In this paper a new role for managers is advocated to create conditions for genuine collaborative engagement in Twenty-First Century organizations. The new role is as a facilitator of emancipatory dialogue, a discourse among parties that can lead to mutual learning, deep understanding and...

We hear much about the “democratic ideal” as if it were unreachable within the walls of the organization. Of late, apologists have begun suggesting that there is no need to worry; democracy exists; it’s just that it is often hidden from view right within the requisite hierarchical...

In this chapter, I hope to first locate action learning within the range of prevailing “action modalities” in management development that conceive of practice as having its own epistemology. They all more or less emphasize the value of concurrent reflection on experience to expand and create...

The most vexing problem in the management of salaried professionals is how to provide them with their espoused right of autonomy while ensuring adequate control of the organization. In this article, Joseph Raelin explains how a standard approach of granting professionals operational autonomy...

This article is intended as a conceptual and practical foundation for those who wish to conduct research in the area of leadership-as-practice. Rather than offer a single methodology for studying how social and leadership activity is carried out in everyday life, it details a pluralistic set of...

This article constitutes an interview between a new researcher of the field of Leadership-as-Practice (L-A-P), Jenny Robinson, with one of the co-creators of the field, Joe Raelin. It is dedicated to providing an update and refinement of leadership-as-practice “practice theory,” which has...

What makes a leader the most? This author argues that it is a compassionate approach, a "leaderful practice" that exhibits humility and seeks to serve others rather than power for its own sake. As a result, people learn to count on others because they have learned that each member, even the...

The quest to find definitive answers about leadership has proved elusive. Leadership defies a single definition - it changes with the situation and with shifting expectations and demands. It changes in everyday practice. This raises important questions for leadership development and for the...

This paper seeks to find complementarities and make contributions to the field of organization development (OD) from the new field of leadership-as-practice (L-A-P), and in so doing, enhance the development of OD in practice. Rather than looking for leadership in people, especially in their...