Tough at the Top

The grounding of leadership theories in the
practical doing of day-to-day leadership work is a
vital, though often neglected, aspect of leadership
research. This missing what (Button, 1993) of
leadership the routine, day-to-day practices that
constitute its doing is the essence of the
ethnomethodological approach taken in this book.
With its emphasis on making visible the
everyday, taken-for-granted practices of leadership
work it offers the reader a unique adequacy
(Garfinkel,1967) in the practices of the study
setting and explicates the accomplishment of
leadership work from within . Based on extended
shadowing of college leaders, the book thus seeks to
present a detailed understanding of the practical
accomplishment of leadership work in the often
neglected learning and skills sector. This book will
be of interest to leadership practitioners who find
the generalisation and abstraction of more
theoretical approaches unrecognisable in relation to
their own need to do leadership better , as well as
to students and academics in the field who wish to
draw on its rich resource of situated detail in
support of theory development.

Autorentext

Dr Marian Iszatt-White is a Teaching Fellow at Lancaster University Management School. Her main area of research is Leadership, and she teaches in Leadership, Organisational Behaviour, & Organisational Coaching. She previously spent 15 years working in financial risk management, latterly as Group Treasurer of Top-100 plc Enterprise Oil.

Klappentext

The grounding of leadership theories in the practical doing of day-to-day leadership work is a vital, though often neglected, aspect of leadership research. This 'missing what' (Button, 1993) of leadership - the routine, day-to-day practices that constitute its doing - is the essence of the ethnomethodological approach taken in this book. With its emphasis on making visible the everyday, taken-for-granted practices of leadership work it offers the reader a 'unique adequacy' (Garfinkel,1967) in the practices of the study setting and explicates the accomplishment of leadership work 'from within'. Based on extended shadowing of college leaders, the book thus seeks to present a detailed understanding of the practical accomplishment of leadership work in the often neglected learning and skills sector. This book will be of interest to leadership practitioners who find the generalisation and abstraction of more theoretical approaches unrecognisable in relation to their own need to 'do leadership better', as well as to students and academics in the field who wish to draw on its rich resource of situated detail in support of theory development.