Joe Raelin, Knowles Chair, D’Amore-McKim School of Business,
Northeastern University

SAP members may be interested in a new book, just out from Routledge, called Leadership-as-Practice:  Theory and Application.  It is edited by member, Joe Raelin, and features content and authors very familiar with SAP theory and practice.  Here’s what former SAP chair, Richard Whittington, had to say about it:

“This book collects powerful statements from notable scholars in the emergent Leadership-as-Practice field, and confirms it as a rich alternative to the under-socialised accounts of leadership that prevail so widely. Leadership-as-Practice: Theory and Application will be an essential reference point for researchers in this and related fields.”

This book develops a new paradigm in the field of leadership studies, referred to as the “leadership-as-practice” (L-A-P) movement. Its essence is its conception of leadership as occurring as a practice rather than residing in the traits or behaviours of particular individuals. A practice is a coordinative effort among participants who choose through their own rules to achieve a distinctive outcome. It also tends to encompass routines as well as problem-solving or coping skills, often tacit, that are shared by a community. Accordingly, leadership-as-practice is less about what one person thinks or does and more about what people may accomplish together. It is thus concerned with how leadership emerges and unfolds through day-to-day experience. The social and material contingencies impacting the leadership constellation – the people who are effecting leadership at any given time – do not reside outside of leadership but are very much embedded within it. To find leadership, then, we must look to the practice within which it is occurring.

The leadership-as-practice approach resonates with a number of closely related traditions, such as collective, shared, distributed, and relational leadership, that converge on leadership processes. These approaches share a line of inquiry that acknowledges leadership as a social phenomenon. The new focus opens up a plethora of research opportunities encouraging the study of social processes beyond influence, such as intersubjective agency, shared sense-making, dialogue, and co-construction of responsibilities.

More information can be found on Amazon or on the Routledge site here:

https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138924864

Please consider attending Joe and colleagues’ SAP symposium on Leadership-as-Practice at the upcoming Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Anaheim