to question whether the idea of leadership-as-practice goes far enough and called for processual inquiries that offer insight into how particular conditions actually produce leadership in the flow of practice (Simpson, 2016;Simpson, Buchan, & Sillince, 2018). ...
... Despite this focus on dynamics and interactions, this literature has been criticised for paying little attention to the ways in which leadership is (re-)produced in ongoing processes of leading and following (Simpson, 2016). In this processual view, leadership is neither a characteristic of distinct human leaders nor coconstructed in interactions but rather continuously emerging from within the flow of practice (Simpson et al., 2018). In responding to these calls, we argue for a performative process perspective of leadership and show how a grounding in post-humanist performativity can help to take the material role of digital technologies seriously in the ongoing accomplishment of leadership (Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2016). ...
The way we perform and organise work has undeniably changed and will continue to do so in the next decades. Work is becoming increasingly digital, independent, and performed outside of hierarchical organisations. These new forms of work, characterised by organisational independence, pose new challenges to management research and its theoretical conceptualisation of leadership. We report on an ongoing ethnographic study of independent digital workers. In particular, we focus on a range of senior workers that appear as leaders in their respective fields. In adopting an inherently processual vocabulary, our study shows how leaders continuously become followers and followers become leaders. We suggest that, in the digital work context, leaders are also always already positioned as followers. This work-in-progress leads to the development of a performative process theory that understands leaders and followers as continuously emerging from within material-discursive processes.
... Ladkin (2010) suggests, for instance, that leadership emerges in situations in which there is a confluence of understanding of the context, of the role taking of leaders and followers, and of a common sense of purpose. Larsson and Lundholm's (2013) research demonstrates how everyday conversations produce collective identities that facilitate and direct future actions by those engaged in the interaction, and Simpson et al. (2017) show how 'turning points' in conversations recall past actions and provide an impulse to change, thereby indicating and prescribing a change in the flow of action. Similarly, Crevani (2018) identifies 'direction' as a core element of leadership processes. ...
... Several leadership researchers have highlighted the ways in which language use accomplishes leadership (Crevani, 2015;Larsson and Lundholm, 2013;Simpson et al., 2017). ...
Leadership scholars are beginning to understand leadership as a distributed phenomenon, produced in interaction and emerging in social situations. Although this perspective has contributed to understanding leadership processes in more detail, it has also been noted that its proponents have largely neglected power and asymmetrical hierarchical relations. In this paper, I address these issues by drawing on Erving Goffman’s notion of frame analysis. Through detailed analysis of the interactions in a core-values session, I show how leadership processes that appear to be distributed and emergent from the participants’ framework appear orchestrated when understood from the manager’s framework. The analysis reveals how power asymmetries operate in the framing of the situation, and how the experience of leadership differs among participants. Talk, text, tools, and movements in time and space all contribute to establish frameworks, and differences in access to these modalities show power asymmetries. The paper highlights how the experience of leadership is framed and how power asymmetries constitute this framing. It thereby contributes to multimodal, constructivist theories of distributed leadership by showing how leadership is simultaneously emergent, distributed, and orchestrated.
... Existing research methods tend to deal poorly with the fleeting, the chaotic, the non-causal and the complex, so alternative methods are needed to engage with people on the move, and to examine the processes by which movement is accomplished. In the leadership literature, a few scholars have explored dynamic approaches such as observing how leadership emerges across a series of meetings (Crevani, 2018;Simpson et al., 2018), following a person (Carroll, 2016), or tracing the unfolding of a project over time (Sergi, 2016). This emphasis on following movement, whether of people, objects or projects, suggests shadowing as a methodological approach that is consistent with a dynamic view of leadership. ...
... Our interest is in their performativity, referring not to their productivity, but to their deep involvement in practice and to their discourses which help shape their identity. The practice view also refers to their "sayings" and "doings" and how these activities come together in particular sites to make particular practices more or less possible and effective as they are reproduced and renewed (Simpson, Buchan, & Sillince, 2018). ...
This essay, through a curation of articles drawn largely from the archives of the Academy of Management, guides readers through the early foundations, principles, and theory of the new field of leadership-as-practice (L-A-P). The field is shown to have evolved through a history of leadership research culminating in a plural tradition with which the practice perspective is allied. Some of the critical issues in the present and unfolding state of L-A-P are exemplified, including their implications for ongoing leadership practice. The essay ends with some recommendations for future research in the field, along with opportunities for advancing theory and application that such study might afford.
... Alternatively, it can be mobilised to focus on specific practices -that is, on specified recurrent patterns of actions that make up the structuring of organisational life. The former position sees leadership appearing in the changing direction of flow, in transforming a situation, and has, for instance been mobilised for identifying turning points in the flow of talk bringing together the past and the future with performative effects (Simpson et al., 2018). The latter position involves the identification of leadership practices and the analysis of what they do. ...
This chapter focuses on the study of leadership and practice with the aim to foreground how different strands of practice theory have contributed to an alternate understanding of leadership as phenomenon by providing a unique orientation and sensibility for research. Practice theories have been one way of answering the need for accounting for the processual, relational and interactional character of leadership. In fact, practice theories not only offer the theoretical and methodological tools to understand leadership as a social accomplishment – but also, as we will argue, as a material accomplishment.
Conceptualising leadership in terms of practice is not new (Follett, 1919; Hosking, 1988). However, what is exactly implied in such conceptualisation can vary. In broad terms, practice can be understood to designate what people do together. Building on such a general idea, leadership scholars have increasingly focused on how leadership is performed and enacted in a distributed way through situated everyday actions. Leadership is thus not necessarily what leaders do. Rather, it is the practical collective accomplishment of direction in organising that is in focus. However, there is not one theory of practice but multiple, which implies that multiple lines of enquiry are imaginable for practice studies of leadership.
In this chapter, we describe how leadership studies have benefitted by (re)attending to practice theories. Practice theories are not presented as more valid theoretical alternatives than dominant leadership theories. Rather, we elaborate on how these theories have offered the possibility to develop new understandings of leadership by reimagining the study of this phenomenon.
The first section of the chapter presents an introduction to practice theories and their entrance in leadership studies. Then, in the second section, we illustrate what studies mobilising practice theories have contributed to. In the third section we dig into a discussion of the different positionings that researchers drawing on practice theories have taken, in order to provide the reader with the possibility to navigate the sensitising framework that these theories provide. The chapter ends with a discussion of criticalities and possibilities, including the possible need to advance our methodological tools.
... Leadership is a focal social phenomenon for our societies in every domain of life and leadership research has a direct and reciprocal relationship with the practice of leadership (Simpson et al., 2017). Consequently, leadership researchers have a responsibility to consider the performative effect of their framing of the phenomenon on leadership practice in the real world (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012). ...
The traditional conceptualization of leadership can be understood as the leader occupying
centerstage whilst the audience of ‘followers’ remains largely in the dark. Furthermore, as
an actor on stage would perceive a booing member of the audience as malevolent or
ignorant, the extant literature mainly depicts non-followers as obstacles, inefficiencies, or
irritants that should be corrected so that they can become productive members of the group
(Ford & Harding, 2018).
Yet, leadership does not only revolve around the leader and his/her ability to create ‘good
followers’ (Collinson, 2006). It is the compilation of cooperating and clashing individual
agencies of the group members that results in more than mere aggregation. Through their
support, opposition, and even apathy, every group member is a participant of the leadership
phenomenon and they individually and collectively influence the group goal and to what
extent it is actualized. As such, this dissertation is dedicated to understanding who the
constituents of leadership really are and how leadership as a multilevel social phenomenon
that is co-created by all group members actually works.
In this dissertation, I introduce the participatory theater framework (PTF) of leadership as a
novel and holistic theoretical approach that can enable us to answer the questions above.
The participatory theater framework recognizes everyone in the group, including the leader
and all forms of followers and non-followers, individually and collectively, as agentic
performers of leadership. Deriving its foundations from various research areas such as
social and cognitive psychology, moral philosophy, and game theory, this dissertation (i)
establishes the theoretical foundation of the PTF and proposes a typology of roles people
adopt in leadership situations, (ii) demonstrates that even those who are most commonly
thought to be passive (i.e., devoted followers of toxic leaders; frequently called ‘sheep’ )
are indeed willful co-creators of the leadership phenomenon, and (iii) presents empirical
evidence for the existence of the proposed typology of roles.
... Findings show that leadership is not only contextually influenced but also context-producing practice in which the leader's micro-actions are important for context and overall success [26]. Researchers have also shown how different types of talk relate to different phases of leadership practice [27]. Other findings highlight power differences and demonstrate that participants are not given equal scope to exercise power within the emerging and hybrid agency orienting the flow of leadership [28]. ...
Practice-oriented perspectives of leadership suggest that we should relate more to organisational realities as they are ‘in practice’. This entails studying patterns of actions with a certain form, direction, purpose or objective. Leadership researchers have not often focused on conducting empirical studies of everyday life and challenges within organisations, which may have contributed to a possible gap between theory and leadership practice. Thus, there is a need for other perspectives, both for researchers and leaders. Rather than presenting idealised notions of what leaders should do, the premise of practice perspectives is that leadership is shaped through leaders’ actions in their everyday environments. The sum of such actions over time constitutes a practice that takes place within a community of collective practice. This entails leadership is understood as a function, a process and an action. Accordingly, research into practice is not so much concerned with identifying normative models and characteristics of the individual but rather shifts the focus from the individual to processes and actions. For leaders, this means that they must develop their own leadership practice regarding how to deal with organisational realities, their messiness and complexity.
... Other "plural" traditions in leadership, such as shared, distributed, and collective leadership (see, e.g., Pearce and Conger 2003;Spillane 2006;Friedrich et al. 2009;Denis et al. 2012;Raelin 2020) also consider leadership practice as collective but they keep classic shibboleths, such as leadership requiring an influence relationship between entities, namely leaders and followers, intact. In a play on words, Simpson, Buchan, and Sillince (2018) suggest that in the case of leadership-as-practice, the compelling engine of activity would not be influence, but "in-flow-ence," signifying movement constituted and emergent within the practices. ...
The field of leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) is beginning to mature as a theory of leadership in direct opposition to standard leadership, which views the individual as the mainstay of leadership experience. Nor does it focus on the dyadic relationship between leaders and followers, which historically has been the starting point for any discussion of leadership. Rather, it is concerned with how leadership emerges and unfolds through day-to-day experience. In this ongoing and evolving activity, questions of ethics arise which challenge what appears to be a flat ontology circumscribing its ethical applications. Using a case analysis, which according to the author takes significant liberties with some of the fundamental ethical principles and practices of L-A-P, this essay seeks to refine and delineate what constitutes business ethics from a leadership-as-practice perspective.
... An organisational restructuring studied by Simpson et al. (2018) has the potential to fragment collaborative agency. Once again, 'talk' is the means by which coherence is achieved and the article maps the ebbs and flows of talk through different phases of the restructuring. ...
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.
... As described above, circumstances have made us more aware of the ambiguity and multiplicity of reality, of the need for collaboration, adaptation and resilience, and of the embodied and material dimension of work life, among other aspects. During the last decades, there have been different streams of research studying leadership as a process and practice that could provide interesting ground to build on in order to renew the way we do, and talk about, leadership (for instance, Barker, 2001;Carroll et al., 2008;Crevani et al., 2010;Cunliffe & Eriksen, 2011;Denis et al., 2012;Drath et al., 2008;Gronn, 2002;Hansen et al., 2007;Hosking, 1988;Küpers, 2013;Ospina & Foldy, 2010;Raelin, 2016;Ropo et al., 2015;Simpson et al., 2018;Spillane, 2012;Uhl-Bien et al., 2007). Although different labels have been applied, what these studies share is an interest in what Rost (1993) in Leadership for the Twenty-First Century called the essential nature of leadership, that is the focus on what leadership actually is: a process. ...
MAD statement
This leading article aims at Making a Difference (MAD) by inspiring to engage in new conventions for leadership and organizational change at a time when there is an opening for new practices to emerge. The COVID-19 pandemic upended much of what we take for granted, making us more aware of the ambiguity and multiplicity of reality, of the need for collaboration, adaptation and resilience, and of the embodied and material dimension of work life.
... However, this experience is also necessarily a temporal phenomenon as the interpenetration of pasts and futures resources present actions (e.g. Simpson, Buchan, & Sillince, 2018). It is in these simultaneities of the old and the new, and of selves and others that creative action emerges and progress is accomplished. ...
The legacy of classical American Pragmatism—Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, Mead, Follett, and others—in organization theory is significant, albeit that much of its influence has come through implicit and indirect routes. In light of recent calls for an empirical stance as an alternative to the prevailing metaphysical stance in organizational research, we re-read Pragmatism as a process philosophy that can profoundly inform process views of organization and organizing. Our particular reading highlights Pragmatism’s emphasis on process and emergence, its theory of knowing as fallible and experimental, its denouncing of dualisms, its future-oriented meliorism, its sensitivity to ethics and democracy, and its positioning of experience as both the start and end of inquiry, arguing that these features lay invaluable groundwork for the study of organization and organizing. We advocate a reappraisal of this legacy, mobilising seven articles from the back catalogue of this journal in a virtual special issues that demonstrates how classical American Pragmatism can reinvigorate the field while also opening up new questions and new ways of questioning.
... Notes 1. There are of course exceptions, not least within the current trend of studying leadership-aspractice or as a collective and/or distributed phenomenon (Alvehus, 2019;Carroll, 2016;Crevani, 2018;Sergi, 2016;Simpson et al., 2018) and in conversation analysis-oriented approaches (Clifton, 2006(Clifton, , 2014Larsson & Lundholm, 2013;Vine et al., 2008). Still, empirical research on this is scarce, and many authors remain vague about the nature of the phenomenon they study. ...
Leadership is a popular term, among scholars and in general. It is romanticized and seems to cover everything and nothing. Its analytical value has therefore been questioned, and so has the very existence of leadership as a phenomenon. Here, based on the social psychology of GH Mead, I argue that leadership is a fundamental human phenomenon emanating from docility. By exploring this through the lens of three classic texts – Milgram’s Obedience to Authority, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management – I argue that processes that accomplish leadership are often not understood as leadership, but as something else, for example manipulation or management. More generally, I argue that leadership disappears as we identify the details of its manifestations, and from this I argue that leadership is a concept that denies its own ontological foundation. My conclusions suggest that leadership scholars and practitioners increasingly should draw attention to the choices involved in leadership processes and to practices commonly seen as not being about leadership – leadership studies will benefit from making the immaculate concept of leadership dirtier.
... Practice and practices are fundamentally different, not only in their theorizations, but also in their implications for empirical research (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011;Simpson, Buchan, & Sillince, 2018). The becoming ontology underpinning the practice orientation that we have adopted in this article requires us to find non-representational approaches to studying projects that allow us to apprehend the "ephemeral and dynamic becomingness of human experience as a continuous flow of creative action" (Garud et al., 2015, p. 13). ...
This article contributes a practice-based approach to project management by opening up to the messiness and unpredictabilities involved in actually doing project work. Drawing on the Pragmatist ideas of John Dewey, we theorize projects-as-practices (noun) and projects-as-practice (verb) as complementary concepts that are built respectively on ontologies of being and becoming. For the purposes of this article, we define the notion of project as an emergent social process of becoming, bounded in time and space, and generative of novel outcomes. We also contribute methodologically by proposing Dewey’s Inquiry as a guide to shadowing the bounded becomingness of projects-as-practice (verb). Using an empirical illustration from a Health and Social Care Partnership in Scotland, we highlight the inherently emergent nature of projects as they bring about transformational change.
... Para ello, se propone desarrollar trabajos de investigación aplicada que, además de concentrarse en aplicar encuestas para medir y caracterizar comportamientos típicos, introduzcan una perspectiva interpretativa (Burrell & Morgan, 1979a) y reexiva (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2000) de la investigación en la que la generalización y el ajuste estadístico deje de ser una prioridad para dar paso a una aproximación ideográca, esto es, un acercamiento de primera mano a los actores organizacionales (Alvesson, 2019). El estudio de caso, la etnografía, el análisis de discurso, la investigación-acción, entre otros (Klenke, 2008;Simpson, Buchan, & Sillince, 2018;Sutherland, 2018), pueden ser métodos que posibiliten al estudiante identicar las diversas caras y manifestaciones que asume el liderazgo en la vida cotidiana de las organizaciones y construir conocimiento situado, contextual e histórico sobre este fenómeno. ...
El artículo busca responder la pregunta de si es posible enseñar liderazgo en las escuelas de administración. Para ello presenta tres concepciones sobre el liderazgo y sus implicaciones en términos de la formación. La primera lo concibe como un conjunto de atributos o cualidades innatas y sostiene la imposibilidad de su enseñanza. La segunda, como un conjunto de habilidades y comportamientos y entiende su enseñanza en términos de la formación de destrezas. La tercera lo concibe como una relación social compleja. El artículo propone una forma de enseñanza del liderazgo sustentada en un paradigma crítico que permita comprender la complejidad del fenómeno, que cuestione sus efectos indeseados, que supere los lugares comunes de la literatura, y que reflexione sobre los fines e implicaciones de la actividad directiva.
... While the re-imagining of relationships and spaces may lead to creative outcomes, the dynamic unfolding of learning/playing demands that we also explore the processes of temporal emergence (Garud et al., 2015). Analyzing accounts of how the food producers created new things, it became apparent that their outputs were often the result of a performative moment in which pasts and futures entered simultaneously into their experience, allowing them to move beyond literal understandings in order to play with existing resources and create something new (Simpson et al., 2017). We found that temporal sociality was expressed at our research sites through the confluence of ideas, retrofitting of technology, and engagement with memories. ...
This article examines the generative interplay between learning and playing in managing and organizing by taking a performative approach that theorizes learning/playing as an assemblage in which playing and learning emerge as co-evolving processes in practice. Addressing the methodological challenges associated with this performative approach, the learning/playing assemblage is probed using traveling concepts, which attend to the dynamic movements rather than the stabilities of organizing, functioning as proposed by Vygotsky as both a research tool and an emergent result of research. This notion of “travelling concepts” is developed empirically by engaging with Mead’s “sociality,” which he defined as the simultaneous experience of being several things at once. Three interweaving strands of sociality—relational, spatial, and temporal—are elaborated in the context of traveling with and through four artisan food production sites, each of which sought to engage differently with the esthetics and functionality of the food we consume.
... While much of the gender and leadership literature is preoccupied with leadership style differences between genders and how followers perceive leader effectiveness as mediated by leaders' and followers' gender, the relatively recent practice turn in organization studies (Schatzki et al., 2001;Whittington, 2002) has also had an effect on how gender and leadership are conceptualized. Leadership-as-practice (Raelin, 2016;Harrison, 2016) is now introduced as a promising approach to theorizing leadership that allows to better capture the dynamics of organizational practices and organizing (Simpson et al., 2017). The links between context, practice and gender appear to invite new ways of understanding gender and leadership. ...
Drawing on evidence from a unique data set of in-depth qualitative interviews with 12 female CEOs (and 139 male CEOs) of global corporations, we explore what enables some women to become CEOs. By drawing on our data from male and female CEOs, we set the scene by comparing the advice they would give to young women as they start their careers. We then focus the rest of our article on the experiences and career trajectory of the 12 female CEOs. We make three theoretical contributions: We identify, at the individual level, how women can take active ownership of their careers as part of a self-acceptance process; how they can embrace gynandrous leadership as part of a self-development process where both feminine and masculine leadership behaviors are embraced, with the feminine being dominant to help move beyond gender stereotypes, and finally, how they translate leadership—rather than combine—gender-based behaviors as part of a self-management process to develop their unique leadership style. For each of these theoretical contributions at the individual level, we also provide two practical recommendations for HR practice and policy, one relating to the intraorganizational context and the second having institutional-level implications. We conclude by discussing implications for future research.
The decarbonization of the built environment remains a strategically important net zero pathway. Relative to other net zero pathways, the built environment persistently lags behind. To address this problem, we use the theoretical lens of institutional stance to enrich the understanding of the cognitive‐cultural foundations of institutions, in particular how entrusted institutional members hold, reflect and assert specific stances towards decarbonization of the built environment. In this institutional stance analysis, we identify three institutional change practices of nudging, tugging and mooring for softening‐up persistently stubborn stances in the pursuit of net zero goals. The findings point to mooring mechanisms which permit institutional members to ‘step out’ via temporal institutional respites , and subsequently reconciling these stances through the practice of satisficing , technology cycling and contrasting . Finally, conclusions and practical implications are presented for softening‐up persistently stubborn stances in prolongated net zero change environments.
When less hierarchical organizations attempt to avoid positional authority and rely more on the authority of shared principles, they are challenged to balance a relative open-endedness and sufficient consensus of those principles. However, situations inevitably arise when assertions about the principles clash, disturbing the sense of collective sharing of principles and so triggering tendencies to make the principles more rigid or default to positional rule. This paper explores how internal collective dialogue unfolds in such situations in the central online channels of three mid-sized Nordic software consultancies aspiring for less hierarchical, principles-based organizing. Our research reveals the emergence of ‘collective authoring’— peripheral participation that reacts to the distress stirred by the clash. The collective responds with tension-mediating remarks and, most markedly, with a polyphony of inquiries and musings that are attentive to what is unfolding but not stubbornly fortified with either side of the clash. We discover how this collective dialogue comes to embed the initial clash with the iteratively maturing and saturating soundscape of deliberations, gradually invoking a tacit sense of the collective understanding of the issue on the channels. The dialogues persist until the most acute sense of distress over the sharing of principles seems to dissolve. We discuss how our findings, by illuminating the role of ‘the collective,’ contribute to the extant conceptions of relational authority and less hierarchical organizing.
While performativity, as a theoretical concept, has gained much purchase in the field of management and organization studies (MOS), there remains a dearth of empirical work operationalizing the idea. In this article, we argue that empirical studies on performativity in organizational settings have been scarce mainly due to two methodological challenges: (1) the problem of breadth, and, (2) the problem of depth. In terms of breadth, to study how a cultural/symbolic construction becomes performative, researchers need to follow threads of meanings and practices that stretch in time and space beyond the scope of what most methodologies afford. In terms of depth, studying performativity requires an in-depth, contextualized understanding of how people live in and through the symbolic world, which few methodologies offer. We posit multi-sited ethnography as a promising methodological approach that has the potential to concomitantly overcome both challenges. Through a vignette of a study that one of the authors conducted in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, we illustrate how multi-sited ethnography enables empirical research on performativity in MOS.
This article serves as an overview of qualitative inquiry for leadership development practitioner-scholars both new and experienced. It begins with a discussion of the need for the qualitative inquiry to create knowledge about leadership development. Then, it overviews design components and includes examples of both research and assessment. We conclude by discussing quality standards for qualitative inquiry and providing suggestions for future directions.
The scholarly literature on leadership has long been characterized by leader-centrism, in the sense of a focus on individual leaders, their characteristics and actions. This tendency has been strongly criticized, not least by scholars with a critical perspective. However, we still see a strong emphasis on leaders and managers in empirical studies of leadership. In this article, we suggest that this tendency is at least in part a consequence of common methodological blackboxing practices within leadership studies. We identify two such blackboxing practices: delegation, where identification of the core phenomenon is left to informants, and proxying, when more easily defined phenomena are taken to stand for leadership. We suggest that a consequence of such practices is an unintended focus on managers, and attempts to avoid leader-centrism that rely on these blackboxing practices therefore paradoxically might result in manager-centrism.
This ‘Leading Questions’ thought piece explores the elusive nature of collective leadership. We use our previous experiences to explore issues that tend to go unnoticed and unreported within the academic analysis of collective forms of leadership, including (1) the motives of those commissioning and conducting applied research to ‘make a difference’ through collective forms of leadership; (2) the performative effects of how ‘collective leadership’ is framed; and (3) the extent to which ambiguity around the nature of collective leadership makes it a powerful ‘empty signifier’ for holding incompatible and inconsistent conceptions and ideologies. Such issues, we suggest, are inherent features of the landscape of collective leadership theory, policy and practice and have important implications for scholars, practitioners and developers.
This study examines how actors organized collective efforts to initiate the project and navigated their way forward, even though the ultimate outcome was not clearly defined. To address this question, we explore the potential of the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. This approach foregrounds duality, recursiveness and temporality of collective activities and offers a new and compelling way to understand and address the challenges actors face in organizing and managing the front-end. By accounting for both the situatedness of actions in the wider social and relational contexts, and by connecting the flow of present experience to the interpretations of the past and future, pragmatism holds the potential for integrating theory the actuality of lived experience in its continuous unfolding while accounting for actors’ transformative agency. By drawing on a real-time longitudinal study of conception of the program of the Restoration and Renewal (R&R) of the Palace of Westminster, we show how participants face the challenge of understanding and managing complex tensions that continually arise due to a duality of mobilization (between seeking consensus and expanding divergent possibilities) and a duality of transformation (between forming a bold vision of the future and translating abstract goals into concrete actions). To tackle the challenges, participants create strategic accounts that are stable enough to be practically feasible in current circumstances, but also sufficiently adaptable to pursue future possibilities in ways that challenge prevailing approaches. By showing how participants cope with these challenges by creating spaces of experimentation and constructing flexible boundaries this study contributes to the literature on management of project's front-end.
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.
Despite the role that non-government organisations, including community development organisations, play in social transformation, their approach to managing projects has received little attention. Employing a processual approach and participatory methodology, this paper investigates how a small, distributed, community-based organisation negotiates the challenges associated with managing its geographically dispersed development projects. It examines lessons that this organisation’s project management approach offers for managing projects at a distance in ways that encourage community ownership, partnership with project beneficiaries and their maximum participation in the process. The paper underlines the need for positioning people’s participation in development projects as a key component of development, rather than as a tool for project implementation. It concludes by advocating a blend of participation and empowerment with technical assistance for recipient communities.
In this article we adopt Barad’s theory of agential realism to explore how power and performativity are simultaneously processual and ontologically entangled. We use the hyphenated term power-performativity to mobilize an exploration of how power is not an ‘outcome’ or ‘effect’ of, but an inseparable flow within, the processes of performativity through which the world is continuously becoming. This moves us beyond the traditional, anthropocentric take on the relationship between power and performativity which emphasizes human agency and linear cause-effect, toward an alternative understanding of organizational phenomena as always enacted through myriad intra-acting more-than-human actants. To empirically mobilize this approach, we explore power-performativity within online healthcare, enacted through Personal Online Healthcare Communities (POHCs). We explore multiple ‘diffraction gratings’ through which particular outcomes of online healthcare come to matter, while others are prevented from mattering. In doing so, we posit the suitability of Barad’s agential realism for further explorations of the dynamics of power and performativity in modes of organizing and organizational life and offer tools for how these may be done.
Finding conditions that are conducive to creative practice is a perennial concern in today’s accelerating world, but temporal theories that might shed light onto this problematic still lag behind the day-to-day practicalities of actually doing creative work. This chapter shows that clock time, with its realist focus on the ordered succession of past, present, and future, is inadequate as a basis for understanding the ways in which creative practice is temporally resourced. Drawing on the idealist philosophies of Bergson, Heidegger, and Mead, an alternative becoming temporality characterized by the timefulness of interpenetrating pasts and futures is elaborated. Rather than simply protecting pockets of time for innovation, timefulness evokes mindfulness, carefulness , and playfulness as actions to be nurtured if creativity is to flourish.
Co-production in the public sector can contribute to enhancing sustainability, social equity and democracy in society. Nevertheless, the citizens in greatest need of enhanced social equity and increased democratic participation are often considered less capable of taking part in co-production projects. Embedded in an understanding of co-production-as-practice, this chapter shifts the attention from focusing on the abilities of the individual to focusing on the social processes of becoming. This processual understanding provides possibilities for coming to grips with how highly marginalised citizens both influence and are influenced by the ability of public staff to realise better solutions within public services. The chapter contributes to widening the processual understandings of co-production by seeing resources, capabilities and empowerment as dynamic elements emerging in the present through social processes. Consequently, it illustrates how social equity and inclusiveness can be produced through the co-constitutive processes of becoming.
This paper contributes to the understanding of relational aspects of leadership and followership. Our in-depth empirical study of the leader/follower relation uncovers how and why assigning team members into ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ positions may sometimes be a double-edged sword and lead to unintended consequences undermining both the team’s potential and member satisfaction. We report on a multi-voiced story of one team that at first looked like a well-performing one with effective, ‘good’ leadership and satisfied team members. However, a closer investigation revealed frictional understandings, unresponsiveness and dynamics of immaturization as the followers overly relied on the elected leader. Leadership seen as ‘good’ may indeed backfire and encourage satisfied, trustful followers to relax and focus on limited roles. Our study further shows the need to conduct rich empirical studies that capture views of all parties in a relation.
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.
Although the idea of leadership being a process is clearly stated in leadership definitions, most researchers focus on individuals rather than observing and studying processes. This contradiction has been highlighted by a number of scholars turning to leadership processes and practices, thereby drawing attention to the interactional and social aspects of the phenomenon. Such contributions mostly take process perspectives in which entities still play an important role. In this article, I therefore aim at contributing to leadership studies based on a process ontology by exploring one central aspect of leadership work, the production of direction, processually. I do so by building on geographer Massey’s conception of space, thus adding a spatial dimension that enables me to conceptualize direction as the development of an evolving relational configuration. In order to empirically explore such a conceptualization, two constructs are proposed: the construction of positions and the construction of issues. The reading of leadership work thus produced leads me to suggest ‘clearing for action’ as a means of conveying the spatio-temporal and constructive (reality constructing) character of leadership work.
John Austin introduced the formulation ‘performative utterance’ in his 1962 Book How to Do Things with Words. This term and the related concept of performativity have subsequently been interpreted in numerous ways by social scientists and philosophers such as Lyotard, Butler, Callon or Barad, leading to the coexistence of several foundational perspectives on performativity. This paper reviews and evaluates critically how organization and management theory (OMT) scholars have used these perspectives, and how the power of performativity has, or has not, stimulated new theory-building. In performing a historical and critical review of performativity in OMT, our analysis reveals the uses, abuses and under-uses of the concept by OMT scholars. It also reveals the lack of both organizational conceptualizations of performativity and analysis of how performativity is organized. Ultimately, our aim is to provoke a ‘performative turn’ in OMT by unleashing the power of the performativity concept to generate new and stronger organizational theories.
John Austin introduced the formulation ‘performative utterance’ in his 1962 book How
to Do Things with Words. This term and the related concept of performativity have
subsequently been interpreted in numerous ways by social scientists and philosophers
such as Lyotard, Butler, Callon and Barad, leading to the coexistence of several foundational
perspectives on performativity. This paper reviews and evaluates critically how
organization and management theory (OMT) scholars have used these perspectives,
and how the power of performativity has, or has not, stimulated new theory-building.
In performing a historical and critical review of performativity in OMT, the authors’
analysis reveals the uses, abuses and under-uses of the concept by OMT scholars. It
also reveals the lack of both organizational conceptualizations of performativity and
analysis of how performativity is organized. Ultimately, the authors’ aim is to provoke
a ‘performative turn’ in OMT by unleashing the power of the performativity concept
to generate new and stronger organizational theories.
'More' or 'better' leadership remains a popular panacea for business failure, climate change, educational underachievement and myriad other world problems. Yet there has been a growing concern that traditional approaches to the subject have naturalised oppressive power relationships, particularly in the workplace. Scholars have therefore put more stress on the creative contribution of 'followers' as co-creators of organisational reality. It is now normal to find calls for shared leadership, less leadership or no leadership. This article argues that even when couched in emancipatory terms, many of these perspectives still tend to diminish the contribution of organisational actors who do not occupy formal leadership roles. Communication and process theories of organisation are employed to suggest that leadership could be more usefully envisaged as those practices which see leaders occupying transitory roles within fluid social structures, in which there is no essence of leadership apart from the discursive constructions of organisational actors and in which the facilitation of disagreement and dissent holds the same importance as a traditional stress on the achievement of cohesion and agreement.
This paper reviews the literature on communication in organizations most relevant to the study of leadership. Although leadership communication research has a history of significant overlap with leadership psychology, the value commitments of a communicative orientation now find expression in a large body of extant literature that this paper reviews. These value commitments, which cross several theoretical paradigms, serve as the organizing framework for this paper. The paper concludes with a research agenda for future leadership communication research.
This article builds on Fairhurst and Connaughton’s proposals for future research agendas in leadership
studies by critically examining three key themes in the leadership literature: dichotomies,
dialectics, and dilemmas. The first section argues that mainstream leadership research frequently
relies on conceptual dichotomies which are often multiple, inter-related, and proliferating.
Critiques of dichotomization are suggestive of more dialectical forms of analysis and these are
discussed in the second section. Dialectical studies can surface important questions about organizational
power relations, paradoxes and contradictions that are typically under-explored within
mainstream leadership studies. The third section proposes an additional, future research theme for
critical perspectives, namely whether and if so why, how, and with what consequences leaders may
engage in discourses of denial regarding the dilemmas and tensions of organizational life. The article
concludes by arguing that re-framing leadership dichotomies as multiple, intersecting dialectics can
open up fresh lines of enquiry and generate important insights about the complex and situated
relations of power and identity that comprise leadership and followership dynamics.
Traditional approaches to organizational change have been dominated by assumptions privileging stability, routine, and order. As a result, organizational change has been reified and treated as exceptional rather than natural. In this paper, we set out to offer an account of organizational change on its own terms--to treat change as the normal condition of organizational life. The central question we address is as follows: What must organization(s) be like if change is constitutive of reality? Wishing to highlight the pervasiveness of change in organizations, we talk about organizational becoming. Change, we argue, is the reweaving of actors' webs of beliefs and habits of action to accommodate new experiences obtained through interactions. Insofar as this is an ongoing process, that is to the extent actors try to make sense of and act coherently in the world, change is inherent in human action, and organizations are sites of continuously evolving human action. In this view, organization is a secondary accomplishment, in a double sense. Firstly, organization is the attempt to order the intrinsic flux of human action, to channel it towards certain ends by generalizing and institutionalizing particular cognitive representations. Secondly, organization is a pattern that is constituted, shaped, and emerging from change. Organization aims at stemming change but, in the process of doing so, it is generated by it. These claims are illustrated by drawing on the work of several organizational ethnographers. The implications of this view for theory and practice are outlined.
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 article we offer a dynamic relational perspective in which frames and framing work together in the practice of leadership development. Mead’s (1932) notion of sociality is introduced as a way of engaging with movements within and between frames, where it is these framing movements that we argue hold the potentiality of emergent practice. The article responds to a growing interest in the delineation, conceptualization and practice of leadership as opposed to leader development, where we understand leadership development in terms of the creation of social capital, relational capacity and collaboration. However, there is little, if any, research into how these dimensions may be developed intentionally in practice. Using online forum data from an 18-month-long leadership development programme, we demonstrate three different sociality movements, which we have labelled kindling, stretching and spanning. Our analysis positions sociality at the core of leadership development interventions, and practice more generally.
This paper reviews the literature on forms of leadership that in one way or other imply plurality: that is, the combined influence of multiple leaders in specific organizational situations. We identify four streams of scholarship on plural leadership, each focusing on somewhat different phenomena and adopting different epistemological and methodological assumptions. Specifically, these streams focus on sharing leadership in teams, on pooling leadership at the top of organizations, on spreading leadership across boundaries over time, and on producing leadership through interaction. The streams of research vary according to their representations of plural leadership as structured or emergent and as mutual or coalitional. We note tensions between perspectives that advocate pluralizing leadership in settings of concentrated authority and those concerned with channeling the forms of plurality naturally found in diffuse power settings such as professional organizations or inter-organizational partnerships. It is suggested that future research might pay more attention to social network perspectives, to the dynamics of plural leadership, to the role of power, and to critical perspectives on leadership discourse.
Competency frameworks, models, instruments and thinking have long been ingrained and utilized in management and organizational life. Not surprisingly they have been transplanted both swiftly and seemingly easily into the leadership domain. While there certainly have been discomfort and critique from academic and practitioner sources, nothing has emerged strongly enough to date that would provide an alternative mode of framing and translating both leadership and leadership development in the different contexts that seek to make it visible. In this article, consequently, we submit leadership and its development to the `practice turn' to enable a radically different perspective from a competency orientated one. The ontology, epistemology and methodologies of practice are examined and translated to the leadership field. We argue that a focus on praxis, practitioner and practice offers both challenge and transformation to the ways that leadership is bounded and constrained by current organizational and managerial conventions.
This article explores leadership as a discursive phenomenon. It examines contemporary discourses of leadership and their complex inter-relations with gender and identity in the UK public sector. In particular, it focuses on various ways in which managers’ identities are constructed within discourse, produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies (Hall, 1996). Drawing from interviews with senior managers employed in a large UK local authority, this article researches the dominant discourses of modernization and the primacy afforded to discourses of leadership in the council. It explores first how these discourses become part of managerial workplace identities, and second, what other discourses help to shape managers’ identities. Contradiction, discursive production, plurality and ambiguity feature heavily in the analysis of these managers. Accordingly, the article questions dominant hegemonic and stereotypical notions of subjectivity that assume a simple, unitary identity and perpetuate androcentric depictions of organizational life.
Ethnography plays a partial role in organizational development in ways that call out for a kind of ‘‘tale of the field’’ that represents what Geertz calls a ‘‘blurred genre.’’ It is blurred by a mixture of ethnographic epistemology based on abductive logic and context/meaning questions, together with ideas from organizational intervention from work by such figures as Argyris, Schein and Stacey. This article defines and exemplifies the blend with two case studies from a state court and a cancer treatment center. The conclusion is that the tale, blurred genre though it is, is in fact clear and it works. The problem is that political and implementation issues typically block a trial run of the proposed solutions that it generates.
Mainstream leadership studies tend to privilege and separate leaders from followers. This article highlights the value of rethinking leadership as a set of dialectical relationships. Drawing on post-structuralist perspectives, this approach reconsiders the relations and practices of leaders and followers as mutually constituting and co-produced. It also highlights the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that typically characterize these shifting asymmetrical and interdependent leadership dynamics. Exploring three interrelated ‘dialectics’ (control/resistance, dissent/consent and men/women), the article raises a number of issues frequently neglected in the mainstream literature. It emphasizes that leaders exercise considerable power, that their control is often shifting, paradoxical and contradictory, that followers’ practices are frequently proactive, knowledgeable and oppositional, that gender crucially shapes control/resistance/consent dialectics and that leaders themselves may engage in workplace dissent. The article concludes that dialectical perspectives can provide new and innovative ways of understanding leadership.
Meetings are increasingly seen as sites where organizing and strategic change take place, but the role of specific discursive strategies and related linguistic-pragmatic and argumentative devices, employed by meeting chairs, is little understood. The purpose of this article is to address the range of behaviours of chairs in business organizations by comparing strategies employed by the same chief executive officer (CEO) in two key meeting genres: regular management team meetings and ‘away-days’. While drawing on research from organization studies on the role of leadership in meetings and studies of language in the workplace from (socio)linguistics and discourse studies, we abductively identified five salient discursive strategies which meeting chairs employ in driving decision making: (1) Bonding; (2) Encouraging; (3) Directing; (4) Modulating; and (5) Re/Committing. We investigate the leadership styles of the CEO in both meeting genres via a multi-level approach using empirical data drawn from meetings of a single management team in a multinational defence corporation. Our key findings are, first, that the chair of the meetings (and leading manager) influences the outcome of the meetings in both negative and positive ways, through the choice of discursive strategies. Second, it becomes apparent that the specific context and related meeting genre mediate participation and the ability of the chair to control interactions within the team. Third, a more hierarchical authoritarian or a more interpersonal egalitarian leadership style can be identified via specific combinations of these five discursive strategies. The article concludes that the egalitarian leadership style increases the likelihood of achieving a durable consensus. Several related avenues for research are outlined.
The notion of the performative—an utterance that accomplishes the act that it designates—was proposed by the philosopher J. L. Austin to describe a type of utterance neglected by philosophers. This article follows the vicissitudes of the con- cept in literary and cultural theory to show () why it appeared useful for literary theory and what happens when literature is construed as fundamentally performa- tive; () how it functions in theory and criticism associated with deconstruction, and () what role it plays in recent work in gender studies and queer theory, where Judith Butler has developed a performative theory of gender. The shifts in this concept pose questions about how to think about the constitutive force of language, the nature of discursive events, and literature as an act.
The study of practices has a long theoretical history and draws on a wide range of methods. This introductory essay sets the stage for the five articles presented in this Special Issue by explaining its background and providing one narrative of the theoretical background on which both its editors and the authors of its articles, in one way or another, draw and to which the latter make explicit or implicit reference.
Leadership can be viewed as a process dependent on the exercise of reciprocal influence between leaders and followers, in the context of a sometimes contested struggle for meaning, power, and resources. Communication, in all its multifaceted forms, is therefore at the heart of the leadership process. The exploration of this dynamic forms the crux of this Special Issue. We hope that it is a timely contribution to scholarship within the domains of both leadership and organizational communication. But we also entertain the hope that it is much more than this. The initial impulse to embark on this project was our realization that, like slightly distrustful strangers, the two fields of inquiry have kept largely apart. The articles in this special issue provides ground for some optimism that the traditionally isolated fields of leadership and communication may indeed have a bright and progenious future together. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper identifies a practice turn in current strategy research, treating strategy as something people do. However, it argues that this turn is incomplete in that researchers currently concentrate either on strategy activity at the intra-organizational level or on the aggregate effects of this activity at the extra-organizational level. The paper proposes a framework for strategy research that integrates these two levels based on the three concepts of strategy praxis, strategy practices and strategy practitioners. The paper develops implications of this framework for research, particularly with regard to the impact of strategy practices on strategy praxis, the creation and transfer of strategy practices and the making of strategy practitioners. The paper concludes by outlining the distinctive emphases of the practice perspective within the strategy discipline.
The Situated Organization explores recent research in organizational communication, emphasizing the organization as constructed in and emerging out of communication practices. Working from the tradition of the Montreal School in its approach, it focuses not only on how an organization's members understand the purposes of the organization through communication, but also on how they realize and recognize the organization itself as they work within it.
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Taking its lead from a growing literature dealing with the research methods employed in management and adjacent disciplines and from the editors’ goal of encouraging a diversity of methodological positions in the pages of Leadership, this article reports the findings of a content analysis of the research methods employed in empirical articles during the journal’s first five years of publication. Particularly in comparison with a comparable study of the North American journal, The Leadership Quarterly, the content analysis findings reveal a greater tendency to employ a qualitative than a quantitative research approach and for qualitative interviewing and the qualitative analysis of documents to be predominant methods of data collection. At the same time, the findings also reveal similarities with traditional journals in terms of the methods employed, such as a relatively low take up of mixed-methods research.
This article aims to extend contemporary work on relational leadership theory by conceptualizing leadership as embedded in the everyday relationally-responsive dialogical practices of leaders. Relational leadership requires a way of engaging with the world in which the leader holds herself/himself as always in relation with, and therefore morally accountable to others; recognizes the inherently polyphonic and heteroglossic nature of life; and engages in relational dialogue. This way of theorizing leadership also has practical implications in helping sensitize leaders to the importance of their relationships and to features of conversations and everyday mundane occurrences that can reveal new possibilities for morally-responsible leadership. We develop and illustrate the notion of relational leadership by drawing on the work of Bakhtin and Ricoeur, and on an empirical study of Federal Security Directors.
This article works out the main characteristics of `practice theory', a type of social theory which has been sketched by such authors as Bourdieu, Giddens, Taylor, late Foucault and others. Practice theory is presented as a conceptual alternative to other forms of social and cultural theory, above all to culturalist mentalism, textualism and intersubjectivism. The article shows how practice theory and the three other cultural-theoretical vocabularies differ in their localization of the social and in their conceptualization of the body, mind, things, knowledge, discourse, structure/process and the agent.
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.
'Practice' is a familiar term in everyday language but it also has a long history of scholarship. What then does it mean to 'turn' towards practice, and how would we know when a practice turn has occurred? To answer these questions, this article develops a theoretical view of practice as a transactional social process involving experience and action as mutually informing aspects of human conduct. This perspective is elaborated in detail by drawing on the ideas of the pragmatist philosophers, especially George Herbert Mead. In particular, it is asserted that 'transactionality' and 'temporality' when taken together, offer a theoretical perspective on practice that is dynamic, emergent and socially agentic. The utility of this pragmatist approach is illustrated using a published study of a strategizing episode. The article concludes that a practice turn is indeed underway in organization studies, but there is still some distance to travel before the full potential of this turn is realized.
In addition to leadership psychology, there is another journey to understand the context of leadership that takes as its starting point the linguistic turn in the social and the organizational sciences. Those impacted by the linguistic turn are broadly social constructionist, discursive, and more qualitative than mainstream leadership scholars. In varying degrees, these scholars view context as multi-layered, co-created, contestable, and locally achieved. This article explores a constellation of perspectives united by these themes, introduces the qualitative special issue articles, and suggests directions for future research on the context of leadership.
This article aims (1) to analytically disaggregate agency into its several component elements (though these are interrelated empirically), (2) to demonstrate the ways in which these agentic dimensions inter-penetrate with forms of structure, and (3) to point out the implications of such a conception of agency for empirical research. The authors conceptualize agency as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its "iterational" or habitual aspect) but also oriented toward the future (as a "projective" capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a "practical-evaluative" capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment).
In this article I describe and compare ct number of alternative generic strategies for the analysis of process data, looking at the consequences of these strategies for emerging theories. I evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the strategies in terms of their capacity to generate theory that is accurate, parsimonious, general, and useful and suggest that method and theory are inextricably intertwined, that multiple strategies are often advisable, and that no analysis strategy will produce theory without an uncodifiable creative leap, however small. Finally, I argue that there is room in the organizational research literature for more openness within the academic community toward a variety of forms of coupling between theory and data.
The present work develops ideas first presented in
Studies in Logical Theory. "All logical forms (with their characteristic properties) arise within the operation of inquiry and are concerned with control of inquiry so that it may yield warranted assertions." "Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole." After an introductory section, the three remaining parts of the treatise deal successively with the structure of inquiry and the construction of judgments, propositions and terms, and the logic of scientific method. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In a reprise of Lowe and Gardner's (2000) review of The Leadership Quarterly's (LQ) first decade as a premier outlet for scholarly leadership research, we review 353 articles published in LQ during its second decade. Multiple methods were employed to prepare this review, including: interviews with the journal's current Senior Editor and Associate Editors; an assessment of LQ's impact, reputation, and most cited articles through citation analyses; a content analysis of article type (theory, empirical, and methods), contributors (e.g., discipline, nationality, and institutional affiliation), theoretical foundations, research strategies, sample location/type, data collection methods, and analytical procedures; survey and follow-up focus groups conducted with LQ Editorial Review Board members; and qualitative analyses to assess the prevalent themes, contributions, and trends reflected in LQ during its second decade. Drawing from these sources, we describe anticipated directions for future research.