S Kelly

Leadership: A categorical mistake?

As growing numbers of scholars become disaffected by the research traditions laid down by leadership psychology, there is a steady turn towards treating leadership as a discursive phenomenon. In response, leadership researchers are increasingly adopting interpretive and observational methods in the search for the practices of leadership in everyday life. This article suggests that while there are many advantages to an interest in discourse and action, there are also many subtle difficulties in making leadership observable and knowable in the field. Taking Louis Pondys notion of leadership as a language-game as its starting point, this article argues that leadership studies as a discipline suffers from a persistent category mistake; a category mistake that some recent interpretive studies of leadership reveal, but inadvertently reproduce in the search for leaderships essential character. Instead, this article takes Pondys thesis to its logical conclusion and outlines a programme of research that confronts this category mistake, whilst demonstrating the potential for, and limitations of, treating leadership as a language-game.

Leadership Refrains: Patterns of Leadership

This article considers issues of leadership and leadership development by reflecting on the notion of the refrain as pattern. Drawing on our research of leadership within UK further education (FE) we examine how tracing ‘patterns of leadership’ can provide an insight into the practical accomplishment of leadership in FE as everyday ‘ordinary’ work. In an era of increased change and uncertainty about the character of leadership within the sector, we use our ethnographic data and interdisciplinary backgrounds to consider leadership development as essentially a design problem through adopting and adapting the notion of patterns that emerge in the architectural work of Christopher Alexander and the organizational studies of Tom Erickson. In doing so we point to the comforting effect of both the refrain and the pattern to repeat, return, renew, react, refine, reconstruct and resolve. We conclude by suggesting some of the ways in which the documenting and describing of such patterns of leadership can be used as ‘teachable moments’ for the design and deployment of programmes of leadership development and training.