Whitehead and Bakhtin: A process conceptualization of leadership

Abstract

This paper develops an understanding of leadership beyond the common focus on an individual leader towards a more thoroughgoing process-relational conceptualization of leaderfulness. To do this, it argues that even contemporary positions within management and organization studies regarding process as allowing a focus on inter-actions rather than the analysis of self-standing actions miss-state the fundamental premises of process metaphysics. To overcome the limitations of the management and organisation studies canon in this regard, the paper uses the work of two process philosophers, Whitehead and Bakhtin, as well as other applied process thinkers such as the theologians Cobb and Griffin, process biologists and physicists such as Delafield-Butt and Phipps, and process sociologists such as Carolan and Halewood, versed in the original process metaphysical discourse, to rethink leadership as process. It applies an understanding or reciprocity and containment in the development of leaderful behaviour to a case study of NASA's 'Leadership Alchemy Programme', and concludes that leadership is better understood as emergent, even, transient, a spontaneous self-organizing activity, where (as with physical nature itself) no prior assumption regarding its existence need necessarily be made or prescribed at the start, but rather where it is internally generated as an inherent feature of organizational life. The individual leader is thus a lure for that leaderful experience that individual others, in the reality of their self-determination can choose to bring into their becoming. As a result, the paper concludes by arguing that change, as a manifestation of leadership in organizations, is no longer understood as externally imposed, but immanently produced.