The Event’s the Thing: Brief Encounters With the Leaderful Moment

Abstract

This chapter is grounded in a radical reconceptualisation of leadership based on the process philosophy particularly of Alfred Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze. Rather than focusing primarily on the individual leader, or even the dyadic relationship between leaders and followers, the lens of process philosophy frames leadership as an unfolding, emergent process; a continuous coming into being. Conceptualising leadership from this perspective, we suggest, stretches the field of potential contributors to its realisation, particularly encouraging a richer appreciation of the role played by contextual aspects, such as history, culture or geographic situatedness. In promoting this view, it joins recent work by Collinson (2005), Grint (2005), Shotter (2005), Wood (2005) and Koivunen (2007), as well as supplementing and extending the work of others in organisation and communication theory (Graen and Scandura, 1987; Hosking, 1988; Dansereau, 1995; Barker, 2001; Gronn, 2002; Pearce and Conger, 2003; Fairhurst, 2005) who are forging theoretical in-roads into how a less individualistic and more process-oriented approach might offer distinctive insights into what is the paradigmatically limited and limiting field of ‘positive’ leadership approaches (Bryman, 1986; Dansereau, 1995).