Diffracting Collaborative Leadership: A Pragmatist Project

Leadership, as an area of research, seems to be a source of endless fascination. So much has been written about it, and yet the questions keep coming. It is almost as if we are asking the wrong questions. In Diffracting Collaborative Leadership, Barbara Simpson takes a novel approach to tackling this problem, proposing that leadership in organizations may be understood as a complementary duality of 'leaders' and 'leading'. Whereas questions about 'leaders' are already well researched, the same cannot be said for the social processes of 'leading'. Familiar research methodologies, and the theories that inform them, seek to represent 'reality' as stable, or at least temporarily stabilized structures and entities, but as such, they are not well equipped to deal with the performative fluidities of 'leading'. Grappling with the slipperiness of a world-on-the-move requires a serious commitment to ontologically processual research that can participate with the flow of lived experience. The author draws on Pragmatism as a systematic, ontologically processual philosophy, using it to diffract the experiences of the senior management team in an arts-based company. This analysis explores 'leading' as a creative, collaborative process of future-making that arises from uncertainties. Leadership then, is what we do when we don't know what to do.

Table of Contents:
Authorial Note Prelude First Movement - Associating Second Movement - Experimenting Third Movement - Making Fourth Movement - Feeling Fifth Movement - Caring Coda References

About the Author :
Barbara Simpson is Professor in Leadership and Organisation Dynamics at Strathclyde Business School. Her professional life began in New Zealand, where she worked as a physicist studying the fluid dynamics of geothermal systems. Now, decades later, having moved to Scotland to pursue an academic career in organization and management studies, her interest in dynamics, movement, and flow still endures, although her focus has shifted from the natural environment to the subtleties of social and organizational experience. In this, she is deeply informed by Pragmatist philosophy and its intersection with the processual ontology underpinning recent developments in posthuman scholarship.

Review :
Influenced by a range of thinkers including John Dewey, Virginia Woolf, and Donna Haraway, Simpson's reconstruction of leadership as a 'collaborative process of in-flow-ence' is unique in a field which remains fixed on individual heroicism as the touchstone of effective leading. Not only is the book stretching conceptually, its form fosters a holographic experience of sense making, which like the theory of leadership it offers, emerges through uncertainty, asking 'what if', and play. Thank you, Professor Simpson for this dis-orienting and re-orienting take on leadership. Simpson's book promotes a leadership to come by putting to work philosophical concepts like pragmatism, immanence, and diffraction. Encouraging experimentation and new approaches to inquiry using those concepts, her convincing scholarship promises to disturb over-determined descriptions of the field and open it to new imaginaries for the new century. This book is a compelling and novel engagement with Pragmatist philosophy. It is grounded in the processual ontology of writers such as Jane Addams, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Mary Parker Follett, and in addition it draws inspiration from diverse disciplinary sources including physics, literature, and music. Professor Simpson's writing style is innovative and refreshing. Read this book with your students and colleagues, and you'll feel wiser when closing it on the last page. Barbara Simpson challenges the fundamental assumption that leadership is something that individual leaders do, while followers follow. Drawing on Pragmatist and process philosophy, music, and various strands of literature, she weaves a compelling argument that leading is movement, emerging in the ebbs and flows, the chords and discords, and the unexpectedness of life. Beautifully written around five movements, we are encouraged to rethink traditional approaches to leadership and engage with the much-needed idea of leading as future-making together.