Diffracting Collaborative Leadership: A Pragmatist Project

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.

About the Author

Barbara Simpson is Professor in Leadership and Organisation Dynamics at Strathclyde Business School. Her professional life began in New Zealand, where she worked as a physicist studying the fluid dynamics of geothermal systems. Now, decades later, having moved to Scotland to pursue an academic career in organization and management studies, her interest in dynamics, movement, and flow still endures, although her focus has shifted from the natural environment to the subtleties of social and organizational experience. In this, she is deeply informed by Pragmatist philosophy and its intersection with the processual ontology underpinning recent developments in posthuman scholarship.