The foregoing two episodes and accompanying analyses of leadership practice reveal a processual model of how leadership is produced (Day, Fleenor et al.2014, p. 70; Dinh et al.2014, p. 41; Langley, Smallman et al.2013). In this view, leadership emergesthrough
ongoing successions of material-discursive practice. This is a particular vantage point where what ‘leadership’is—is enacted. Langley et al. describe this as the:
[P]oint at which ‘process’ meets ‘practice’, since how the past is drawn upon and made relevant to the present is not an atomistic or random exercise but crucially depends on the social practices in which actors are embedded (2013, p. 5).
These notions of ‘practice’ and being ‘embedded’ are precisely what I am attempt- ing to foreground through my analytical emphasis of Barad’s material-discursive practice (2007, p. 178).
Simultaneously, by including computational objects as an actant in the analyses, I demonstrated how computational objects are intimately involved in the constitution and transmission of material-discursive practices that may subsequently be cited through fur- ther material-discursive practices as leadership practice. This intimate relationship with the computational object is demonstrated in the�rst episode where the entire engagement between Walt and Robert is materialised through their engagements with computational objects. That is, without these objects, they would not interact at all. I then show that prior to my research, members of the company refer to the material-discursive practices of pair programming and cite them as being associated with leadership through the�ve dimensions as depicted in�gure2.4on page32, thus materialising ‘leadership’.
The intimate relationship with computational objects is also demonstrated in the second episode where the computational object has been granted an authoritative role. Speci�cally, like a teacher or a manager, the computational object in the second episode evaluates work that has been submitted by humans and issues feedback to the group, sometimes resulting in direct commands to stop what they are doing and attend to a prob- lem that it has detected. In so doing, it plays a particularpositionas depicted in�gure2.4
on page32 in the organisational hierarchy. This accomplishment involves a subtle but crucial shift from the canonical relation of computational object as tool, where the user is the subject and the computational object is the object whose being is subordinated to the human (1927 / Heidegger1996, pp. 64-67). However, in the case I presented, the role is reversed; the computational object takes the role of subject, directing its command to its object, the human group. Such a state closely aligns with Haraway’s views of technology
andwith the argument I am putting forward here regarding leadership. Thus, leadership, or leading, in the contexts I have presented, can be described as a phenomenon where:
[S]ocial relationships get congealed into and taken for decontextualized things [...and where] social relationships include non-humans as well as humans as socially [...] active partners (1997, p. 8).
Haraway’s perspective not only highlights the observable decontextualisation of technology as a relation but, more importantly, accounts for the invisibility of leadership to members in its enactment. Haraway’s view also aligns with Barad’s argument that the phenomenon of consciousness arises out of particular material-discursive arrangements that include both bodiesandmachines. Here, Barad asserts that
‘[M]inds’ are themselves material phenomena that emerge through speci�c intra-actions. Phenomena are real material beings (2007, p. 361).
Thus, in Barad’s agential realism, phenomena and not ‘things’ are the primary on- tological elements,all of whicharise through particular arrangements of material-discursive
practice (ibid., p. 178). Here I suggest, following agential realism, that the phenomenon of ‘leadership’ can be viewed as operating just like any other phenomenon that materialises; it arises through particular arrangements of material-discursive apparatuses and practices. Elsewhere, Orlikowski and Scott (2008), Nyberg (2009), and Iedema (2007) have engaged with Barad’s agential realism in their respective IS and organisational research to underpin a similar perspective. Central to the position all these scholars take is the claim that:
Matter and meaning are not separate elements. They are inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter how energetic can tear them asunder. Even atoms, whose very name,ato�os(atomos), means ‘indivisible’ or ‘uncuttable’, can be broken apart. But matter and meaning cannot be dissociated, not by chemical processing, or centrifuge, or nuclear blast. Mattering is simultan- eously a matter of substance and signi�cance, most evidently perhaps when it is the nature of matter that is in question, when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities. Perhaps this is why contemporary physics makes the inescapable entangle- ment of matters of being, knowing, and doing, of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value, so tangible, so poignant (Barad2007, p. 3).
Consequently, even when matter is ‘torn’ apart, Barad argues, meanings are still produced—and indivisible from—subsequent material (re)con�gurations. My application of this construct is the claim that the ‘meaning’ of leadership cannot be decoupled from the particular material-discursive practices that produce it. This is precisely why a practice- based approach is crucial in studying such a phenomenon: to glimpse the materialisation of leadership as it happens.
Moreover, I take it that Barad’s use of term ‘apparatuses of bodily reproduction’ (ibid., p. 178) refers to arrangements of material bodies of any form. The implication here is that agency is not exclusive to humans but rather, like phenomena, constitutive of reality. Thus, from an agential realist perspective, that computational objects may possess the agency to lead is no surprise. What Barad is arguing here is that through the exploration of what might be considered the mundane, that understandings capable of shaking ‘the very foundations of Western epistemology’ (ibid., p. 97) can be undertaken. Indeed, one of the central points of agential realism is a recasting of agency where:
The primary ontological units are not ‘things’ but phenomena—dynamic to- pological recon�gurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations. And the primary semantic units are not ‘words’ but material-discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted. This dynamismisagency. Agency
is not an attribute but the ongoing recon�gurings of the world (2003, p. 818). Accordingly, when these ideas are di�racted (Barad2007, pp. 86-94; Nicolini and Roe2014) through the the empirics presented above, whether in the way keyboard control is managed or the ways humans and computational objects in�uence each other through various dimensions of leadership, what Barad’s agential realism helps grasp is the pro- cessual emergence of particular phenomena arising through material-discursive practice. These phenomena may be understood and attributed as a symbolic resource (Ailon-Souday and Kunda2003) and commonly called ‘leadership’ but remain enmeshed with the material- discursive practices that (re)produce them (Barad2007, p. 170).