Researching Leadership-As-Practice

<p>One current challenge of conducting research from the leadership-as-practice perspective is a practical one: how to capture and analyse the elusive practice of leadership within the web of mundane organising processes. Although a number of researchers have attempted to address the issue there is not yet a definitive ‘how to’ guide to making sense of the empirical manifestations of leadership practices. </p><p>The book responds directly to this challenge and offers a theoretical framework and practical guidance to capturing identifying and analysing evidence of leadership practice emergence; and provides implications of this approach for leadership academics and practitioners. The developed framework enables a method for understanding these leadership instances as they are enacted by individuals within and against the evolving activities of their day-to-day work. The framework is underpinned by cultural-historical activity theory and critical realism and it conceptualises leadership practice by placing agents’ actions and interactions within the context of their relationships objectives experiences material and non-material artefacts and wider organising processes and organisational structures; work that has not yet been undertaken in the field. It offers a strong theoretical foundation for further development of our understanding of leadership-as-practice providing a methodological guidance for undertaking leadership-as-practice research and enables a discussion on the variety of underlying processes and elements as they emerge from empirical observations. </p><p>It will be of value to researchers academics professionals and students in the fields of business and management with a particular interest in management theory organisational studies and leadership research.</p>