Leadership-as-Practice: Theory and Application

by Joseph A. Raelin (Editor)

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.

Genres: Leadership

310 pages, Paperback

First published January 27, 2016

About the author

JOE RAELIN is an internationally-recognized scholar in the fields of collective leadership, learning, and practice. Besides serving as the Asa S. Knowles Chair Emeritus at Northeastern University, he has held distinguished international visiting professorships in South Africa and the UK and is currently Visiting Professor of LUT University in Finland. He was formerly Professor of Management at Boston College and received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Joe is a prominent inventor of new practices in leadership and management studies, to wit, his development of a new paradigm of collective leadership via what he refers to as “leaderful practice,” on the emerging movement in leadership known as “leadership-as-practice,” as well as the field of work-based learning.
He is also a prolific writer with 11 books and over 200 articles as well as a management consultant with the firm, The Leaderful Consultancy.

His current book is: The Best of "Is it Leaderful?" It is a Kindle ebook available on Amazon.

Among his prior books on Amazon are:
Creating Leaderful Organizations: How to Bring Out Leadership in Everyone (Berrett-Koehler, 2003)

Work-Based Learning: Bridging Knowledge and Action in the Workplace (Jossey-Bass, 2008)

The Leaderful Fieldbook: Strategies and Activities for Developing Leadership in Everyone (Nicholas-Brealey, 2010)

Leadership-as-Practice: Theory and Application (Routledge, 2016)

Reviews

[Rachel Reynolds · Rating 4 out of 5]

The text is sometimes a bit dense, but Raelin's collected essays on the concept of Leadership as Practice provided new insights into the latest research around shared leadership and viewing the role of the leader as something other than a figurehead. A good text for the insightful academic.

[Paul Cruickshank · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dated language, not an accessible read - had to read for Uni