Ontology is concerned with the nature of reality – what we take to be real (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). Until recently, there were two main ontological positions – a realist, or objectivist, ontology, which suggests that there is one reality and it exists independently of our mind and a relativist, or subjective, ontology, which suggests that reality is a
construction from within our own thoughts (Levers, 2013). The review of the literature (chapters 3 & 4) will show that what scholars take to be real is central to the paradigm shift in leadership studies, which has seen a split between entity and collectivistic leadership.
As will be suggested in chapters 3 and 4, the dominant discourse in leadership studies has viewed leadership through the lens of what one person does (Uhl-Bien, 2006). This view of leadership focuses on leadership as something that one person does, and on how their attributes and behaviours impact influence others. The assumption is that leadership resides in the individual, and is based on factors that already exist both within the individual and within the relationship that individual has with any ‘followers'. We could therefore argue – as scholars such as Uhl-Bien (2006) do – that scholars working within the entity perspective of leadership assume a realist ontology. This is supported by the
overwhelming use of quantitative, positivistic studies in leadership (Sweeney et al., 2019). Those who take a realist position suggest that there is an external world, independent of people’s minds (Pansiri, 2005) – as we will see in the literature review, this is the position taken by leadership scholars working from an entity perspective, who consider leaders as discrete entities working within organisational structures that they are distinct from.
Collectivistic scholars, on the other hand, have a very different conceptualisation of leadership (Alvesson & Sveningsson, 2012; Fairhurst & Uhl-Bien, 2012; Hosking, 2011; Uhl- Bien, 2006). They call for an expansion of the entity perspective that looks beyond the dyad of leader and follower and acknowledges that leadership can flow in any direction and that a working team can be a source of leadership. By focusing research activity away from the behaviours and attributes of the individual, scholars can begin to focus on the social processes by which “…leadership is constructed and constantly in the making” (Dachler & Hosking, 1995, p. 15). A relational perspective thus privileges the relationships in which leadership resides, and views leadership as a co-constructed event by social actors - it therefore aligns itself ontologically with a relativist position.
Relativist scholars consider that the way we understand the external social world is in a constant state of revision as social actors interact to create their own reality (Bryman, 2004). If we contrast this with the position taking by realists, we can see how relativist scholars would view leadership as residing within the co-constructions developed through the relationships of these social actors, who are engaged in a specific contextual
environment. So from this relativist perspective, the ontological position is that the social world cannot be understood from the perspective of the individual, and that there is no ‘real’ social world outside of the individual, other than the labels that are assigned to them for the purpose of sense making (Kivunja & Kuyini, 2017; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Morgan, 2007). Realities are multiple and complex and our research participants are located within an ever evolving environment that both impacts on them, and is impacted by them (Kivunja & Kuyini, 2017). So the difference between realist and relativism is that reality is out there and ready to be observed, or that reality is constructed through social interaction in a continuously evolving interplay between us, others and society (Bryman, 2008).
However, there is a third way to consider ontological questions about the nature of reality in leadership studies and that is from a pragmatist perspective. For the pragmatist, there is such a thing as reality, but it is a changeable matter and it changes with our actions and their consequences (Kivunja & Kuyini, 2017). With a potentially ever-changing reality, it becomes difficult to make distinctions between a reality that exists apart from our
understanding of it (realist) and a set of complex realities, constructed by our understanding of them (relativist). For pragmatists, then, these conceptions of a ‘real’ world are abstract and the nature of reality is essentially unknowable - they therefore chose to focus on human experience – on actions, and their consequences (Morgan, 2014a). One of the early
proponents of pragmatism was Pierce, who formulated the key idea that underpins it – “one’s conceptions of the effects of an object (that one is mentally constructing) is the whole of one’s conception of the object” (cited in Drath, McCauley, Palus, O’Connor, & McGuire, 2008, p. 636). In other words, the only thing that matters is the understanding you have of the constructed object – for pragmatists such as Pierce, truth is a normative
concept, it cannot be established once and for all (Pansiri, 2005). This is close to the influential work of Dewey, who sought to promote pragmatism throughout his career (see the edited works by Boydston and colleagues e.g. Boydston & Axetell, 2008; Boydston & Hook, 2008; Boydston & Murphy, 2008). Dewey suggested that the central question should be ‘what is the nature of human experience?’ (Morgan, 2014a). For Dewey, the human experience always involved a process of interpretation, and that interpretation can be habitual (for example, when we make every day, normal, decisions) or it can be a self- conscious process, which Dewey describes as inquiry (Morgan, 2014a). For Dewey then, the emphasis should be placed on the nature of human experiences. Dewey also stressed that these experiences cannot be separated from the context within which they take place – the
human experience is always social in nature (Boydston & Hook, 2008) and any process of inquiry is also social in nature (Morgan, 2014a).
So what thoughts do pragmatists such as Dewey give to ontology? The answer is little: if all knowledge is subjectively constructed, then how we know what we know - the true nature of the reality - doesn’t matter, because we can never move beyond our socially based constructions of it (Andrews, 2012; Morgan, 2014a). For example, a leading
proponent of pragmatism, Crotty (1998), suggests that ontological positioning doesn’t matter so long as you have a clear epistemological position – there is little point worrying about the existence of a ‘real world’ because it is outside of the human experience. Dewey calls the attempt to find a reality outside of ourselves a ‘spectator theory of knowledge’ (cited by Morgan, 2014b no page number). For pragmatists then, epistemological perspectives become much more important, as they focus their research on the
understanding of how we come to know what we know (Andrews, 2012; Crotty, 1998). In this study, I follow Crotty’s lead and take an agnostic approach to ontology – this study acknowledges the essential difficulties of understanding what leadership is and suggests it may be best described as an empty signifier. Leadership is an attribution by followers and the observed (Fairhurst, 2008) - it means something different to every person, and even their own interpretations will shift over time, or in different contexts. Due to the difficulties of understanding what leadership is, this study focuses instead on how
leadership happens, in order to try to gain an understanding of the social constructions that allow leadership to develop or emerge. This research also seeks to challenge the dominant discourse in leadership studies that leadership is something that one person ‘does’ – this then is consistent with adopting a pragmatic perspective, in which our understanding of
leadership is constructed, and it exists only because of interactions with others (Dachler & Hosking, 1995; Fairhurst & Grant, 2010; Kempster & Parry, 2011).
Consistent then with a collectivistic approach, grounded in a social constructionist perspective, the position taken in this study is that leadership is an influence process that is accomplished through relationships and resides in interactions. This pragmatic emphasis on the relational and on the study of the construction of the relationships between the leaders and the people they interact with through the relationship they construct together leads us to a discussion of epistemology.