Leadership Across Boundaries: A Passage to Aporia

Leadership Across Boundaries: A Passage to Aporia theorizes on leadership in an unprecedented manner by stepping outside of conventional leadership theory and importing into leadership studies the implications of certain innovations in the social sciences, such as pluralism, complexity theory, and the dialogical turn, to change the way scholars discuss and study leadership.Leadership Across Boundaries anchors theoretical passages that generate a new way of imagining what it means to lead and follow with concrete examples about Martin Luther, the Common Law, dialogue as a practice, a painting by Diego Velázquez, synchronized fireflies, and the strange career of Francis of Assisi. This book acknowledges the limitations of existing leadership research as being too leader-centric, simplistic, static, and in many cases oblivious to the power of images to shape our understanding. To rectify these limitations, Leadership Across Boundaries examines alternative images of leadership grounded in concrete examples that present leadership in an unprecedented light. The book includes a discussion of invigorating ideas of homeward leadership (looking backward), extra-ordinary leadership (going forward), and what will be defined as the perennial need for aikido politics.An interdisciplinary text, Leadership Across Boundaries: A Passage to Aporia will appeal not only to scholars, instructors, and students of leadership, but also to those in the many fields in which leadership theory applies, such as history, economics, sociology, archetypal psychology, the law, political philosophy, applied mathematics, and the martial arts.

About the Author

Nathan Harter is Professor of Leadership Studies at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Previously, he practiced law in Indiana and became a full professor at Purdue University in the Department of Organizational Leadership.