This paper develops the idea of caring leadership based on Heidegger's philosophy of care.From this perspective, caring leadership is grounded in the practices of 'leaping-in' and 'leaping-ahead' as modes of intervention in the affairs of the world and the efforts of others.This involves gauging and taking responsibility for the ramifications of intervention, balancing the urge for certainty of outcome and visibility of contribution with the desire to encourage and enable others. Our analysis suggests several twists to contemporary leadership debates. We argue that the popular models of transactional and transformational leadership are to be critiqued not for their over-reliance, but rather, their under-reliance on agency. This is a different kind of agency to that of heroic or charismatic models. It involves tolerance of complexity and ambivalence; a rich sense of temporal trajectory; concern for one's presence in the world; and crucially, the ability to resist the soothing normativity of 'best practice'. From this position, we argue that the problem with the growing scholarly interest in an ethic of care is that it provides too tempting a recipe to follow. In a Heideggerian view, caring leadership has little to do with compassion, kindness or niceness; it involves and requires a fundamental organization and leadership of self.
We share findings from empirical research into Kolb's experiential learning (EL) approach, using our reflections as teachers and data from our undergraduate management students.The EL experience emerges as a space where bodies, feelings and ideas move and develop in intimate relationship with one another. This is a space where teachers exercise authority over, and commitment to, the here-and-now, risking corporeal and intellectual exposure. We probe the concept of experience in EL, suggesting that teachers require a kind of 'experiential expertise' to draw both on embodied felt sense and on what one has done in one's own career to role-model the transformation of experience into knowledge, which is at the heart of Kolb's theory. We explore a blurring of experiential agency, and the tendency for students to appropriate the teacher's experience rather than dwell on or develop their own. For us, EL is more usefully seen as 'relationship-centred' than 'student-centred', and we contrast this relational focus with the way EL seems to have been popularised as antiinterventionist, a kind of educational 'laissez-faire'. Based on these reflections, we suggest powerful connections between phenomenology and theories of space as a way of conceptualising the complexities and richness of teaching and learning experiences. Key words:experiential learning; embodiment; phenomenology; space; feelings Page 2 THE CASE FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNINGIn the last few decades, experiential learning (EL) has become increasingly prevalent in management education at undergraduate, postgraduate and executive education levels (Kayes, 2002;Reynolds and Vince, 2007). Its popularity seems related to dissatisfaction with traditional information transfer approaches and a reaction against the 'banking model', where teachers make knowledge 'deposits' (Freire, 1982). Such methods are being supplemented and, in some cases, replaced by a range of more 'student-centred' approaches, one of which is EL (Kirschner et al., 2006). These encourage students to make their own sense of the content, and craft their own connections amongst the various concepts (Biggs, 1999;Säljö, 1979).We think the popularity of EL reflects something of a 'turn to experience' in a range of disciplines, including management studies (Cunliffe and Coupland, 2011;Sanders, 1982); management education (Yakhlef, 2010;Strati, 2007); phenomenological psychology (Langdridge, 2007;Smith et al., 2009); positive psychology (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990;Rathunde, 2001); and neuroscience (Gallagher and Brøsted Sørensen, 2006;Gallese, 2003). In their various ways, writers in these fields use the notion of experience as their core unit of analysis, whether subjective experience is investigated in its own right or linked to more objectively observable neurological or behavioural activity. For us, such a 'turn to experience' is beautifully crystallised in R.D. Laing's injunction to defend the 'unreal' against the 'real' (Laing, 1967): Taking experience seriously means honouring and valuing people's sub...
Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to look at how phenomenology can be used to explore the meaning and experience of organizational life. It argues that phenomenology provides more than just themes or leitmotifs for post hoc analysis of narrative data; in its basic formulation, phenomenology is a way of thinking -a method -which illuminates the embodied, subjective and inter-subjective qualities of the life-world. Design/methodology/approach -The paper follows Husserl's command to "go back to the things themselves" to access raw experience, asking ourselves, "what does experience mean phenomenologically?" We draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty to "flesh out" the embodied aspects of that phenomenological experience, outlining how the idea of a "field of presence" grounds our reflections in the here-and-now and gives our selfhood its coherence. Findings -The paper presents data on the diverse meanings of "experience" to suggest that phenomenological and organizational understandings can be differentiated in terms of both temporality and selfhood. The paper argues that these differentiations expose different ways of thinking about the world more generally, drawing on Husserl's philosophy of the "natural attitude" to propose that one of its derivations, an "organizational attitude", is obscuring our view of embodied experience. Practical implications -The paper provides practical guidelines for those interested in researching the embodied, experiential qualities of organizational life. These emphasize the need to suspend the "organizational attitude", modify how the authors position and explain the research, and attend to the interplay between the felt sense of the world and the words used to articulate it. Originality/value -The logic of the body helps the authors to work towards a more integrative, conciliatory epistemological position for qualitative organizational research. The paper uses a phenomenological view of embodiment -as both subjectively experienced and objectively presented to the world -to suggest that the body, particularly when it is sick, is giving us clues for how to conceptualize the life-world of work.
This article explores what it is like to be a ‘working carer’—that increasingly common category of employee who combines paid work with unpaid care.1 We draw on phenomenology for our initial motivation, epistemological assumptions and method of data analysis, and on critical sensemaking as a template for interpretation and theorization. In line with critical sensemaking, we see identity as a central feature of personhood, and we examine our participants’ identity work through the specific refractions of plausibility, context and agency. These highlight the inconsistencies and oscillations of identity work, and the ways in which it is influenced by competing discourses of the right kind of employee and the right kind of woman. We foreground the existential aspects of sensemaking, as participants struggle to come to terms with the impact of care on their own life-projects and search for meaning. This reflects our belief that experiential approaches to work-related issues have a vital part to play in a ‘turn to meaning’ in critical organizational research. Key implications for practitioners and campaigners are discussed, and policy makers urged to address the issue of working carer identification, recognition and support with greater sensitivity to the label’s psychological and existential implications.
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