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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Diffracting Collaborative Leadership: A Pragmatist Project

Diffracting Collaborative Leadership: A Pragmatist Project

Simpson, Barbara

Hardcover

Business GeneralManagement

ISBN10: 0192856022
ISBN13: 9780192856029
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Mar 19 2025
Pages: 194
Weight: 0.99
Height: 0.73 Width: 6.48 Depth: 9.31
Language: English
Leadership, as an area of research, seems to be a source of endless fascination. So much has been written about it, and yet the questions keep coming. It is almost as if we are asking the wrong questions.

In Diffracting Collaborative Leadership, Barbara Simpson takes a novel approach to tackling this problem, proposing that leadership in organizations may be understood as a complementary duality of 'leaders' and 'leading'. Whereas questions about 'leaders' are already well researched, the same cannot be said for the social processes of 'leading'. Familiar research methodologies, and the theories that inform them, seek to represent 'reality' as stable, or at least temporarily stabilized structures and entities, but as such, they are not well equipped to deal with the performative fluidities of 'leading'.

Grappling with the slipperiness of a world-on-the-move requires a serious commitment to ontologically processual research that can participate with the flow of lived experience. The author draws on Pragmatism as a systematic, ontologically processual philosophy, using it to diffract the experiences of the senior management team in an arts-based company. This analysis explores 'leading' as a creative, collaborative process of future-making that arises from uncertainties. Leadership then, is what we do when we don't know what to do.

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