Spacing leadership as an embodied and performative process

Ropo, Arja; Salovaara, Perttu

doi:10.1177/1742715018768707

Cited by 31 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…The ball is then passed around to give members of the team the "floor" to contribute to the project. The koosh ball at that point becomes an object that in its own right occupies active leadership space (Ropo and Salovaara, 2018;Antonacopoulou and Fuller, 2019). Sergi (2016) has attested that textual objects in particular are apt at conveying a high degree of detail when working through a project.…”

Section: Materialitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a methodology for studying leadership-as-practice

Raelin

2019

Leadership

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This article is intended as a conceptual and practical foundation for those who wish to conduct research in the area of leadership-as-practice. Rather than offer a single methodology for studying how social and leadership activity is carried out in everyday life, it details a pluralistic set of methods and presents a series of theoretical guidelines through its phenomenological form of inquiry. In particular, it endorses discursive, narrative, ethnographic, aesthetic, and multimodal methods to attempt to capture concurrent, collective, and dialogical social practices. After providing an overview of praxis-oriented research as the methodological basis of leadership-as-practice, the article turns to the conceptual building blocks that can provide some guidance in selecting an appropriate methodology for study. These building blocks incorporate issues of agency, identity, materiality, context, power, and dialogue. The author hopes that researchers will take up the challenge of examining leadership dynamics “from within” to co-participate in working with actors engaged in projects of significance advance their mutual endeavors.

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Section: Materialitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a methodology for studying leadership-as-practice

Raelin

2019

Leadership

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“…The significance of materiality for understanding organisational control is also pointed out by Dale (2005: 655), according to whom 'it is the social-and-material embodied actor who enacts social control'. In a more recent work, Ropo and Salovaara (2018) propose a sociomaterial approach to leadership, focusing on the relationship between the human and the material as embodied spatial engagement;, their understanding of space as performative and active is directly relevant to the position we take in this paper.…”

Section: Leadership As Embodied Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Get me the airway there’: Negotiating leadership in obstetric emergencies

Mesinioti¹,

Angouri

O’Brien

et al. 2019

Discourse & Communication

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The article discusses leadership enactment in medical emergencies. We draw on video recordings of simulated obstetric emergencies and investigate how senior clinicians ‘do being’ the leader discursively in the spatiomaterial context of the emergency room. We take an interactional analysis approach, combining conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics and look specifically into the ways in which professional roles do interactional control using directives and questions in the material space of the obstetric room. We discuss this interactional performance in relation to the clinical performance of the teams. Our analysis shows that leadership in medical emergencies is multimodally achieved; professionals draw on discursive strategies, the affordances of material space, body and gaze orientation, which build on each other and converge in indexing leadership. Our findings highlight the situated nature of negotiating responsibility, illustrating that leadership in our context is claimed, projected and resisted discursively. We provide a typology of the functions of questions in the emergency encounter, and close the article by foregrounding the implications of our study and providing directions for further research.

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“…Hawkins (2015) acknowledged the lack of "thing-ness" in leadership research and studied various material aspects of leadership in the British Royal Navy shore establishment. Ropo et al (2013;2015) and Ropo and Salovaara (2018) have undertaken a stream of research to study how physical spaces shape and construct leadership in workplace settings.…”

Section: Leadership In Human-materials Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, leadership is considered to occur, not only in relations between people, but also in human-material relations (Hawkins, 2015;Ropo and Salovaara, 2018;Ropo et al, 2013). The increasing materiality in organisations-such as IT-technology, infrastructure, office space, and documents-has been shown to affect organising and leadership (Carlile et al, 2013;Oborn et al, 2013;Orlikowski and Scott, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online company blogs as narrations of plural leadership

Ropo

Mäkinen

Seppä

2019

JOCM

Self Cite

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how companies that characterise their leadership style as plural, shared or distributed narrate their actions and practices in online blog texts. Design/methodology/approach The data consist of online blog texts published by seven Finnish IT companies. The analytical strategy draws on both thematic and structural approach to narrative analysis. The blog texts were analysed thematically to uncover different aspects of plural leadership. The analysis revealed a narrative pattern consisting of three categories that explain why and how companies implemented plural leadership. Findings The first category in the narrative pattern describes the motivation for engaging in plural leadership. The second category explains how the companies broke down existing hierarchies in order to create new flexible work roles. The third category describes how the organisations sought to create a communal culture and a strong sense of trust using symbols, material objects and spaces. Research limitations/implications The study contributes to leadership research that emphasises post-heroic leadership conceptualisations. The narrative pattern provides future empirical studies a framework for analysing plural leadership practices in different organisational settings. Whereas this study sheds light on the ways in which organisations and their leadership practices can be investigated using online data, traditional organisational ethnographies can make a further contribution to this line of research. Practical implications Implementing plural leadership in organisations can lead to informal power plays. Attention should be paid on to how plural leadership evolves in flat hierarchies and promotes community building. Originality/value Company webpages have rich information on how companies operate and perceive themselves. They provide yet another window for observing organisational activities. This study makes a novel contribution to how plural leadership is practiced and conceptualised in online blog texts.

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Spacing leadership as an embodied and performative process

Cited by 31 publications

References 90 publications

Toward a methodology for studying leadership-as-practice

Toward a methodology for studying leadership-as-practice

‘Get me the airway there’: Negotiating leadership in obstetric emergencies

Online company blogs as narrations of plural leadership

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