Embodied inter-practices of leadership – Phenomenological perspectives on relational and responsive leading and following

Abstract

This paper offers phenomenological perspectives on leadership as an embodied material and relational practice. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of embodiment and practice, leadership is interpreted as an emergent process of the inter-practice of leading and following. For showing the enactment of this embodied inter-practicing as a creative one, improvisation is explored as an exemplary media. Finally, some practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives on embodied inter-practices of leadership will be outlined.

Keywords

Phenomenology Merleau-Ponty lived body embodiment practice

Introduction

Facing various shortcomings and limitations conventional discourses and practices of leadership require openings and extensions towards a more situational, relational and integral understanding of leading and following (Küpers and Weibler, 2008; Uhl-Bien, 2006; Wood, 2005). This paper shows that one way towards such orientation can be developed through ‘re-turning forward’ to the body and embodiment in relation to practicing leadership.

The prevailing marginalization and instrumentalized or objectified interpretation of the body in social, organizational and leadership theory and practice, call for re-considering an embodied perspective (Dale, 2001, 2005; Dale and Burrell, 2000; Hassard et al., 2000; Ladkin, 2008, 2010; Ropo and Parviainen, 2001; Springborn, 2011). Living bodies serve as tangible media through which various forms of leadership practices are negotiated, fractured, resisted or integrated. Bodily gestures and postures, facial mimic, tones of voice, and other forms of expression are part of an embodied practicing of leadership, which also include aesthetic sensibilities and competencies, as well as felt meanings (Hansen et al., 2007; Schroeder and Fillis, 2010).

The following proposes that a phenomenological approach can help to ‘re-member’ the nexus of body, embodiment and leadership (Ladkin, 2010) in life-worlds of organizations (Holt and Sandberg, 2011). This re-membering, allows not only a critique of reductionistic, disembodied orientations and investigations that prioritize instrumentally orientated action (Hancock, 2009). Rather, it also contributes to re-integrating material, bodily qualities and lived experiences for a re-embodied leadership as relational and emerging event. The advanced phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1995) provides an important entry-gate for approaching and interpreting bodily and embodied practices as well as the creative interplay of leading and following in situated everyday-life. This phenomenological focus on practice resonates and contributes to the re-turn towards body and embodiment within recent discourses on relational leadership and innovation or creativity (e.g. Marion, 2012; Rosing et al., 2011) as well as the practice-turn in organization, leadership and strategy research (e.g. Samra-Fredricks, 2003), especially the emergent ‘leadership-as-practice’ respectively ‘leaderful practice’ orientation (Raelin, 2011).

Furthermore, from a Merleau-Pontyian perspective, research itself can be interpreted as an embodied practice, in which leadership researchers are bodily involved in their context and produce insights or findings, which are then expressed in so called ‘bodies’ of texts. Thus, not only can Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy present good reasons for critiquing approaches of ‘objectified disembodiment’, it also provides the base for alternative re-embedment of corporeal dimensions into the creative practices of organizing, leading, following and researching.

First, a phenomenological, particularly a Merleau-Pontyian understanding of embodied practice will be presented. On this basis then, practices of leadership are interpreted as relational processes of an inter-practice or inter-practicing of leading and following as descriptive and prescriptive, pragmatic concepts. Improvisation will then be explored as an exemplary medium for the realization of an embodied, situational, responsive and creative inter-practice of leadership. Finally, some practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives on an embodied leadership and its inter-practices as well as its corporeal study will be outlined.

Phenomenological understanding of embodied practice

The contribution of phenomenology to an understanding of practice is based on its call to return to things and events themselves, and to their life-worldly situatedness and meanings. This turning towards the life-world is one to an antecedently given horizon for ‘all activities and possible praxis’ (Husserl, 1970: 142) as an embodied and situated nexus of experiences, intentions, responsivness and action. From a phenomenological perspective, practices of leadership take its situated ‘(inter-)place’ (Küpers, 2010) through experiential processes in organizational life-worlds (Sandberg and D’Alba, 2009), which provide the source and medium for meaning.

Phenomenologically, practices and practising are embodied and as such inter-involve various bodily modes of belonging, relationships and practical engagements. According to Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1995), our body is being in and towards the world of everyday-life, which makes practice ‘unfolding, fluid, ongoing, shifting, wholistic, and dynamic’ (Weick, 2003: 459).

Specifically, embodied practice is built upon a pre-reflective and ambiguous ‘ground’ of experiences as lived-through and expressed. From this viable perspective, the body and embodiment are not only functioning as a surface for inscriptions or discursive constructions, but are having an experiential depth and specificity (Leder, 1990). What renders Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment particularly important for an extended understanding of the practice of leadership is his critique of reductive empiristic realism, as well as rationalistic intellectualism. Both reduce live-worldly phenomena, perception and sensation either to the realm of matter or to that of ideas both failing to explain the expressive, creative sense. While empiricism regards perception as grounded in sensation; intellectualism sees it as a function of judgment. Behavioristic-empiristic and mentalistic-idealistic explanation fail to explain the situated body and its phenomenal field because they assume the body must be understood as either as passive object (corpus) or as subject as extension of the mind; instead of seeing it as constituted by both as a living body (‘Leib’). Correspondingly, Merleau-Ponty developed an understanding of bodily mediated practicing within an interwoven post-dichotomous, integrative nexus of ‘self-other-things’ situated in the living world (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 57).

Given that practice is first and foremost embodied and its practitioners are primarily corporeal beings, they both are part of the world and coextensive with it; constituting, but also constituted by it (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 453). Accordingly, the life-world is found meaningful mainly with respect to the ways in which concretely situated and engaged practitioners as ‘body-subjects’ perceive and act within it and which acts upon them (Crossley, 1996: 101; 2001, 2006). Their embodiment is neither a physical manifestation, nor is their body a physico-perceptual objectified ‘thing’ or physiological resourceful system to be measured (Akinola, 2010). Rather, being embodied implies that practitioners are dynamically incarnated in and mediated through situated experiences, living and interrogating perceptions, receptive affectedness, emotions and being-at-tuned in moods as well as cognitions and actions. Thus their involvement is mediated through various corporeal modalities like sensing, feeling, which are always already happening within dynamic materially, socio-culturally, historically, gendered, and technologically co-determined horizons as situated and impacting conditions and contexts. This multifold incarnation occurs while humans are being connected to themselves, others and their environments in an ongoing, foremost sensual and meaningful relation. Thus, the embodied practicing subjects as well as their socio-cultural embodiment are situated in a tactile, visual, olfactory or auditory way. Whatever these incarnated beings perceive, feel, think, intend or do, they are exposed to a synchronized field of interrelated senses and synaesthetic sensations (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 207). It is through embodied living, in the midst of being exposed and acting in a sensual world of touch, sight, smell, and sound that practitioners experience, practice and make sense of it (Küpers, 2013b). For example, the senses serve as embodied psychophysical medium for social synaesthetics and bioagentic tuning of somaticized experience of charisma (Freund, 2009).

In accordance with their sensory bodies and within their embodiment, practitioners cope with particular circumstances or act innovatively. For this reason, embodied practitioners ‘body-forth’, thus agentically projecting their possibilities into a world in which they are enmeshed. Within this embodied sphere a practitioner does not only feel ‘I think’, but also ‘I relate to’ or ‘I do’. In other words, the atmosphere within which practices are situated in are primarily what is ‘live through’ with an ‘operative intentionality’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: xviii, 165) as a bodily, pre-reflexive, concrete spatial motility.

The affective, active and moving body serves as a medium that is implicated in all experiencing and signifying. As the living and lived-body is constantly present, it is functioning as a perceptive and intentional organ, dispositioned as an ‘I can’ (Husserl, 2001: 50–51) that is the capacity to experience or to do certain things. Moreover, this propensity to reach out and relate via bodies precedes and conditions the possibility of the ‘I know’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 137, 173; Gherardi 2008, 2009a, 2009b). With this understanding of embodied-based practice, there is a close link between what is actually given and what is intended, and then causing situated responses.

This responsiveness refers to a specific answering practice (Waldenfels, 2007, 2008) within a responsive order (Gendlin, 1997). It implies that as a living body and being embodied practitioners respond to meaningful questions, problems or claims posed to them through the embodied ‘Other’, or specific material conditions and its embedding contexts. As a relational practice this responding is part of all sensing, sayings and doings that is of all embodied and communicative acting in particular also of leaders and followers. An enacted responsiveness is co-emerging in inter-related leadership and followership and creates a multidimensional space for thoughts, feelings, moods, conversations and agencies involved. For example, specific acts of responses by leaders may summon, evoke, invite, request, inspire, or provoke effects in the follower and vice versa. Taking claims or demands of the preceding, respective ‘Other’ as a starting point helps overcoming the one-sidedness of intentionalistic, rational choice, and normativistic conceptualizations, while opening towards a co-creation of embodied joint practices. Thus, practicing also of leader- and followership arises from direct and engaged participations in bodily experiences, acts and responses of living and organizing.

By considering dynamically interrelated dimensions, which are proceeding and grounding all theory of practice, a phenomenological approach contributes to an extended understanding of social practicing. Especially, it allows studying embodied practicing as joint, plural action and cooperation, processed through joint intentionalities and collective commitments and embeddeddness in a ‘We-Mode’ (Tuomela, 2007; Schmid, 2009) enacted as ‘We-can’ in shared situations. Within this situatedness, the living bodies inter-mediate responsively between internal and external, ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ as well as individual and collective dimension of meaningful and shared practices. This co-constituted body-mediated process coordinates the inter-relations between individual behavior, social relations and material dimensions, artifacts and institutions, particularly through language as communicative and expressive medium (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 197; Küpers, 2012).¹

Thus, practices can be seen as a function and emergent process of a vivid bodily subject and dynamic, material and social embodiments in which practitioners are inter-relationally enmeshed. The entwinement between practitioners and their intermediating embodied practicing allows considering multi-folded spheres of experiences and realities of leader- and followership practices in a fluid, reversible and integrative fashion (Küpers and Edwards, 2008).

Embodied practices and ‘bodies at work’ in follower- and leadership

Following the outlined phenomenological understanding of the nexus between embodiment and practice, human beings involved in leader- and followership can be interpreted as ‘body-subjects-in-action’, whose embodied experience connects them to their life-world in specific times, places and socio-cultural contexts. As such, embodied leaders and followers as practitioner are comported intentionally, movingly and responsively towards a socio-material and joint, co-created world, while their experiences open up to inexhaustible, but meaningful and creative possibilities.

Forms in which this embodied practices can be concretized in organizations and management respectively those that involve ‘bodies at work’ (Wolkowitz, 2006: 183). These practices involve working occupational bodies or performative work especially in relation to other bodies, respectively when the leader- and followership context becomes the body or a form of embodiment.

As much as disciplined and fit bodies seem to be central for leadership vitality in the workplace, a ‘militarized’ body may embody also forms of unfit fitness (Godfrey et al., 2012: 559). Furthermore, the tired bodies of leaders may cause ‘low vitality epidemic’ (Cannon, 2011) manifesting as fatigue, physical tensions and sufferings, including headaches, insomnia, weight issues, stress, illness and burnout, etc., having far-reaching psychological, social and organizational effects.

Full-bodied leadership practice (Sinclair, 2005: 387) can be interpreted as a kind of somatic work, which refers to a diverse range of sense-making experiences and practical activities (Vannini et al., 2012).

Accordingly, with their working bodies, leaders in their occupational milieu (Hockey and Allen-Collinson, 2009: 222) produce, interrupt, manage, reproduce, negotiate, and communicate somatic sensations and semantic sense. They do so to make them congruent with personal, interpersonal, and cultural notions and rules of moral, aesthetic or logical desirability and in relation to organizational circumstances enacts a corporeal sense-making or sensuous making of meaning (Waskul and Vanini, 2008).

Moreover, there exists a specific bodily leadership knowledge, which refers to a special type of tacit knowing, acquired through experience and social interaction over time (Ropo and Parviainen, 2001). In connection to followers, this implicit knowing as a kind of embodied cognition influences leaders’ sense-making and decision-making (Lord and Shondrick, 2011; O'Malley et al., 2009).

Bodily practices, which are manifesting as tone, breath, body alignment, energetic presence, attuning, embodied spacing, timing, etc., are used for enacting possibilities of co-ordination and collaboration in leadership. As Sauer (2005) has demonstrated in her study on a dramatic ensemble, sensory and emotional dimensions of the body and corresponding rhythms are co-constructing leadership. Iszatt-White (2009) explained how ‘valuing practices’ of leadership could be seen even as a kind of emotional labor. In addition, Longhurst (2001) showed how specific regulative body-regimes in organizations produce norms of impenetrability of bodily boundaries at work. Especially the business suit has a normalizing effect on the more fluid or squashy aspects of the body to render it more acceptable and normal, creating an image of the controlled and ﬁrm body. Also forms of impression management that try to evoke and cultivate affective dramas for and states in other use agency-oriented body-techniques (Crossley, 1995), and embodied emotions or aesthetics for specific forms of communication. The dramaturgical and performative body on display in appearance and symbolic management produces or is involved in expressive and impressive dynamics. These are embedded in ritualized social and cultural ways with ‘somantic rules’ and are including for example ornamenting, elastic elements like clothing, jewellery and other adornments, hairstyles, cosmetics, perfumes or scented aromas (Waskul and Vannini, 2013).

Furthermore, it is through their co-present co-performing bodies and a social embodiment that leaders and followers co-create a formation through which their joint practicing and its meanings emerge (Schatzki, 89; 2001: 3). This understanding corresponds to reviewed tenets of practice theory, which considers practice as ‘embodied materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understandings’ (Schatzki, 2001: 3). Practice for Schatzki is a ‘temporary unfolded and spatially dispersed nexus of doing and saying’ where the body and artifacts are sites of understanding (1996: 89). Expressive bodies not only signify biological or psychological states, but are central in the enactment of social and organizational and leadership life as ‘it is through the performance of bodily actions that the performance of other actors is constituted or effected’ (Schatzki, 1996: 44).

For example, participants, who are taking different roles and turns in business meetings are organized through embodied orientations and conducts as multimodal practices, displaying specific local expectations regarding rights and obligations to talk and to know (Markaki and Mondada, 2012). Additionally, the embodiment of group-identity and proto-typicality influence leadership effectiveness (van Knippenberg, 2011).

Therefore, practices of leadership are made up of a collection of embodied orientations, intentions, feelings, thoughts, and activities related to equipment and tools as well as shared socio-cultural milieus. The latter includes traditions, values, norms, procedures, and routines and agencies of collaborating, performing practitioners, who are realizing common practical purposes (Reckwitz, 2002).

In contrast to mere doing, practicing of leader- and followership refers to actual (micro-) activities within a situated sphere of embodied praxis as the interconnection and embeddings of coordinated intentions, responses, actions, actors and institutions, forming a Gestalt-like ‘held-togetherness’ and conduct of life.

But occupational and somatic particularities of followers for example in diversity-work can also use micro-political ‘strategies of embodiment’ as a form of resistance or co-optation, which involves forms of symbolism of racialized and gendered bodies and body work for example in the context of new public sector management (Swan and Fox, 2010).

Thus, a particular embodied practice of leader- and followership can take various forms, varying or morphing with changes in worldly situations and its structurations within specific, altering margins and horizons. For this reason, these practices are not singular and unitary, but multiple and contingent. Being implicated within various horizons, and processing ongoing corporeal differences (Weiss, 1999), embodied practices of leading and following are not closed, but are co-evolving towards preliminary results. As such they remain open, indeterminate and incomplete as well as mutually related to other practices and social embodiments.

Embodied inter-practice in Flesh of leadership

Similar to the conceptualization of practice-configurations in a radical process-orientation (Chia and MacKay, 2007), practices are not only a collection of purposeful activities of self-contained individual actors and material things. Rather, they are also trans-individual, social and systemic events of emergent be(com)ing and meaning-giving complexes. With its emotional dynamics and active responsiveness, this relational practicing resembles more an iterative, explorative way-finding and dwelling, then a planned navigation and building, thus dares for example to process strategies without design (Chia and Holt, 2006). Connected to this relational process perspective and following Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and ontology, practicing leadership can be interpreted as an ‘inter-practice’ (Küpers, 2011b).

Based on the post-dual ontology of ‘inter-being’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2003: 208) such radicalized relational orientation understands and describes inter-practice as an emerging event. Phenomenologically, this inter-practicing is always already co-constituted and influenced by embodied pre-subjective and pre-objective capacities of experiential processes within what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘Flesh’ (1995: 131, 248–251). This elemental mediating Flesh refers to an incorporated intertwining and reversibility of pre- and non-personal with personal and inter-personal dimensions (Küpers, 2014).

The ontological concept and carnal, polyvalent variegated metaphor of Flesh expresses and allows associations to the sensible, bodily commonality of beings and to the generative capacity of being as becoming.

As a dynamic medium, this Flesh inter-links the sentient and sensible body through which in- and outside, passivity and activity enmesh, while ‘permeating all interrelated, interwoven things’ (Cataldi, 1993: 60).

Even more, serving as common connective tissue and signifying a polymorphous, open systems, this Flesh ‘enables’ phenomena to appear in the first place. It processes multivalent, and an ambiguous meanings woven through all levels of experience, making possible all particular horizons and expressions. Not being a static totality or stasis or metaphysical identity, the relational Flesh is more a process of incomplete, difference-enabling being as ongoing explosion. As such it is tied to dehiscence as the manner in which the perceptual and meaningful horizons of practicing remain open, thus it is a ‘pregnancy of possibles (Weltmoeglichkeit)’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1995: 250).

In the social world of leader- and followership, Flesh manifests as an open-ended soma-significative entwinement and dialogical exchange moving in a wave-like flow between embodied leaders and followers, processing their shared We-can-Mode. The relational Flesh creates ‘in-between spaces’ (Bradbury and Lichtenstein, 2000) of inter-practicing, which include various interwoven, emerging processes and feedback-loops (Calori, 2002; Lukenchuk, 2006). Providing possibilities for an unfolding in-betweenness, Flesh serves as generous source (Diprose, 2002), enacted as a corporeal generosity of mutual recognition in organizational life-worlds (Hancock, 2008). Considering the elemental medium of a ‘Flesh of Leadership’ inter-practice allows understanding co-created and reversible roles of leading and following (Ladkin, 2010: 71–73; 182–183).

The concept of Flesh-mediated embodied inter-practice helps to reveal and interpret the relationship between being, feeling, knowing, doing, structuring and effectuating in and through action, both individually and collectively as they are implicated in leader- and followership. For example, Hindmarsh and Pilnick (2007) have demonstrated how the body and an inter-corporeal knowing and sharing constitutes an important resource for managing effective real-time coordination of emerging interdependent activities of operating teams. The power of material embodied presence of actors is shown in a case study by Hodgkinson and Wright (2002), who showed how much even the physical positioning of key actors in a meeting room can influence the development of practices of strategizing. For example, leaders skillfully manages not only her discourse at the workshop, but also the lay-out of the chairs and her own bodily positioning vis-à-vis the whiteboard in order to ensure her control of the episode.

Exploring inter-practices inquires into the interplay of entwined embodied materialities, subjectivities, and intersubjectivities of practices of leading and following with its multi-modal orchestration of bodies and material artifacts and discourses (Streeck et al., 2011).

Embedded within the complexities of human pragmatics, inter-practice covers both: experiential actions of bodily agents and institutionalized operations of leadership-systems as ‘incorporations’. In this way, an inter-practice of leadership considers more inclusively the corporeality of practice-based dimensions (Yakhlef, 2010). Embodied, responsive, performing practitioners and enacted inter-relational with their specific action-logics (Torbert et al., 2004), generate creative and innovative ways of leadership. For instance Küpers et al. showed in their empirical study (2012) how narrative inter-practices of strategizing are mediated by lived, embodied experiences in organizational life-worlds. For further exploring the creative inter-practice of leadership, the following discusses improvisation as one of its possible forms of enactment.

Improvisation as enactment of inter-practice in leadership

The relationship between improvisation and leadership has rarely been directly studied (Gagnon et al., 2012: 304). Often improvisational practice in organizations and leadership have been explored as an inventive competence and responsive, performing action, which takes place in a spontaneous and intuitive fashion under specific circumstances (Crossan, 1998), and discussed as oxymoron, paradox or a legitimate way of achievement (Leybourne, 2007; Cunha et al., 2003).

Newton (2004) demonstrated how practicing improvisation can be used to develop leadership skills. In a recent study, Gagnon et al. (2012) showed how improvisation can help the learning of an affiliative leadership, which is characterized by openness to multiple perspectives, trust and shared control. Learning that occurs in the midst of practice as a ‘concurrent by-product of practice’ is essential for the development of collaborative leadership (Raelin, 2006: 157). Especially, ‘being in the moment’, ‘whole listening’, and ‘focusing on the other’ are skills that can be taught through improvisation. Cunha and colleagues (2003) confirmed that leaders can create the conditions in which others can improvise (Cunha et al., 2003). For example, minimal social and task structures and convincing employees of the importance of the task, encourage individuals to improvise in turbulent environments.

Phenomenologically, improvising inter-practices are situated, provisional and emerging in relation to embodied, material and social flux of bodies and locally sensitive knowledge. Recent research confirmed the role of improvisational skills and embodied intuitive processes in situated practice for example in cases of nursing, financial trading and scientific practice (Styhre, 2011) and project-management (Thomas et al., 2012).

Individual or social occurrences of improvised inter-practicing in real-time are always embedded within specific materially, structurally, and culturally embodied milieus’. As improvising agents, leaders and followers are informed, constrained, and possibly also co-determined by the bodily, socio-cultural and institutional conditions and their performative nexus (Pinnington et al., 2003). As an ingenious inter-practice, improvisation involves constant perception organizing as well as dis- and re-organizing, while moving between material, subjective and interpersonal realms.

Relationally, improvisation not only moves between active and passive modes and helps to adapt to complex outer environments, but also allows expression of inner complexity (Montuori, 2003). Metaphorically, improvisation can be characterized as a dance between the exterior and interior, often occurring as skilled, ‘improvised in-situ-coping’ (Chia, 2004: 33) a practical coping that involves an absorbed intentionality of the body (Chia and Holt, 2006: 648). Specifically, improvising needs to be seen in relation to habits, respectively de- and rehabitualizing (Küpers, 2011c). Although based on and dynamically related to bodily memory and habits, improvisation happens ex-temporaneously outside the normal flow of time that is un-predictable and with little known cause or causal relationships. In this sense, improvising does not belong to a regular chronology in a linear sequence of events, but processes an authentic temporality (Ciborra, 1999). Improvisations are or can trigger an affective and ecstatic experience of an interruption. This ruptive experience is characterized by a sense of immediacy, suddenness, transgression of pre-determined plans, thus re-forming dis-positions, which in turn pre-dispose to act or respond in particular ways. For example, Lanzara (2009) showed how the disrupting introduction of new media in a bureaucratized professional setting triggered an perception-based coping and affective migration of practitioners to a different medium usage to perform their work, which uncovered unknown dimensions of practice and sense-making. As an unsettling, albeit situational process, improvisation is ‘embody(ing) different senses of persons in different situations’ (Machin and Carrithers, 1996: 345). Thus, it can be highly contingent upon emerging circumstances and its interpretation in which intentional design and realizing action take place simultaneously (Weick, 1998). Converging intention, design and execution, improvisation co-creates an ongoing embodied, inter-practice as it unfolds, thus being responsive in real time (Crossan and Sorrenti, 1997). Embodied improvising agents like individuals, teams (Vera and Crossan, 2005) or entire organizations (Miner et al., 2001), develop and realize their improvisatory practices while being open, responding to situated questions, problems or opportunities on the spur of the moment. This openly responsive quality provokes the improvisers to deal or cope with surprise for example in form of improvisational choreography in tele-service-work (Whalen et al., 2002).

The embodied, irruptive, and responsive character of improvising implies that it defies measurement and objectifying approaches and methods. For that reason, the subversive power of embodied improvisation can be found in its quality of challenging the prevailing objectivist and cognitive or rational paradigm, which still governs many organizational and leadership practices and its theorizing.

Improvisational activities in embodied inter-practices occur as given, contested and emergent. As such, they are not a harmonious, fluid or free way of acting. On the contrary, they entail paradoxes, dilemmas and conflicting needs and interests of those bodily involved. At the same time, they are also a source for reflecting ways of dealing with these tensions (Blackler and Reagan, 2009), for example serving as a means to reconcile and negotiating basic conflicts such as those between flexibility and structure (Kamoche and Cunha, 2001).

Using and making sense of something in improvisation is a full-bodied, sensory project that demands an enlivened sensory, vibrant state of readiness for alternatives. As an interstitial practice, improvising allows spaces and times for surprise and discovery, without eliminating choice. Moreover, practitioners can make swift and resolute choices, while engaging also socially in bricolages of material, mental, social and cultural resources (Duymedjian and Rüling, 2010; Nicolini et al., 2003: 27).

Additionally, improvisation can be regarded as a significant contributor to organizational and management learning through the mobilization of embodied tacit knowledge, for example in relation to emergent strategies (Bergh and Lim, 2008). While being related to other practices, inter-organizational dynamics and distributed agencies (Garud and Karnøe, 2003), improvisations are instances of embodied practice-making and practice-changing. Therefore, they are formations of what could be called ‘re-evolutionary’ (dis-)organizing and trans-+-formational leading as be(com)ing (Küpers, 2011a, 2011c).

Practical, political and theoretical implications

With its experiential, dynamic and provisional status, the described forms and transformational qualities of embodied inter-practice of leadership defy control and elude manageability. Given that these relational and creative practices do not exist as a given, stable, fixed entity, they cannot be simply organized or manipulated. Instead of being designed directly, inter-practices can only be designed for, that is, allowed and encouraged. Part of this challenge is to prepare and offer supportive conditions and relationships that engender targeted facilitations or circumstances on a situation-specific basis (Küpers, 2009), by which embodied inter-practices of leadership-moments can flourish. Particularly, improvisation, as a disciplined craft of enacted inter-practice, requires situationally applied orientations and skills that can be learned through continual practice (Crossan et al., 1996: 25), as ‘…improvisation has no existence outside of its practice’ (Bailey, 1992: x). Following a phenomenology of surprise (Depraz, 2010), and approaches towards learning to be surprised (Jordan, 2010) improvisational practices can be pre-prepared by cultivating an attentional openness, an attending with and to the body (Csordas, 1993). An attitude of expecting to be surprised brings out the stratified rhythmic of affective emotions that subtends it and allows the emergences of difference and newness. The paradoxical capacity of expecting surprise – understood as an active receptivity for the unpredictable – are part of a phenomenology of birth and event (Dastur, 2000) and which contributes to openness towards indeterminate futures. As practice is a protensive temporalization, the future is always already present and is actualized in the immediate present (Adkin, 2011). Therefore imagining the embodied practitioner in their improvisational modes experience the forthcoming with a quasi-bodily anticipation, specifically of ‘what is to be done’. This can also be connected to learning through visual inquiry in leadership development (Latham and Soosan, 2011). To practice improvisation and to ‘rehearse spontaneity’ (Mirvis, 1998) individually or in communities of improvisation (Machin and Carrithers, 1996) requires fostering settings such as the cultivation of creative habits (Tharp, 2003) or team-training for improvisational action (Vera, 2002).

Basically, the capacity for innovation and learning in leadership for developing responsive inter-practices depends on the ability of leadership to nurture ‘between-times’ and ‘between-places’ (Berthoin Antal, 2006) for the co-creation of value in different constellations. Regarding inter-practices as an integral nexus prompts the avoidance of falling into the fallacy of an individualist actionistic heroism or collective action-driven orientation which both could have suboptimal or even dysfunctional effects (Bruch and Ghoshal, 2002). Alongside this, the reductionism of a short-sighted ‘practicalism’ needs to be problematized as technocratic or managerial ideology. As an outcome-fixation and utilitarian course collapses practical instrumentalism with practicality, it looses access to emergent, indeterminable qualities and possible meanings. Moreover, the absorption by instrumentalistic preoccupations can lead to pre-conceiving all phenomena as intrinsically meaningless ressources, which impoverishes and undermines the creative engagement and the potential for ethical and aesthetic dimensions for leadership. In the same vein, and for countering the danger of falling into a practicalistic ‘over-doing’, it will be important to explore the experiences and practices of ‘Doing Nothing’, understood as infraordinary ‘non-events’ (Ehn and Loefgren, 2010: 5). These often subversive, embodied events and acts may manifest in occurrences such as waiting or day-dreaming which are powerful undercurrents of daily life in organizations.

Furthermore, instead of assessing success according to degrees of conformity to existing plans, the possibilities for active deviations without evaluating them as symptoms of failure are required (Orlikowski and Hofman, 1997: 20). To realize embodied, creative inter-practices, leaders and followers as improvisers, require access to available material, financial as well as affective, emotional, cognitive and social resources (Cunha et al., 1999). All of these resources and facilitating conditions are closely related to political implications.

Political implications

By enacting facilitations for inter-practices of leadership implies to recognize that these are not value-free or politically neutral processes. While inter-practicing leadership aspires contributing to the flourishing of interrelated embodied human persons, communities, and systems, such undertaking raises questions of values, morals, and ethics respectively ethical bodies (Al-Saji, 2006) and linking embodiment and the socio-ethico-political as social Flesh (Beasley and Bacchi, 2007). Consequently, appropriate attention needs to be paid to underlying principles and purposes as well as being as transparent as possible about the strategic and moral choices that are made. However, providing reliable guides to the question ‘useful for what?’ is rather complex because it raises critical issues such as: Who defines what is wanted, for whom and within what temporal horizon? How can potentials and actualities of inter-practices of leadership integrated into broader organizational and even societal circumstances?

Furthermore, some practices of leadership may become entrenched among others as more dominant, in that way that some become ‘more equal than others’ and end up anchoring nets of activities (Swidler, 2001). Critically, an inter-practical approach requires analyzing the ways in which political practices in leadership are exercised. This analysis can help to understand how power or control is achieved and maintained as well as what forms of practicing are excluded or superimposed. In particular, such critical stance can reveal how specific embodied experiences, meanings and practices of leaders’ and followers’ are discriminated, marginalized, degraded and ignored, dominated or subordinated. Thus, a critical approach towards inter-practice can be used for studying the ordering and normalizing effects of disciplinary techniques and encumbering processes of forced or imposed practices on individual and collective levels. For example, investigating the bodies of managers, Harding (2002) showed how they embody the desired aesthetic of organizational control and how they produce and are consumed by the organization, while rendered invisible or seen as something to be mastered.

Bodily practices constitute an important means by which the norms, values and beliefs associated with a particular culture are enacted, and proficiency of a cultural member is demonstrated. The lived experience of bodies and their intersection with norms and power can be seen as a potential site for resistance to power (Ball, 2005). The body is thus involved in both the construction of societal influences on identity and the psychic experience of them.

Consequently, bodily performances have the potential to subvert particular hegemonic norms, which impact constructions of self and identity among women managers. With regard to the politics of identity, Kenny and Bell (2011) discussed the problems involved in representing the successful managerial body, especially women’s embodied experiences of managerial cultures. In addition, Haynes (2008, 2011) showed the significance of a ‘professional body image’ as part of professional identity formation in which gendered ‘physical capital’ is implicated in processes of socialization, subordination and control.

Improvisational inter-practice in leadership not only refers to purposive actions, but also to non-purposive, non-rational and especially silence(d) practices in organizational life. Phenomenologically, it is important to explore what is not practised or not said, including un-noted actions or actors and all kinds of omissions. This implies those phenomena that are strategically unthinkable, supposedly un-doable or tabooed for example in decision-making (Carter et al., 2007: 94).

Moreover, tactics and micro-political processes in relation to the everyday-of-living (de Certeau, 1984) can be studied as an employment of a creative intelligence and practice of governance. Through these tactics, embodied occupants of work-environments or resisting groups, subvert all-pervasive pressures to re-assert and re-appropriate a sphere of autonomous action and self-determination. By applying varied perspectives on embodied inter-practices and their interconnections, researchers are better equipped to shed light on tensions and conflicts that come along with lived practices by exposing seemingly incompatible demands and disparities as complementary and by demonstrating that apparently opposing interests are actually interwoven.

Another critical political concern relates to the danger of possible retro-regressive orientation. While there seems to be an increasing need for reviving forms of experiential practices of embodiment, there exists the threat of falling prey to a pre-modern longing for ‘unity’ and retro-romantic fallacies or irrational sentimentalities. As understandable as such yearning for returning to a pre-reflective union for the disembodied, alienated, rational modern and fragmented, relativizing consciousness appears, there is no way back to a uniting-regressive coincidence with nature or supposed pre-existing truths. Rather, what is required is an adequate and integral orientation and practice of transformation, which follows a co-creative way forward or cyclic, spiraling movements with a reflective somatic consciousness (Shusterman, 2005), and its practical enactment through embodied agency of a transformative politics (Coole, 2005, 2007: 175).

Theoretical and methodological implications

Methodologically, phenomenology allows phenomena of organizing and leading to show themselves in their fullness, hidden dimensions and complexity, that is, how they arise as experiences and realities in rich, often unstructured, and multidimensional ways. In that a phenomenological approach and style of study arises through direct involvement and firsthand, grounded contact with a given phenomenon, it can be called ‘radical empirical’. Compared to the second-hand constructions of positivist science – for example, a priori theory and concepts, hypotheses, predetermined methodological procedures, statistical measures of correlation and causality – phenomenology retains a sensibility and awareness for how organizing and leading appear processually and structurally. Following an extended method of suspension or bracketing, a phenomenologist investigating leadership attempts to meet phenomena closer as they appear in as unprejudiced a way as possible. The distancing supplied by this bracketing is of particular disclosing value as a heuristic device to reveal and interpret the genuine inter-practicing processes of leadership with its non-cognitive constituencies and meanings involved. The results of this phenomenological methodology are revealing descriptions and understandings as well as moments of deeper clarity in which inter-practices can be seen in a fresh and more adequate way. Supplementing to what psychological, behavioral, cultural or constructionist investigations offer, a phenomenological approach contributes to enriched interpretations of relational dimensions and meanings involved in embodied inter-practices of entwined leading and following. With regard to avoiding a reifying and entitative approach, instead of labeling boxes, phenomenological approaches toward inter-practice emphasis the arrows, the actional dynamic relationships and performances that create effects and ‘outcomes’ (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011: 1247). In terms of language, a focus on inter-practices invites the use of more doing-words and gerunds for expressing processual acting and signifying how practices of leadeship are in the making, always becoming and evolving while providing life-enriching and imaginative potentials (Carlsen, 2006). For example, research on improvisation related to leadership as embodied and creative performances in an immersion-in-activity (Hyland, 1984) can be explored, by which imagination and inter-practicing are mediated and unfold. Approaching improvisation methodologically as an inter-practice supports the development of a multilevel theory that explores improvisational processes at different levels and links them to each other in a business context (Vera and Crossan, 2005: 221).

Phenomenology can bring researchers in closer touch with life-worldly practicing of leadership and its dynamic interactions (Crevani et al., 2010: 84), while ascertains the heterogeneous dimensions involved. As differentiated reminders of the leadership life-world’s multifaceted dimensionalities, a phenomenology of embodied inter-practicing is likely to serve as a helpful antidote to reductionist or reifying approaches or one-sided analytical-rational methods. Particularly the post-Cartesian Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology and relational ontology contributes to the radically reflexive reworking of subject-object distinctions with their knowledge problematics (Cunliffe, 2011).

To further analyze the body and embodiment in leadership research needs to become a more multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary endeavor, opening up for using approaches and findings from other disciplines like social sciences and humanities, but also natural sciences. For example, recent advances in the field of neuroscience are used to extend the understanding of leadership and its development, specifically related to inspirational leadership (Waldman et al., 2011). Taking research itself as a form of inter-practice, cross-disciplinary bridging helps to show the significance of bodily affection and various embodied processes involved in inter-practices of leading and following.

Exploring the embodiment of inter-practiced leadership, requires an integral epistemology and methodological pluralism need to take first-, second- and third-person perspectives in singular or plural forms with each of their specific, inherent methodologies or modes of inquiries as well as their complex interplay (Küpers and Weibler, 2008).

Overall, carnal leadership studies embrace a more sensorial and fleshly stance in relation to bodies of all its members and the mediating embodiment at work as part of organizational every-day worlds. Developing such embodied leadership research, requires shifting from a theorizing about or of bodies, in a disembodied, objectifying or subjectifying way, towards a mode of inquiry that is sensing and making sense while thinking from and with lived bodies and processual embodiment. Such orientation calls for more sensual methodologies and art-based research practices (Knowles and Cole, 2008; Warren, 2008) and ‘scholARTistry’ (Knowles et al., 2007). For example, collecting and analyzing embodied, sensuous appearances by integrating videography into research methodologies helps to study and (re-)present bodily senses (Merchant, 2011; Park Lala and Kinsella, 2011).

Conclusion

This paper discussed the significance of a phenomenology of embodied practice and practicing of leadership in organization. Following the phenomenological ‘re-turn’ to practice and to the body, specific interconnected embodied dimensions of practice have been explored. The paper has opened up possibilities for a more integral and processual understanding of an ‘inter-practice’ of leading and following. Moreover, conceptualizing of ‘inter-practice(ing)’ contributes not only to reconceive the embodied base of leadership practices. Rather, this also allows conceiving new ways of approaching how responsive and creative, improvisational practicing co-evolves within a multidimensional nexus of organizations.

If practices of leadership are shaped by bodily processes and an embodied responsiveness, then inquiries into practice that fail to take them into account, may miss not only significant aspects, but also how practices are happening in and through the very in-between of leading and following. The potential of a situated bodily action-research explores actual, ongoing practice as one that is shared by both practitioners and researchers in their different roles as inter-practitioners (Shotter, 2010: 281).

However, a critical reflection concerning various difficulties, limitations and problems involved in realizing embodied inter-practices, needs to consider the danger of an escapist orienation. Returning to an embodied practice requires being aware of not falling prey to the aforementioned pre-modern longing for unity and retro-romantic fallacies. A historiographically and culturally informed account of embodiment prevents falling into a kind of neo-sensualism or neo-sensationalism, but links the embodied sensorium of practice to contemporary forms of sense-making, for example in cyberspace, with its tele-presences and multi-media applications (Jütte, 2005: 324). Facing the complexities of current leadership practices, it remains important to recognize that not all what is involved in them can be understood properly by bodily or embodied processes alone.

Nevertheless, putting into practice an embodied inter-practice of leadership opens up important possibilities for future practices and studies about embodied ‘hows’ of leading and following. On the one hand, such an approach helps to critique disembodied and non-creative practices in which individual and collective bodies and embodiments are neglected, merely seen as constructed or rendered only as instrumentalized objects for an utilitarian exploitative ‘practicalism’. Such a reductionistic approach blocks the enfoldment of creative potentials of inter-practices and improvisational experimentalism in leadership. On the other hand, focusing on inter-practices may contribute to the emergence and realization of alternative, ingenious and more suitable forms of practicing leadership. This becomes even more relevant as leadership is placed in increasingly complex often paradoxical or dilemmatic individual and collective organizational settings. Furthermore, actualizing an embodied practice of leadership may facilitate a more relational, co-creative understanding of leader- and followership (Küpers and Weibler, 2008) and cultivating practical well-being and practical wisdom in organizations (Küpers, 2005, 2007) especially as professional artistry (Küpers, 2013a). Wisdom principles can be used for evaluating leadership (McKenna et al., 2009) contributing for next steps towards a post-paradigmatic phronetic, ‘real’ social science (Flyvbjerg, 2001; Flyvbjerg et al., 2012) and corresponding embodied wise inter-practices.

It is hoped that the phenomenological interpretation offered here provides possibilities to re-assess and revive the relevance of bodily processes and embodied realities of inter-practice in and through leadership. Re-membering and re-searching the living experience and dynamic intricacies of bodily inter-practicing and a more responsive embodied leadership is a challenging endeavor. But this undertaking is a timely and worthwhile one, as it contributes to much-needed, more integrally transformative, hence sustainable practices in the current interdependent worlds of leadership and organization. Moreover, enacting such an embodied inter-practicing in organizational life-worlds may mediate the incarnation and unfoldment of ‘alter-native’ that is ‘other-birthly’ economic, political, societal and ethical relationships and realities to become.

Footnotes

Note

Author biography

Wendelin M Küpers, at present, is working as an Associate Professor at the School of Management, Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. Combining phenomenological and cross-disciplinary research, he uses an relational and integral approach for exploring various phenomena and practices in organizations and leadership. In his current investigations and teachings he focuses on embodied, emotional and creative, respectively aesthetic dimensions in relation to more responsible, and hence sustainable forms of organizing and managing. He is also editing a book-serial on the significance of practical wisdom in organization and leadership.

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