Where’s the agency in leadership-as-practice?

Abstract

Leadership-as-practice is one of a number of emergent threads in the leadership literature that seek to de-center the individual "leader", turning the analytical gaze instead towards more contextualized, participatory, engaged, and relational understandings of leadership. This chapter sets about the task of unraveling "practice" to reveal what agency might mean in the context of leadership-as-practice. Dewey and Bentley critiqued selfaction as a primitive treatment of knowledge that pre-dates scientific thinking. In dramatic contrast with the representationalist, substantialist ontology common to Dewey and Bentley's definitions of selfaction and interaction, transaction puts process first. Questions about agency, and in particular about the nature and effects of selfaction is nowhere more evident than in the leadership literature. Leader-centerism, and its associated centering of agency, results in the public glorification and vilification of individual "leaders" as their stars are seen to wax and wane.

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