Revestimiento en Caliente

Throughout this section I have elaborated on many aspects of the practice turn in leadership studies. This section now examines the critical question of what actually is leadership. I make the argument that ‘leadership’ is in fact a signifier for social activity, which also indicates that leadership’s demarcation lines to other practical accomplishments (e.g. strategy) are blurred. Leadership, I suggest, is a variation of organising. At the same time, this calls for a means to delimit and distinguish leadership from other social phenomena in order to study it in a meaningful way. This section, therefore, concludes with a way to do so.

Accordingly, at its base, leadership is simply a practice. That is, leadership is a mundane practical accomplishment, performed by actors in organisations. I have also established that not only those we would conventionally call ‘leaders’ perform leadership but also any actor may do so in any situation (Crevani et al., 2010). In other words, any seemingly trivial act could be labelled ‘leadership’. This hardly helps narrowing down the phenomenon, and enables critics to contend that if supposedly everything is leadership, then nothing really is (Grint, 2010; Alvesson and Spicer, 2012). Leadership’s mystique suddenly evaporates, or, as even more sceptical scholars proclaim, perhaps leadership as a distinct theoretical construct does not exist to begin with (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003a, 2003b).

Indeed, is what we observe as mundane everyday doings really ‘leadership’, or perhaps rather, say, ‘strategy’? Alvesson (1996) as well as Alvesson and Sveningsson (2003b) in fact demonstrate that in prominent definitions (e.g. Yukl, 1989: 253) the term leadership may well be substituted with the term ‘strategy’ or ‘culture’, and it would still mean the same thing. This may be due to leadership being an elusive concept, with demarcation lines to other aspects of organising being fundamentally blurred (Kelly, 2008; Fairhurst and Grant, 2010; Carroll, 2015; Crevani and Endrissat, 2015; Sergi, 2015). As I argue in this section, a practice-based approach to leadership helps to draw out these demarcation lines.

An activity that is said to be leadership (e.g. setting direction) may also be part of strategy work and occur simultaneously. In this sense, as actors principally engage in multiple practices at the same time (Crevani and Endrissat, 2015), I suggest leadership to be a ‘meta-practice’ that is enacted while other practices are being accomplished at the same time (cf. Carroll, 2015; Crevani and Endrissat, 2015). Indeed, in empirical settings aspects of practices do not appear as a separate and abstract entity, such as leadership, but as a meaningful and unfolding totality (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011; Carroll, 2015). Bundles of practices are studied to understand processes of organising, which implies that categories such as ‘leadership’ or ‘strategy’ might actually collapse. These categories, as mundane doings, are not separate from but simply are variations of

organising (Crevani, 2015; Crevani and Endrissat, 2015). If we look at everyday practices, actors pursue certain activities, such as analysing quality issues, hosting meetings, launching new products, talking to customers, preparing sales pitches and so

forth. All these activities are not necessarily leadership per se, yet they may involve

coordinating, strategizing, learning, and leading.

Such line of thinking posits that there might not be a concrete phenomenon such as leadership to begin with (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003b). What Alvesson and Sveningsson propose, though, is not that leadership does not exist per se, merely that its existence is in discourse (see also Kelly, 2008; Fairhurst, 2009; Fairhurst and Grant, 2010). As I have insinuated throughout this chapter, leadership is a signifier for practical activity we encounter in situ (Alvesson, 1996; Drath, 2001; Alvesson and Sveningson, 2003a; Crevani et al., 2010; Alvesson and Spicer, 2012; Kelly, 2014). “Only thoughts, words, and actions that are recognized as leadership can constitute

leadership”, Drath (2001: 6, my italics) writes. It is thus “a matter of abstractive thinking and not a property of the underlying thing itself” (Wood, 2005: 1104). Leadership is a ‘surface effect’, one we “employ to give substantiality to our experience” (ibid.). Leadership, to put it another way, is a product of abstractive thinking of scholars and practitioners alike. Labelling mundane activities leadership is a heuristic means to understand what is going on in an empirical setting (Alvesson, 1996; Carroll, 2015). Maintaining blurred boundaries between concepts, therefore, is helpful for making a meaningful impact on theory and practice regarding the specific phenomenon studied (Crevani and Endrissat, 2015).

Capturing a phenomenon as elusive as leadership, however, is difficult (Kelly, 2008; Alvesson and Spicer, 2012; Carroll, 2015; Sergi, 2015). Nonetheless, in order to make a meaningful contribution, it is vital for empirical study of leadership to begin by deciding what leadership is and what it is not (Alvesson, 1996; Crevani et al., 2010; Carroll, 2015; Kempster et al., 2015; Ramsey, 2015). Although practice is indeed the unit of analysis for empirical inquiry, not all enactments of practice may materialise as leadership, suggesting that a mere focus on practice is not enough to anchor leadership as a variation of organising. Leadership, therefore, needs to be delimited and its diversity restricted (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003b).

In practice-based studies, however, this needs to be done with caution. A heuristic is required that remains open to the proposal that any activity by any actor possibly constitutes leadership (Crevani et al., 2010). Furthermore, if we are to take the

driven definition aspiring to once and for all define leadership (Alvesson, 1996). In ethnographic research tradition, the most popular means to study practice and hence LAP (see methodology chapter; Raelin, 2011a; Carroll, 2015; Cunliffe and Hibbert, 2015; Kempster et al., 2015; Kempster and Stuart, 2010), theory, in fact, plays a less prominent role (Van Maanen, 1988). Instead of a once and for all, valid over time and space definition, standardised meanings and general categories, local meanings are taken seriously so that data has the chance to ‘kick back’ (Alvesson, 1996; Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003b; Kelly, 2008; Fairhurst, 2009; Fairhurst and Grant, 2010; Alvesson and Spicer, 2012). With a ‘situational focus’, it is, in this sense, a move from “grand theory to local theory” (Alvesson, 1996: 473) in order to avoid the “artificial separation of theory and data” (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003b: 364). This is not to suggest being non-theoretical, merely that notions pertaining to local contexts take precedence (Alvesson, 1996). Nevertheless, there is a need for pragmatism (Crevani et al., 2010). Instead of outlining specific activities that arguably constitute leadership, it is more advisable to set out broad parameters as to how one understands leadership (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003b; Kempster et al., 2015; Sergi, 2015).

Whilst the literature is indeed fond of proposing certain categories of ‘leadership activities’ (e.g. Gronn, 2002; Raelin, 2003, 2014, 2015; Ramsey, 2015), I take a different route to account for the possibility that any activity may constitute leadership, but at the same time delimit the phenomenon. To do so, I focus on the idea that accomplishing practices has effects (see also Drath et al., 2008; Crevani et al., 2010). Indeed, as suggested earlier, leadership is a product of collective action. Based on the etymology of leadership (see Harper, 2015, referring to the activity ‘guiding’ and the notion of ‘shape’), Sergi considers “products that not only propel and drive the continuation of action, but specifically those (that) have directing, shaping, and/or ordering effects on the endeavours in which the actors are involved” (2015: 118).

Directing, shaping and ordering effects as described by Sergi (2015), hence, may not only drive the continuation of action, but also, more profoundly, may alter or change direction of the flow of action. In other words, I perceive leadership as a continuous social flow in which “it is the situated, moment by moment, construction of direction

that becomes interesting” (Crevani et al., 2010: 81, my italics). Indeed, leadership is about changing and setting courses of action (Smircich and Morgan, 1982; Grint,

2005b; Carroll and Simpson, 2012; Crevani, 2015; Crevani and Endrissat, 2015). Based on American pragmatist Herbert Mead, Simpson (2015) refers to this direction setting in terms of ‘turning points’, or ‘leadership moments’. These points or moments, she argues, “re-orient the flow of practice towards new, or at least different, directions. Without leadership, the flow of practice would continue unchanged” (Simpson, 2015: 170; Crevani et al., 2010). When studying leadership, therefore, we should concentrate on “moments that stimulate change or reinforce stability, the moments that make a difference (…) in organizing” (Ramsey, 2015: 216; Latour, 2005). Direction, however, need not mean ‘one direction’ in the sense of agreement – as leadership in its collective fashion may imply (see following section). On the contrary, the production of direction needs to consider debate and negotiation as well as diverging views and unresolved conflicts (Crevani et al., 2010; Küpers, 2013; Crevani, 2015).

In this thesis, therefore, I take the work of leadership to be about producing direction (Crevani, 2015), in terms of a course of action changed or actively reinforced; and about making a difference to organising (Ramsey, 2015), i.e. changing the ways practices are performed. In this way, a diversity of activities, emanating from a diversity of actors, may constitute leadership. At the same time, however, focusing on such ‘turning points’ is a means to delimit leadership and to differentiate it from other ordinary doings that, according to this perspective, do not constitute leadership. If practices are always enacted, and if leadership is a form of organising as I have argued, then merely some enactments of practice materialise as leadership – in the present case when direction has been produced.

Importantly, although producing direction is presented here as theory-driven construct, it should be noted that ‘direction setting’ appears as an omnipresent theme in my empirical analysis. My definition of the work of leadership, therefore, was developed from an interplay of my data and existing theory. This approach hence gives primacy to the meanings of leadership in the local context of the empirical setting of this study while taking seriously results of previous research (see Chapter 3; for a similar approach see Crevani, 2015). Moreover, advocating local instead of grand theory, the proposed conception of leadership to materialise in turning points is free of any normative statements about the activities by which they are produced – which, as

LAP literature. Instead, it reflects what Latour (2005) would call an ‘infra-language, also recommended by Nicolini’s (2009a) toolkit approach to studying practice, which strikes a balance between making a phenomenon empirically discernible yet leaving it meaningless enough for local meanings to transpire (cf. Alvesson, 1996).