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We introduce aesthetic leadership as a promising approach in leadership studies. Two current movements in leadership research, the inclusion of followers in leadership models and the exploration of subjective leadership qualities, make taking an aesthetic perspective in leadership especially attractive and timely. Aesthetics relates to felt meaning generated from sensory perceptions, and involves subjective, tacit knowledge rooted in feeling and emotion. We believe the aesthetics of leadership is an important, but little understood, aspect of organizational life. For example, while we know followers must attribute leadership qualities such as charisma and authenticity to leaders to allow for social influence, we know little about how these processes operate. We propose that followers use their aesthetic senses in making these assessments. We relate aesthetic leadership to several current topics in leadership research, and outline the assumptions and methods of aesthetic leadership.

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This paper analyses how material places and leadership are related to each other. We do that by exploring the question: How do spaces and places construct and perform leadership? The notion that material places can lead relies on three concepts of leadership. First, we make a distinction between the leader and leadership. Second, we join the growing number of scholars who view leadership as socially constructed, emerging and as meaning making. Third, we consider leadership as an aesthetic, embodied phenomenon and as sensuous experience. Embodiment of leadership refers here to social, relational constructionism as ontology of leadership and to aesthetic epistemology that legitimizes sense-based data such as emotions, bodily sensations, intuitions and mental representations as a basis for knowledge development. To understand the relationship between leadership and material place, we elaborate on the epistemology of embodied experience. We discuss embodied ways of knowing and point out specific aspects of embodied experience with examples from the art field. Our chapter contributes to the understanding the material nature of leadership by conceptualizing the notion of embodiment as an epistemological issue.

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