Constructionist Leadership in the Global Relational Age

Abstract

Many people perceive mountains as powerful symbols of pristine wilderness and natural strength. But these perceptions belie the vulnerabilities of mountain environments: All over the world, expanding economic pressures are degrading mountain ecosystems, while confronting mountain peoples with increasing cultural assimilation, poverty, and political disempowerment. In this article, we trace the human response to the growing global agenda for change in relation to the world's precious mountain environments, beginning with the global regime formation associated with Chapter 13 of Agenda 21 at the 1992 Earth Summit and resulting in the construction of a new worldwide organization, the Mountain Forum. In particular, the study builds on the regime formation literature surrounding the three widely acknowledged leadership types-structural, entrepreneurial, and intellectual-and proposes constructionist leadership as a fourth complementary but missing leadership type. Through grounded theory analysis of this unique and successful global change organizing effort, propositions are developed about a kind of leadership that enables productive connections, at the deepest levels of belief and method, among paradigms or cultures of inquiry. Helping to expand our understanding of the organization dimensions of global change, this study concludes that the most challenging task in global regime formation and organization development is the bridging of diverse systems of intelligibility, allowing for establishment of a worldwide metaculture of knowing.

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