A new transformational leadership: A Meadian framework for a new way forward

Abstract

The most prominent theory in leadership studies is transformational leadership. Ironically, however, scholars who subscribe to transformational leadership have left the concept of transformation itself, unexamined and lying dormant in the background. In response to this neglect, I propose a Meadian framework of leadership that is centered on the nature of transformation in both leaders and leadership trans-actions. I present a framework that is Meadian, and not exclusively from Mead, by integrating contemporary scholarship from a range of disciplines that corroborate and complement Mead’s work and provides transformational leadership scholars a new way forward. I use Mead’s I/Me distinction to answer who transformational leaders are in their embodied social selves and Mead’s role-taking notion in the social act to answer what transformational leaders do in relation with followers. In doing so, I provide leadership scholars a “third way” between dichotomous conceptions of singularly influential leaders on the one hand and leaderless leadership processes on the other.

Keywords

Leadership transformation Mead role-taking selves sociality process

Since its introduction more than 30 years ago, transformational leadership (TL) has maintained its position as the most prominent leadership framework, evident by its lasting influence in both research and practice (Dinh et al., 2014). Somewhat paradoxically, however, leadership scholars have left the concept of transformation itself, explicit in the theory’s name and central to its core tenets, largely unexamined. This is particularly ironic given that what distinguishes TL from previous and subsequent theories is its focus on the impact that leaders have in transforming followers beyond the expectations of themselves and their organization (Rafferty and Griffin, 2004). In a review of the state of leadership theories, Avolio et al. (2009: 428) summarized TL’s emphasis on:

symbolic leader behavior; visionary, inspirational messages; emotional feelings; ideological and moral values; individualized attention; and intellectual stimulation saying that ‘such leaders raise followers’ aspirations and activate their higher-order values (e.g., altruism) such that followers identify with the leader and his or her mission/vision, feel better about their work, and then work to perform beyond simple transactions and base expectations.

Of all of the leadership theories, none is more aspirational and explicit in centering the role of influential individuals in the transformation of their followers than TL.

But TL theory has largely failed to deliver on its promises. The findings from TL scholars have mostly focused on the psychological characteristics of transformational leaders (e.g. traits and behaviors) and some of the effects they may have on followers (e.g. job satisfaction, self-efficacy, motivation and job performance) but have not provided a theoretical foundation for, or conceptual boundaries around, the nature of transformation itself. And as several recent critiques of the theory point out, TL theory often falls prey to conflating the ends of leadership, with the means—thus contributing to a process—or transformation—less framework (Banks et al., 2016, 2017; Eberly et al., 2013; Van Knippenberg and Sitkin, 2013). Avolio et al. (2009) acknowledge this in their review of the theory by saying:

generally speaking, few have paid any attention to the underlying psychological processes, mechanisms, and conditions through which charismatic and transformational leaders motivate followers to higher levels of motivation and performance (Kark and Van Dijk, 2007).

Van Knippenberg and Sitkin (2013) offer the most thorough critique on these grounds by arguing that TL does not meet the scientific criterion of clear conceptual boundaries, means of falsifiability, and an explanatory model that does not conflate leadership causes with its effects—what they call the fatal flaw of the theory. In their “creative destruction” of the theory, they say, “in short, we have been forced to conclude that admittedly provocative advice to the field is necessary: namely, that the concept of charismatic–TL be dropped from scientific inquiry” (p. 45).

I depart from these critiques, however, not because TL theory lacks a robust explanatory model of leader effects on followers, but instead, because the theory is largely transformation-less in demonstrating how leaders enact profound changes in followers becoming more, and other, than themselves. Tsoukas and Chia’s (2000: 568) critique of organizational studies’ inability to account for how change and becoming is “actually accomplished”, on-the-ground and over time, holds for TL theory as well. We may be able to point to some ways leaders move followers from point A to point B post facto, but we know almost nothing about the transformational process “in the middle”. The evidence we do have from TL is reflective of the psychologism endemic to the theory, which assumes static actors with stable traits and behaviors. Thus, the kinds of influential changes in TL are incremental in nature where selves are left intact and unchanged through leadership interactions. But how do we account for deep transformations where individuals develop new desires, values, beliefs, aesthetics, morals, and practices that are wholly other than they have previously known or experienced—and what is the role of influential leaders in that process? As it stands, TL theory is not equipped to answer such questions given its empirical starting place of stable and static persons and organizations. In short, TL is not transformational enough.

This is especially unfortunate given that the progenitors and strongest proponents of TL have emphasized the aspirational elements of the theory—like, liberation, ethics, transcendence, justice, and inspiration—in motivating followers to adopt higher-order values and create healthier organizations (Bass, 1985; Burns, 1978; Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999). As Bass and Steidlmeier (1999: 211) say:

authentic transformational leaders, as moral agents, expand the domain of effective freedom, the horizon of conscience and the scope for altruistic intention. Their actions aim toward noble ends, legitimate means, and fair consequences. Engaged as they are in the moral uplifting of their followers, in the sharing of mutually rewarding visions of success, and in enabling and empowering them to convert the visions into realities…

The originators of the theory should be praised for their aspirational focus on the role that human beings have in transforming one another to new, and greater, states of being—even if they ignore the dark sides of those of transformational possibilities (Collinson, 2012; Price, 2003; Tourish, 2013). Furthermore, just because TL has failed to deliver on its promise, does not mean we should abandon its promise altogether. Even Van Knippenberg and Sitkin (2013), in their call for a complete abandonment of TL theory, do so with the invitation to scholars to continue to pursue the redeeming elements of the theory free from its methodological and conceptual constraints. If Van Knippenberg and Sitkin (2013) offered a creative destruction of the theory, my aim is to offer a creative reconstruction of what lies at the center of TL, namely, personal and social transformation (for a comprehensive review and analysis of transformational theory in its current formulation, see Banks et al., 2016, 2017). Instead of attempting a reconstruction of TL theory as it currently stands, and thus adjudicating the methodological issues endemic to its positivist formulation, I take an alternative path altogether: I offer a provocation to leadership scholars to resist calls to abandon the TL framework by introducing scholarship that is centered on the nature of transformation and thus promising for constructing a more robust TL theory.

The phenomenon of transformation in leadership studies is too rich and vital a concept to abandon outright. It is worthy of our continued research and promising for understanding the transformational realties that exist in the leadership process. Furthermore, the question of the nature of transformation is experiencing a rebirth at the boundaries and interstices of several disciplines. Carrigan (2014), in Becoming who we are: Personal morphogenesis and social change, offers a thorough review and interrogation of theories from philosophy and sociology that have examined the phenomenon of transformation as an inherent element of personal and social change. Similarly, Rothenberg (2010), in her innovative theory of social change, draws on social theorists across the humanities and social sciences in arguing that the unbounded nature of personhood is the necessary ingredient for personal and social transformation. Psychologists too have focused on the nature of transformation by proposing a social ontology of selves as the starting place for a process psychology (Bickhard, 2004, 2012; Guignon, 2012). Philosopher Grosz (2011), combines philosophy and evolutionary biology in demonstrating that people are more accurately human becomings, not human beings, always in a process of becoming something more than what they are—both biologically and socially. In the same vein, anthropologists and sociologists working at the intersections of the social and life sciences have proposed that human beings are inherently biosocial organisms in constant flux with their environments (Ingold and Palsson, 2013; Meloni et al., 2016). But perhaps nowhere is this emerging interest in personal transformation more clear than in L.A. Paul’s recent book, Transformative Experience, in which she examines:

the notion of a transformative experience, which is a kind of experience that is both radically new to you and changes you in a deep and fundamental way; experiences such as becoming a parent, discovering a new faith, emigrating to a new country, or fighting in a war…A personally transformative experience changes you in some deep and personally fundamental way, for example, by changing your core personal preferences or by changing the way you understand your desires, your defining intrinsic properties, or your self-perspective. (2014: 2)

In considering how transformative experiences fundamentally change us in ways that we can never anticipate or undo, Paul (2014) builds upon the transformational nature of persons and how we are always becoming other than what we are through our experiences. The notion of a transformative experience assumes a transformational conception of personhood and selves. But what she, and others researching transformation, have not emphasized is the role that influential people (like leaders) play in transforming others in those experiences. Leadership scholars, with their expertise on both influential persons and leadership processes, are uniquely positioned to add to this emerging body of work. My aim is to demonstrate that empirical and political ground is lost by abandoning TL outright, especially when a more transformational paradigm is possible.

In proposing a framework that is (re) centered on the notion of transformation, I have chosen the American pragmatist and social psychologist, George Herbert Mead, as my interlocutor. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate how Mead’s lifelong focus on the nature of transformation provides a compelling example for leadership scholars to emulate in their own research on TL in the future. I am joining a resurgence of scholars calling for renewed attention to the richness of Mead’s work for an array of contemporary scholarship (de Silva, 2007; Joas and Huebner, 2016) and organization studies (Elkjaer and Simpson, 2011; Simpson, 2009, 2014). More specifically, I am answering the call of Simpson (2014: 11) “to re-visit the wealth of potential in Mead’s thinking as a way of better informing our contemporary understandings of dynamic practices in organizations”. And I hope to complement and build from Carroll and Simpson (2012) and Simpson et al.’s (2017) work in applying Mead’s thought directly to the phenomenon of leadership by making central the transformational elements of Mead’s work. As a Pragmatist philosopher, Mead’s work is illustrative of what Farjoun et al. (2015: 1790) describe as a central contribution of Pragmatist philosophy: offering a “third way” between dualistic categories that instead, treats categories as “both contradictory and complementary, recursively linked and mutually constitutive of one another”. Mead’s anti-dualistic ontology does not eliminate the complexities, or divergent nature, of leadership categories; but instead, provides a “third way” that maintains the tensions, mutuality, interdependence, and dialectical nature of an emergent world that is always in flux—resisting the temptation of dichotomous theorizing which may focus on the best of a theory while ignoring its worst.

In the following sections, I use the works of Mead, and Meadian scholars, to address the questions of: (1) who transformational leaders are, (2) what transformational leaders do as a starting place for a new TL framework. I conclude with future considerations.

Who transformational leaders are—The I/Me and the sociality selves

Mead, is probably most famous for his distinction between the two phases of the self—the I and the Me. It is ironic, however, as recent scholars have pointed out, that these central concepts have been largely misunderstood and misappropriated posthumously—thus necessitating a return to the original works of Mead (da Silva, 2007). It is in the same spirit that I now (re)introduce Mead’s notion of the self, before making connections to the nature of transformational leaders.

What made Mead’s conception of the self unique, both in his time and ours, is his refusal to reduce the self either to a metaphysical entity existing inside a person’s mind—and thus separate from the world—or to a mechanistic calculating organ (the brain), which is indistinguishable from the world. One of the reasons that Mead is especially relevant today, and particularly for leadership research, is that these dichotomous conceptions of the self-world still shape the trajectories of research across the social sciences and have a significant influence on the way we understand leaders and leadership. Mead demonstrates that neither reduction is necessary, or useful, for portraying persons who are equally biological, social and psychological. For Mead, the self is not somewhere “in there” in our minds, distinct and separate from the external world “out there”, but instead, selves are a constantly emerging process made up of the experiences of our various social worlds.

For Mead, the self is social all the way down. In this way, Mead inverts the Cartesian dualism of the self-world by imagining selves as enmeshed and emergent from the “external” world itself. Unlike his behaviorist contemporaries, Mead’s starting place was not the individual self-existing a priori any interaction in the world: instead, selves are a complex and dynamic assemblage of our social experiences. Like sponges, we move through life “soaking up” our social experiences which coalesce to form our semi-stable conceptions of ourselves in our environment—making up the cultural origins of our mind (Tomasello, 2009). But selves are also not endlessly fluid and indistinguishable from their social environments. Mead qualifies his processual and social conception of the self, by making an analytical distinction between two phases of the self that are vital to his theory: the “I” and “Me”.

The “Me” is the organized phase of the self, formed developmentally throughout life, when we take on the role of others in our various social groups—seeing ourselves as members of the community. The “I” is the spontaneous attitude of ourselves towards the “Me”. Mead is intent on delineating the necessity and value of both phases of the self. The Me, formed from our respective group affiliation, provides coherence, continuity, and a sense of community. The I is the site of freedom, novelty, and reflexivity in the self. But unlike many misinterpretations of Mead’s “I”, that portray it as a static and autonomous part of the self, Mead was careful to describe the ever elusiveness of the “I” in its dialectical relationship with the “Me”. The nature of the “I”, although spontaneous and novel, is always bound to the respective nature of the social “Me”. The “I” only exists in the fleeting moments of the present, as our conscious reflection on our experience, before it dissolves and joins our collective “Me”. The “Me”, is like a calm body of water made up of our internalized social experiences with various groups, and the “I” an ever-flowing waterfall, existing only for a flash before cascading into the “Me” of our memories. Simpson (2009: 1336) summarizes the I/Me dynamic this way:

The subjective ‘I’…is the actor’s anticipatory response to the social conventions and habits of conduct represented by the ‘me’; it is the active principle of forward movement that introduces divergence and novel possibilities into the processes of the self. The consequences of any action by the ‘I’ may reflexively form part of the embodied ‘me’; thus the ‘I’ both calls out, and responds to the ‘me’ in an internalized conversation of gestures. Mead argued that the ‘me’ and the ‘I’ are inherently social, mutually informing resources in the construction of social selves. Without the ‘I’ principle, the self would be nothing more than a stable and convergent reflection of social structure, and there would be no potential for creative or reconstructive activity.

Mead’s conception of the self is akin to flowing lava, whose outer layer hardens as it cools, but only momentarily, before the molten inner core propels it forward into a new state of being. The “Me” is our relatively stable “cool” crust and the “I” is our ever-emerging and novel phase of our self that is in perpetual motion, forever shaping and being shaped by the “Me.” The lava metaphor is especially useful here in that the outer crust and inner core are distinctions between phases of the same material whole, distinguished only in form, and their relative relation to the (temperature of) the external world. Selves are transformed out of the social stuff of their environments: as Mead says, “the relative values of the “Me” and “I” depend very much on the situation” (1934: 199). Contemporary Mead scholar, Felipe da Silva (2007: 54–55) frames the significance of Mead’s self this way:

Mead argues that the “I”, in its dialectical relationship with the “Me”, is a response, by the individual, to a “social situation which is within the experience of the individual. By bringing social attitudes inside the structure of the self, Mead performs nothing short of a Copernican revolution.

Not only did Mead provide a more social conception of selfhood that challenged the dichotomous inside-outside view of selves as separate from the world, but the I/Me dynamic is illustrative of the multiplicity and transformational nature of selves throughout life. Though Mead mostly speaks of the “I” and “Me” in the singular, by conceiving of them as phases of the self in process, he invites us to consider that the self is made up of multiple “I’s” and “Me’s”, in the plural. As Mead (1934: 164) says, “There is a social process out of which selves arise and within which further differentiation, further evolution, further organization, take place”. In other words, we have as many I’s and Me’s as we have diverse social experiences and cultural identities—across race, class, ethnicity, age, gender, nationality, religion, or sexual orientation. To be clear, the plurality of Mead’s selves do not exist, or operate, atomistically. Pizzato (2006), who integrates performance studies and the latest advancements in neurology, provides a compelling account of how the multiplicity of Mead’s social selves (though he does not reference Mead explicitly) have their corollary in the neuronal mapping of the brain. We have neural “director(s)” that operate analogously to the way Mead describes the role of the “I” as the phase of our selves that speak to the social actor(s) of our “Me’s”. “I”(s) are the internal directors of the brain’s theater that direct “the Me”(s) of our respective neural groups–made up of our social experiences with others—that are waiting and competing backstage to be called up by the director. In this way, Mead’s social self is simultaneously singular and multiple.

Mead’s social self, is the ontological starting place for a more TL framework and is particularly useful for describing the nature of who transformational leaders are and how they might have transformational influence on others. The I/Me distinction not only provides leadership scholars conceptual footing to bring the social, cultural, and political into to our notions of selves, answering to Athens’ (2007, 2009, 2010) call for a “radical interactionism” and Callero’s (2003) call for a “sociology of the self”; but Mead’s conception of selves provides a necessary social complement to critical leadership studies’ core principle of reflexivity (Alvesson et. al., 2009; Wickert and Schaefer, 2015). Mead (1934: 134) conceives of reflexivity as an emergent part of social experience: “It is by means of reflexiveness–the turning-back of the experience of the individual upon himself-that the whole social process is thus brought into the experience of the individuals involved in it”. This is most akin Margaret Archer’s work who defines reflexivity as “the mental ability, of all persons, to consider themselves in relation to their social contexts” (Archer, 2007: 4). Unlike Giddens (1991) or Bourdieu’s (1992) emphasis on a reflexivity where individuals monitor their social behavior to maintain continuity, Archer emphasizes the internal conversation of the “I” as the site and force of agency that effects real change in oneself and one’s environment (Rafieian and Davis, 2016). This dialogic nature of the self (Hermans, 2012) is simultaneously how individuals experience self-transformation throughout life and the process by which they have transformational influence on others.

Mead provides leadership scholars a “third way” between dichotomous leadership theories that maintain a distinction between individual leaders and followers on the one hand, and more relational, distributed, and processual forms of leadership on the other (Avolio et al., 2009; Crevani et al., 2010; Fletcher, 2004; Tourish, 2014; Uhl-Bien, 2006). For Mead, however, leaders themselves are always in process—and it is always a social process. This is most akin to Leadership-as-Practice scholar, Raelin’s (2016: 28), distinction of an “entitative soft” ontology wherein individuals are transformed but always within and through relations to others. Relational and processual scholars are right to challenge the psychologized view of heroic individual leaders as rational, enclosed entities distinct from their social environments and the relationships within them. But by imagining there are no leaders (Raelin, 2016) and focusing exclusively on collaborative and processual theories of leadership we not only lose political ground for critiquing the dark sides of individualized manifestations of leadership (Tourish, 2013), but we move too far in ignoring the real influence, even if socially constructed (Meindl et al., 1985), that individuals do have in leading and transforming others—albeit in relational processes. Transformational notions of selves are not exclusive to relational theories however, but are implicit, or peripheral, in works like Wood and Dibben (2015), Tourish (2014), and Uhl-Bien (2006), which see leadership as co-constructed in an on-going process. Although Tourish (2014: 87) focuses more on the nature of leadership interactions, than individual leaders, his reliance on processual notions of selves is made explicit when he says:

Leadership is less one person doing something to another (with their more or less willing compliance). Rather, it is a process whereby leaders and non-leaders accomplish each other through dynamics of interaction in which mutual influence is always present.

Mead’s I/Me distinction provides an ontological foundation by which individuals are the kinds of social beings that are capable of accomplishing themselves and each other in the first place. Similarly, Simpson (2016: 167), in delineating how agency and novelty emerge in leadership processes says “transactional engagements transform trans-actors as they enact new and unfolding meanings in ongoing trans-actions, whereas inter-actors and self-actors remain unchanged through their actions”. Although Simpson distinguishes trans-actors from inter-actors (2016: 174) by emphasizing the emergence of new persons through “leadership in the flow of practice”, her work has largely focused on the emergence of novel situations, gestures and discursive meanings in leadership and less so on the transformation of trans-actors themselves (Carroll and Simpson, 2012; Simpson et al., 2017). My aim in this paper is to build from processual works on “leadership in the flow of practice” by centering what is often latent, implied or under-theorized—namely, the transformational nature of individual persons within that flow.

So what might a leadership framework that sustains the complexity of influential leaders and the processual nature of leadership look like? There is a provocative section in Mind, Self and Society (1934) where Mead addresses the nature of leaders explicitly where the individual-social duality is on full display. This passage is particularly striking given American Pragmatism’s emphasis on sociality, community, and democratic values over and above powerful individuals. But here, Mead models how the individual and social can be simultaneously in focus. It is worth quoting at length.

Persons of great mind and great character have strikingly changed the communities to which they have responded. We call them leaders, as such, but they are simply carrying to the nth power this change in the community by the individual who makes himself a part of it, who belongs to it…It is in such reactions of the individual, the “I”, over against the situation in which the “I” finds itself, that important social change takes place…An individual of the type which we are referring arises always with reference to a form of society or social order which is implied but not adequately expressed. Take the religious genius, such as Jesus or Buddha, or the reflective type, such as Socrates. What has given them their unique importance is that they have taken the attitude of living with reference to a larger society. (Mead, 1934: 216, 17)

Mead’s socially emergent conception of leaders represents nothing short of a paradigm shift for TL research. Whereas transformational leadership, and leadership theories broadly, have been characterized by a search for the unique psychological or moral traits that distinguish leaders from followers, Mead distinguishes leaders by their unique social characteristics. Serendipitously, Bass and Steidlmeier’s (1999) similar use of Socrates, sages from the Judio-Christian tradition, and Confucius as ideal leaders fully displays this divergent conception of transformational leaders. The authors attribute the transformational influence of these figures to their individual moral virtue—even if developed in community— saying, “the moral life rests upon foundations of individual virtue and that the individually virtuous person transforms others as well as the social environment” (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999: 194). The authors are explicit in their privileging of the individual over the social when they say:

We do not find in either thinker a treatise on commerce and markets. In fact, they seem to take for granted the institutions of their day together with embedded social hierarchies. (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999: 195).

But this is not the only, or most accurate, reading of these figures. In fact, Proietto and James (1996) argue the exact opposite in regards to Socrates’ influence as a leader. In addition to highlighting that Socrates himself said he did not know what virtue was—thus necessitating his dialectic endeavor to discover its meaning—the authors argue convincingly that it was Socrates’ deep knowledge, and use, of Athenian rituals, institutions, laws, and social hierarchy that made him so influential—and eventually led to his death. In essence, it was Socrates’ internalization of his social world that made him so transformational, not his individual virtuousness. The authors conclude their argument this way:

There has been no need to treat Socrates as other than a man of his times. He was formed in and by the logic of his community. His particularity was his genius, and his genius was clear perception of the logical structure of his society–His trial was the device through which the Athenians sought to remove from their body politic the tremendous, yet unassimilable, energy of Socrates. That energy was the power of the deep structure of their society, its basic law. (Proietto and James, 1996: 27)

Similarly, in Mead’s framework, people do not become transformational leaders despite their social environment; but because of it. It is equally important to point out, however, that a leader’s uniqueness and individual influence is not erased by the social conditions that produce them—both are simultaneously at work in transformational leaders. Nowhere is this duality of leaders—as both individually efficacious and socially structured—more apparent than in Mead’s (1934) description of “the genius” (which he uses synonymously with “the leader”):

The behavior of a genius is socially conditioned, just as that of an ordinary individual is. The genius, like the ordinary individual, comes back at himself from the standpoint of the organized social group to which he belongs and the attitude of that group toward any given project in which he becomes involved; and he responds to this generalized attitude of the group with a definite attitude of his own toward the given project, just as the ordinary individual does. But this definite attitude of his own with which he responds to the generalized attitude of the group is unique and original in the case of the genius, whereas it is not so in the case of the ordinary individual; and it is this uniqueness and originality of his response to a given social situation or problem or project…that distinguishes the genius from the ordinary individual.

In the same way that the “I” responds critically and creatively to the social nature of the “Me”, leaders likewise act in relation to, and from, their social milieu and within specific organizational cultures and contexts. Leaders must not only make bold and innovative choices in the presence of others, but in order for their choices to be transformational, they must have a deep sense of their own and others collective social “Me’s” in the process. In fact, the transformational leader may have an even deeper “Me” than her followers to carry “to the nth power” their creative response to their respective social worlds (Mead, 1934: 216–217). Daniel (2016: 284) highlights this duality in his work on Mead and conscience saying, “We could even say that the genius is more conditioned by norms of social fittingness but in a much subtler fashion than most, releasing the norms’ potential by responding to them in a novel manner”. Mead’s leader has striking similarities to Bourdieu’s description of the prophet: “The prophet is less the ‘extraordinary man’ of whom Weber spoke than the man of extraordinary situations” (Bourdieu, 1991: 35). Bourdieu then challenges scholars to “dispose once and for all of the notion of charisma as a property attaching to the nature of a single individual, and examine, instead…sociologically pertinent characteristics of an individual biography” (Bourdieu, 1987: 131).

In a Meadian framework of leadership, this means taking seriously the social selves that make up transformational leaders. The task for understanding the nature of leaders is not just in answering who leaders are, in terms of their psychological traits, behaviors or charisma—but what leaders are in terms of their embodied social experiences. It is important to note too, that this shift in emphasizing the unique social nature of leaders is not counter to Bass’s (1999) original inclusion of cultural competence as a distinguishing factor of transformational leaders. Integrating Mead, goes further by providing a theoretical foundation for understanding how cultural competency acts to make certain individuals more transformational in various contexts. Leaders must have an intimate knowledge and embodiment of the social worlds they inhabit before they can enact change in those contexts in meaningful ways that transform followers. Or as Bourdieu would have it—if we extend his call to understand prophets to leaders–the task of the researcher “is to explain why a particular individual finds himself socially predisposed to live out and express with particular cogency and coherence, ethical or political dispositions that are already present in a latent state amongst all members of the class or groups of his addresses” (Bourdieu, 1987: 131). This is the task of leadership scholars who wish to pursue a new TL framework.

Situational, contingency, and complexity theories of leadership have made advances in including the role that social context plays in leadership, but they have left unexamined how these contexts get internalized by leaders within them. They paint a picture of leaders working within various social contexts who may have distinguishing psychological traits, but who are socio-culturally vacuous. Social identity theory of leadership, which positions leaders as prototypical embodiments of the groups they lead, is the contemporary theory most closely aligned with the Meadian framework I am proposing (Van Knippenberg, 2011). The many overlaps from leader group prototypicality substantiate the relevance of Mead for leadership research; but the differences are equally important. Whereas leader group prototypicality emphasizes the role of the leader in embodying the group’s ideals, thus bringing increased group cohesion, continuity and reduced uncertainty, the Meadian leader embodies these group ideals in enacting novelty, change, and transformation. The transformational force of the leader’s “I” is not always in reaction against their integrated “Me”, but is in the creative appropriation and enactment of their social repertoire in novel ways that transform the status quo. In other words, the leader’s “Me” is the fountainhead of all the transformational potential of their “I”. A Meadian framework also complements Van Knippenberg’s (2011) call for more work on how prototypical group leaders convey, enact, and embody group ideals in leadership interactions. In the next section, I address this call by introducing Mead’s concept of “taking the role of the other” in the social act to demonstrate what leaders do—in relation with their followersto enact transformations in themselves and others.

What transformational leaders do—Taking the role of the other in the social act

By addressing the question “what leaders do”, I join leadership scholars who position leadership primarily as a set of embodied practices that leaders perform—thus shifting away from cognitive approaches that characterize leaders and leadership exclusively in terms of individual charisma, traits, or behaviors (Carroll et al., 2008; Crevani et al., 2010; Raelin, 2011, 2016). As Crevani and Endrissat (2016: 42) say, leadership-as-practice (LAP) scholars refocus “our attention from what (extraordinary) individuals are, to what ordinary people and objects do as they engage in leading”. Although this may be a useful dichotomy—between being and action—for analyzing differences between leaders and leadership respectively, the distinction is incomplete. In a Meadian framework of leadership, in which mind-body and self-world dualities are simultaneously in focus—who leaders are is intimately tied to what leaders do.

Mead was quintessentially a philosopher of social action. Though his I/Me distinction describes the process by which reflexivity, meaning, and consciousness emerge in the self, selves are ultimately, and always, created in relation to others and their environment. His most famous statement for how selves emerge is “taking the role of the other.” For Mead (1934), what distinguishes human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to see ourselves as both subject and object; seeing ourselves as others see us and acting consciously on those perceptions. This process happens initially in infancy and adolescence, but continues, albeit in more complex forms, throughout life. In play, children take on the role of particular others who they pretend to be and they use their responses to these (real or imaginary) others in building a self. As Mead says “A child plays at being a mother, at being a teacher, at being a policeman; that is, it is taking different roles…he addresses himself as a parent, as a teacher; he arrests himself as a policeman” (Mead, 1934: 150–151).

Later in life, Mead describes the more advanced form of taking the role of the other by referencing “the game.” In his illustration of a baseball game, children must not only learn the expectations of their position on the field, but to function and excel in the game, they must understand and take on the role of all other positions as well (coaches, players, and parents). The game, unlike play, involves a more highly complex set of social actors and rules that must be integrated. Whereas play is taking on the role of a single individual—usually in a playful, decontextualized environment—the game is more high stakes and includes a moral component of sacrificing one’s own desires for the sake of the rules of the game and expectations of others. In both phases of role-taking however, new selves emerge and transform through a processual relation to others. And although Mead emphasizes the vitality of being a conscious, self-reflective actor in this process, the taking of the role of others is always an embodied taking.

Recent work by psychologists, sociologists, and cognitive scientists illustrate how Mead’s notion of role-taking is not only the mechanism for human development broadly, but provides a framework for how transformations happen in leadership interactions throughout all stages of life. The works in this section complement and corroborate scholars who have rightly pointed out a need for more scholarship on the embodied nature of leadership practices (Fisher and Robbins, 2015; Küpers, 2013) Martin and Gillespie (2010: 269) highlight how leadership dynamics through our role-taking abilities are inherent to human transformation beginning in infancy: "early sequences of interactivity amount to very initial exchanges between the positions of “leader” and “follower,” and imitation as a more generalized form of “following the actions of others” may be seen to emerge developmentally through such initial infant interactivity."

Similarly, Popper and Mayseless (2003) make the connection between developmental psychology and TL by noting how leaders, like parents, act to create social wombs where followers feel safe to take risks and receive correction in their development as followers. Leadership scholars do have much to learn from developmental psychology, but whereas the authors use parenting as a useful analogy for leadership, a more TL framework takes literally, not only how parents are influential in the formation of children, but also how leaders are influential in the transformations of followers in all stages of life. As the child must take the perspective of the parent in using the adult’s language in the same way they are using it, the leader too, must be able to take the perspective of their followers by understanding their language, gestures, desires, and cultural values—as the starting place for transformational impact. In the same way that the transformational nature of leaders is found in the social nature of their “I” and “Me”, what leaders do is analogous to what happens in the social process of taking the role of others in interaction. And our role-taking abilities, as the outflow of the “mini societies” of our mind (Hermans, 2002), increase in complexity in tandem with the increasingly complex nature of modern organizations, a globalized society, and the multiplicity of diverse selves that make up our cultural identities.

The growing body of work from scholars who propose and test various “position exchange” theories that explicitly extend the work of Mead are particularly prescient for understanding the TL process (Barresi, 2012; Gillespie, 2005; Gillespie and Martin, 2014; Gillespie and Richardson, 2011; Martin et al., 2008). Unlike cognitive approaches to social learning that assume transmission of knowledge from one person’s mind to another:

in position exchange it is the movement of actors between social positions which weaves the fabric of intersubjectivity. Although actors cannot ‘take’ each other’s experiential perspectives directly, they can quite literally take each other’s social position and thus experience a similar perspective. (Gillespie, 2012: 42).

Martin (2005) emphasizes that Mead’s notion of perspectival selves, results from socially embedded interaction with others, and not, through some distant form of mentalist introspection or empathy. We do not take on new perspectives and practices through solipsistic introspection of others, but through experiencing and simulating similar social roles and contexts. Like Mead’s role-taking in the play and game, individuals throughout life “try on” and practice various roles in diverse contexts through reflection on the meanings of those roles and how to best perform them—what Erik Erikson (1968) calls “role experimentation”. Like a young calf, we stumble awkwardly in new roles and contexts until we build up strength over time to take confident strides like those we emulate. As Martin and Gillespie (2010: 265–266) say:

In choosing, acting upon, and realizing possibilities for action and interaction that emerge at the interfaces of multiple perspectives, human agents continuously are involved in the ongoing creation of themselves and their societies…through deliberate planning and problem solving with others, they come to realize their potential as agents capable of transforming themselves and their world.

But Mead’s role-taking notion begs the question of how leaders are effectual in transforming followers. Admittedly, Mead describes role-taking as the process of human (self) transformation broadly, and thus relevant for both leadership and followership theories. However, role-taking is not merely a passive receiving of other perspectives in the emergence of new selves; it is an inherently agentic, future-oriented (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998), and intentional (Dittrich and Seidl, 2017) practice co-constitutive with our ongoing trans-actions with others. In fact, Mead (1934: 47) makes the other-oriented nature of the role-taking process explicit in describing how gestures move beyond mere mimicry in becoming significant (transformational) symbols for others saying, “[g]estures become significant symbols when they implicitly arouse in an individual making them the same responses which they explicitly arouse, or are supposed to arouse, in other individuals, the individuals to whom they are addressed.” Role-taking then, is the “the conditio sine qua non” (Nungesser, 2016: 256) for the emergence of novelty in any situation—including transformation of others. Or as Mead (1964: 149) would have it, “The appearance of…different interests in the forum of reflection [leads to] the reconstruction of the social world, and the consequent appearance of the new self that answers to the new object.” Of course, transformational influence is never one-directional or deterministic; followers themselves are active, and ultimately decisive, in taking-on (or rejecting) the practices of leaders—in this way, role-taking is always a giving-and-taking.

But role-taking is also how a leader’s cultural repertoire is built up and what gives their respective sociality its transformational influence with others. In the same way that Emirbayer and Mische (1998) distinguish varying degrees of agency relative to one’s sociality, a leader’s transformational influence is relative to their ability to take-on the role of diverse others in a diverse social environment. In the same way that Mead describes the transformational potential of the genius as simultaneously individual and social, leadership practices are individually effectual because they are inherently social. As is evident in the following example, a leader’s transformational influence with others flows from their respective sociality.

In Body and Soul, Wacquant’s (2004) ground-breaking auto-ethnographical account of “becoming a boxer”, he describes in rich detail how “DeeDee”, his boxing coach, plays a significant role in leading him through his transformation from sociologist to amateur boxer. Wacquant’s (2004: 102) description of DeeDee (in which he cites Mead’s piece on the “Biologic Individual”) is an illustrative example of what an embodied TL looks like. DeeDee’s leadership is diametrically opposed to the rational discourse-centric focus of much of the existing leadership development theory. Instead, Wacquant’s transformation into a boxer is “effected collectively, by imitation, by emulation, and by diffuse and reciprocal encouragement, the trainer’s role being to coordinate and stimulate routine activity, which turns out to be a much “more powerful source of socialization than intentional pedagogy.”

Throughout Wacquant’s (2004) account, we see how DeeDee embodies and enacts Mead’s notion of sociality, what Wacquant (2005: 445) calls “sociocultural competency”, as the primary action that makes him a transformational leader. Perhaps no other concept captures the transformational nature of Mead’s work more than sociality (Simpson, 2014). Mead describes sociality as the movement “betwixt and between the old system and the new” and “the capacity for being several things at once” (1932: 75). Thomas (2016: 199) connects Mead’s notion of sociality to our role-taking abilities as:

a matter of integrating the experience of other human beings into one’s own experience. In doing so, one takes the world into oneself and develops a sense of the world that develops the practical capacity to anticipate the action of others and the ability to see entities in the world as objects of concern.

It is DeeDee’s enactment of his sociality—in utilizing the multiplicity of material objects and gestures of diverse people–that gives him such transformational influence for Wacquant, “not a dialogue between the sole teacher and his pupil but rather a conversation of multiple voices open to all regular participants in the workout” (Wacquant, 2004: 1130). By leveraging the sites and sounds of the gym, the expertise of the other boxers, and the temporal rhythms and codes of the ring, DeeDee is able to bring the entire sociocultural world of boxing into his leadership trans-actions with Wacquant. Like DeeDee, transformational leaders introduce novel cultural worlds to their followers by modeling symbolic behaviors that challenge or incite their existing habitus, which leads to the vital internalization and role-taking necessary for continued transformation of followers into new states of being.

A leader’s enactment of their sociality adds a sociocultural complement to Simpson’s (2016: 174) notion of trans-actions and is the transformational force that produces the “emergence of new persons” in the “leadership in the flow of practice” process. Transformation, in the world and in our ourselves, emerges in the “betwixt and between the old system and the new” when our social Me’s are disrupted in trans-actions with diverse others. Sociality is the transformational fountain from which novelty (Simnpson et al., 2017) and “turning-points” (Carroll and Simpson, 2012) in leadership practices spring to life. In our trans-actions, it is our past social experiences and anticipations of the future which structure and shape our coordination with others (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013)—and since our pasts and futures are imbued with culture, this is more precisely, a coordination of cultures. In describing the sociality of our trans-actions, Mead (1932) evokes the imagery of physical geography to describe this transformational process; like tectonic plates, we are constantly sliding into one another—creating new topographies along the way. It is, for Mead (1932: 90) the overflowing nature of our transactions with diverse others which “is the scene of that emergence which gives always new heavens and a new earth”.

Sullivan (2001), though drawing on the work of John Dewey, provides a provocative metaphor that elucidates the transformational nature of Mead’s role-taking with diverse others. Sullivan (2001: 16) challenges the metaphors of a “melting-pot” and “toss-salad”—typically used as descriptors of diverse social relations—as two sides of the same dichotomy; portraying cultural differences in either total atomistic isolation on the one hand, or in complete assimilation and diffusion on the other. Instead, she describes our embodied transactions with others as more like a stew; where carrots and onions become “carrot-y onions and onion-y carrots” as they collide, congeal, and rub-off on one another, yet maintain their distinct flavors in the process. Or as Mead (1938: 641) says, “When things get together, there then arises something that was not there before”. TL necessitates a more intimate encounter between leader and follower where our diverse social I’s and Me’s intersect and interact and produce new versions ourselves “on the other side” of our relations with others.

This is especially vital in organizations where leaders are many times removed from followers—both physically and socially—and see them from the distant horizon rarely having the more intimate encounters necessary for transformation (Sennett, 1993). And distant followers, likewise, construct mental images of leaders that may be disconnected from, or aberrations of, the leader’s true essence (Galvin et al., 2010). This social distance may allow for the depersonalization of a leaders as “stand in” representations of the group (Hogg, 2001)—not as change-agents of the group itself. When leaders and followers only see each other as distant shadows, leadership interactions become like Plato’s shadows on the cave wall—faint representations of leadership far removed from the realities of more embodied trans-actions.

Mead’s (1938) description of the “social act”—the four-stage relational process between social (people) and physical objects—provides further clarity for the contextual conditions of TL transactions. de Silva (2007: 65) summarizes the social act this way:

Firstly, there is an impulse, in the sense of a physiological predisposition of the organism to respond to a given stimulus; secondly, the organism perceives either an object or a part of the surrounding environment; thirdly the organism manipulates the perceived object, either physically (e.g. an apple) or intellectually (e.g. a past event); fourthly, the organism attributes a certain value to the object in question, thereby consummating the act.

The social act is the same whether we approach a physical object (a chair) or social object (another person). Mead (1938) uses the example of a chair and the way our bodies contort in preparation to sit down just moments before we physically make contact, demonstrating how our perception of the chair and its meaning (as a piece of furniture) determines our interaction with it. Objects first appear to us on a distant horizon and our physiological and social impulses determine the nature of the future interaction. When we make contact with objects in the “manipulatory phase” of the act we come to know objects in a more intimate way. We embody them; they become part of ourselves and after, we evaluate them and give them meaning. The process is the same in our relationships with other people as well. Leadership demands an increased ability, to not only take on the role of followers across various levels of an organization, but in all their cultural diversity as well. Mead’s social act provides a cultural complement to works like Cuddy et al.’s (2008), that demonstrates how our perceptions (or misperceptions in stereotypes) of a person’s warmth and competence predict our behaviors to either engage or retreat from diverse social others. As leaders approach followers in interaction, their perceptions of them either work to further the possibility of transformation through intimacy or eliminate it entirely by keeping others at “safe” social distances. While social proximity is a moderating variable for a leader’s influence on followers (Cole et al., 2009), it is not a causal condition that gives rise to transformation—especially leadership scholar’s assumed positive transformations in socially close relationships. Manne’s (2016) work, for example, challenges the assumption that socially close relationships automatically lead to more humanizing views of others—instead, it may create the conditions for all kinds of dehumanizing caricatures necessary for oppression and brutality. More empirical work is needed into how the multiplicity of diverse others in contemporary organizations, the proliferation of social roles in modern society (Frank and Meyer, 2002) and the power asymmetries that exist between actors across race, gender, class, and social roles, like leader and follower (Athens, 2007), give rise to transformation in leadership trans-actions. Social selves that are deeply divergent—embodying different values, habits, and symbolic language—severely limit the degree to which we can take the role of others or see ourselves as others see us. But the diverse, and divergent, nature of organizations and organizational actors is paradoxically where all of the potential of transformations in leadership processes lie.

It is in the disruptions and disjunctions of the “manipulatory phase” of the social act where we reflect, react, and experiment with the social world in new ways, that gives life to transformational possibilities. The manipulatory phase is akin to anthropologist, Turner’s (1982) concept of “liminal periods” where individuals in social dramas imagine and experiment with new possibilities of themselves—wherein they are transformed into new states of being. It is our role-taking abilities in the social act between leaders and followers—beyond discursive transmissions of knowledge—where the sights, sounds, and somatic sensations of leadership produce transformations in ourselves and others. To summarize, if who transformational leaders are is found in their reflexivity (from the “I”) to their respective social “Me’s”, then what leaders do, is found in their ability to take on, and integrate, the role of diverse others in responding to their social world in transformative ways. Because of their deep awareness of the social world—within themselves and others—transformational leaders create the kinds of transactions with others where the transformational potential of a diverse world is unleashed.

Conclusion

I have intentionally resisted offering a formal definition, and theory, of this more TL framework. I echo what Uhl-Bien (2006: 668) has said about her work, that what I am proposing is “not a theory in the traditional sense of the word. It is an overarching framework for a variety of methods, approaches, and even ontologies that explore” what a new transformational framework might look like. Not only does the processual and transformational nature of selves and transactions with others resist the kinds of positivist theory building characteristic of much leadership scholarship, but any attempt to draw clear boundaries and static dichotomies around transformational leaders and leadership would be antithetical to the spirit of Pragmatism’s “third way” ontology and the processual nature of Mead’s work. Instead, I hope to have shown the promise of taking seriously the transformational reality within leaders and leadership trans-actions for constructing a new TL theory in the future.

Using Mead as my interlocutor to frame the paper served two purposes. First, to complement, and build on, scholars who have called for more integration of American Pragmatism in organization studies broadly and leadership studies specifically (Carroll and Simpson, 2012; Elkjaer and Simpson, 2011; Fontrodona, 2002; Parmar et al., 2016; Simpson, 2009, 2014; Simpson et al., 2017). And second, to demonstrate how Mead’s transdisciplinary scholarship—integrating philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology—provides an exemplary model for future scholars to work across disciplines towards a more TL theory. Since transformation is a deep change from one state of being to another, TL scholars will need a more holistic, processual and integrated approach to capture this complexity. Although I hope that I have demonstrated the promise of a Meadian framework to move this work forward, the theoretical and empirical landscape is ripe for leadership scholars from a variety of disciplines to build from this foundation.

Several works from scholars working from a sociological frame are worth mentioning as fruitful starting places that leadership scholars may build from in the future. In their one-of-a-kind study, Why Leaders Fight, Horowitz et al. (2015) combine quantitative and qualitative data from the life experiences of famous world leaders and show how those experiences shaped their propensity to use force in war later in life. As political scientists, who typically analyze group level phenomenon, their study is exemplary of scholarship that aligns with a central theme in this paper, namely, that a focus on individual leaders does not exclude focusing on the sociocultural experiences and contexts that give leader’s their influence. The problematic with individualized (entitative) leadership theories currently is not their focus on individuals per se, it is the exclusive focus on psychology’s traits and behaviors to the neglect of sociology’s emphasis on culture and practices.

Religious studies scholar, McCloud (2012), has emphasized the often-neglected transformational elements in Bourdieu’s work by examining religious conversions, and conversions of all kinds, that is indicative of the kind of deep change from one state of being (or faith) to another that distinguishes the essence of transformation in TL from its less transformational counterparts. In Becoming a Fan, Benzecry (2009) examines how new aesthetic tastes, and not just cognitive knowledge, are cultivated over time by studying how novices are transformed into avid opera fans. Similarly, Cornelissen (2016) tracks the transformations of New York City “dumpster divers” tastes from seeing trash as disgusting to desirable, reconceiving trash sites as resources for food and healthy living. Roth and Bowen (2001), in their work on the process of becoming ecologists, describe the embodied nature of the fieldwork experience as the transformational hinge into new states of being and knowing—their study is illustrative of how our embodied role-taking abilities are not limited to social interactions with others but with the material-biologic world as well. These works highlight how transformations are embodied, beyond just new forms of knowledge or discursive meaning, extending to new aesthetics, tastes, beliefs, skills and habits. These studies are indicative of the kind of work that TL scholars could build on by adding the missing ingredient that leaders play in the transformational process.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Travis L Jones is a researcher and consultant who specializes in leadership, organizational culture and diversity and inclusion.

References

Alvesson

Bridgman

Willmott

(2009) Introduction. In: Alvesson

Bridgman

Willmott

(eds) The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–28.

Archer

(2007) Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Athens

(2007) Radical interactionism: going beyond Mead. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37(2): 137–165.

Athens

(2009) The roots of “radical interactionism”. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 39(4): 387–414.

Athens

(2010) Human subordination from a radical interactionist’s perspective. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 40(3): 339–368.

Avolio

Walumbwa

Weber

(2009) Leadership: Current theories, research, and future directions. Annual Review of Psychology 60: 421–449.

Banks

McCauley

Gardner

, et al. (2016) A meta-analytic review of authentic and transformational leadership: A test for redundancy. The Leadership Quarterly 27(4): 634–652.

Banks

Engemann

Williams

, et al. (2017) A meta-analytic review and future research agenda of charismatic leadership. The Leadership Quarterly 28(4): 508–529.

Barresi

(2012) On seeing our selves and others as persons. New Ideas in Psychology 30(1): 120–130.

10.

Bass

(1985) Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations. New York: Collier Macmillan.

11.

Bass

Steidlmeier

(1999) Ethics, character, and authentic transformational leadership behavior. The Leadership Quarterly 10(2): 181–217.

12.

Benzecry

(2009) Becoming a fan: On the seductions of opera. Qualitative Sociology 32(2): 131–151.

13.

Bickhard

(2004) The social ontology of persons. In: Carpendale

JIM

Muller

(eds) Social Interaction and the Development of Knowledge. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, pp. 111–132.

14.

Bourdieu

(1987) Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber’s Sociology of Religion . In: Whimster

Lash

(eds) Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity. London: Allen Unwin, pp. 119–136.

15.

Bourdieu

(1991) Genesis and structure of the religious field. Comparative Social Research 13(1): 1–44.

16.

Bourdieu

Wacquant

(1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

17.

Burns

(1978) Leadership, 1978. New York: Harper & Row.

18.

Callero

(2003) The sociology of the self. Annual Review of Sociology 29(1): 115–133.

19.

Carrigan

MMA

(2014) Becoming Who We Are: Personal Morphogenesis and Social Change. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Warwick, UK.

20.

Carroll

Levy

Richmond

(2008) Leadership as practice: Challenging the competency paradigm. Leadership 4(4): 363–379.

21.

Carroll

Simpson

(2012) Capturing sociality in the movement between frames: An illustration from leadership development. Human Relations 65(10): 1283–1309.

22.

Cole

Bruch

Shamir

(2009) Social distance as a moderator of the effects of transformational leadership: Both neutralizer and enhancer. Human Relations 62(11): 1697–1733.

23.

Collinson

(2012) Prozac leadership and the limits of positive thinking. Leadership 8(2): 87–107.

24.

Cornelissen

(2016) Turning distaste into taste: Context-specific habitus and the practical congruity of culture. Theory and Society 45(6): 501–529.

25.

Crevani

Lindgren

Packendorff

(2010) Leadership, not leaders: On the study of leadership as practices and interactions. Scandinavian Journal of Management 26(1): 77–86.

26.

Crevani

Endrissat

(2016) Mapping the leadership-as-practice terrain. In: Raelin JA (ed)Leadership-as-Practice: Theory and Application. New York: Routledge, pp. 21–49.

27.

Cuddy

Fiske

Glick

(2008) Warmth and competence as universal dimensions of social perception: The stereotype content model and the BIAS map. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 40: 61–149.

28.

Da Silva

(2007) GH Mead: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity.

29.

Daniel

(2016) Conscience as ecological participation and the maintenance of moral perplexity. In: The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 276.

30.

Dinh

Lord

Gardner

, et al. (2014) Leadership theory and research in the new millennium: Current theoretical trends and changing perspectives. The Leadership Quarterly 25(1): 36–62.

31.

Dittrich

Seidl

(2017) Emerging intentionality in routine dynamics: A pragmatist view. Academy of Management Journal 61(1): 111–138.

32.

Eberly

Johnson

Hernandez

, et al. (2013) An integrative process model of leadership: Examining loci, mechanisms, and event cycles. American Psychologist 68(6): 427.

33.

Elkjaer

Simpson

(2011) Pragmatism: A lived and living philosophy. What can it offer to contemporary organization theory? In: Philosophy and Organization Theory. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 55–84.

34.

Emirbayer

Mische

(1998) What is agency? American Journal of Sociology 103(4): 962–1023.

35.

Erikson

(1968) Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: Norton.

36.

Fisher

Robbins

(2015) Embodied leadership: Moving from leader competencies to leaderful practices. Leadership 11(3): 281–299.

37.

Fletcher

(2004) The paradox of postheroic leadership: An essay on gender, power, and transformational change. The Leadership Quarterly 15(5): 647–661.

38.

Farjoun

Ansell

Boin

(2015) PERSPECTIVE—Pragmatism in organization studies: Meeting the challenges of a dynamic and complex world. Organization Science 26(6): 1787–1804.

39.

Fontrodona

(2002) Pragmatism and Management Inquiry: Insights from the Thought of Charles S. Peirce. Westport, CN: Greenwood Publishing Group.

40.

Frank

Meyer

(2002) The profusion of individual roles and identities in the postwar period. Sociological Theory 20(1): 86–105.

41.

Galvin

Balkundi

Waldman

(2010) Spreading the word: The role of surrogates in charismatic leadership processes. Academy of Management Review 35(3): 477–494.

42.

Giddens

(1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

43.

Gillespie

(2005) GH Mead: Theorist of the social act. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 35(1): 19–39.

44.

Gillespie

Richardson

(2011) Exchanging social positions: Enhancing perspective taking within a cooperative problem solving task. European Journal of Social Psychology 41(5): 608–616.

45.

Gillespie

(2012) Position exchange: The social development of agency. New Ideas in Psychology 30(1): 32–46.

46.

Gillespie

Martin

(2014) Position exchange theory: A socio-material basis for discursive and psychological positioning. New Ideas in Psychology 32: 73–79.

47.

Grosz

(2011) Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

48.

Guignon

(2012) Becoming a person: Hermeneutic phenomenology’s contribution. New Ideas in Psychology 30(1): 97–106.

49.

Hermans

(2002) The dialogical self as a society of mind: Introduction. Theory & Psychology 12(2): 147–160.

50.

Hermans

(2012) Dialogical Self Theory and the increasing multiplicity of I-positions in a globalizing society: An introduction. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 2012(137): 1–21.

51.

Horowitz

Stam

Ellis

(2015) Why Leaders Fight. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

52.

Hogg

(2001) A social identity theory of leadership. Personality and Social Psychology Review 5(3): 184–200.

53.

Ingold

Palsson

(2013) Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

54.

Joas

Huebner

(2016) The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

55.

Küpers

(2013) Embodied inter-practices of leadership–Phenomenological perspectives on relational and responsive leading and following. Leadership 9(3): 335–357.

56.

Manne

(2016) Humanism: A critique. Social Theory and Practice 42: 389–415.

57.

Martin

(2005) Perspectival selves in interaction with others: Re-reading GH Mead's Social Psychology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 35(3): 231–253.

58.

Martin

Sokol

Elfers

(2008) Taking and coordinating perspectives: From prereflective interactivity, through reflective intersubjectivity, to metareflective sociality. Human Development 51(5–6): 294–317.

59.

Martin

Gillespie

(2010) A neo-Meadian approach to human agency: Relating the social and the psychological in the ontogenesis of perspective-coordinating persons. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 44(3): 252–272.

60.

McCloud

(2012) The possibilities of change in a world of constraint: Individual and social transformation in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Bulletin for the Study of Religion 41(1): 2–8.

61.

Mead

(1932) The philosophy of the present. LaSalle, IL: Open Court.

62.

Mead

(1934) Mind, Self and Society ( Vol.111). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

63.

Mead

(1938) The philosophy of the act. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

64.

Mead

(1964) On social psychology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

65.

Meindl

Ehrlich

Dukerich

(1985) The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly 30: 78–102.

66.

Meloni

Williams

Martin

(2016) Biosocial Matters: Rethinking Sociology-Biology Relations in the Twenty-First Century. New York: John Wiley.

67.

Nungesser

(2016) Mead meets Tomasello: Pragmatism, the cognitive sciences, and the origins of human communication and sociality. In: Joas H and Huebner D R (eds) The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 252-275.

68.

Parmar

Phillips

Freeman

(2016) Pragmatism and organization studies. In: Mir

Willmott

Greenwood

(eds) The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies. London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 199–211.

69.

Paul

(2014) Transformative Experience. Oxford: OUP.

70.

Pizzato

(2006) Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain. New York: Springer.

71.

Popper

Mayseless

(2003) Back to basics: Applying a parenting perspective to transformational leadership. The Leadership Quarterly 14(1): 41–65.

72.

Price

(2003) The ethics of authentic transformational leadership. The Leadership Quarterly 14(1): 67–81.

73.

Proietto

James

(1996) Socrates: A sociological understanding of the production of an outcast. Economy and Society 25(1): 1–35.

74.

Raelin

(2011) From leadership-as-practice to leaderful practice. Leadership 7(2): 195–211.

75.

Raelin

(2016) Imagine there are no leaders: Reframing leadership as collaborative agency. Leadership 12(2): 131–158.

76.

Raelin

. (2016) Leadership-as-Practice: Theory and Application. London: Routledge.

77.

Rafieian

Davis

(2016) Dissociation, reflexivity and habitus. European Journal of Social Theory 19(4): 556–573.

78.

Rafferty

Griffin

(2004) Dimensions of transformational leadership: Conceptual and empirical extensions. The Leadership Quarterly 15(3): 329–354.

79.

Roth

Bowen

(2001) Of disciplined minds and disciplined bodies: On becoming an ecologist. Qualitative Sociology 24(4): 459–481.

80.

Rothenberg

(2010) The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change. Cambridge: Polity.

81.

Sennett

(1993) Authority. New York: WW Norton & Company.

82.

Simpson

(2009) Pragmatism, Mead and the practice turn. Organization Studies 30(12): 1329–1347.

83.

Simpson

(2014) George Herbert Mead (1863-1931). In: Helin J, Hernes T, Hjorth D and Holt R (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 272–286.

84.

Simpson

(2016) Where’s the Agency in Leadership-as-Practice? New York/London: Routledge.

85.

Simpson

Buchan

Sillince

(2017) The performativity of leadership talk. Leadership. Epub ahead of print 05 June 2017. DOI: 10.1177/1742715017710591

86.

Sullivan

(2001) Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

87.

Tavory

Eliasoph

(2013) Coordinating futures: Toward a theory of anticipation 1. American Journal of Sociology 118(4): 908–942.

88.

Thomas

(2016) Mead, Whitehead, and the sociality of nature. In: Joas H and Huebner DR (eds) The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 185.

89.

Tomasello

(2009) The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

90.

Tourish

(2013) The dark side of transformational leadership: A critical perspective. Routledge.

91.

Tourish

(2014) Leadership, more or less? A processual, communication perspective on the role of agency in leadership theory. Leadership 10(1): 79–98.

92.

Tsoukas

Chia

(2002) On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science 13(5): 567–582.

93.

Turner

(1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. Boston, MA: PAJ Publications.

94.

Uhl-Bien

(2006) Relational leadership theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing. The Leadership Quarterly 17(6): 654–676.

95.

Van Knippenberg

(2011) Embodying who we are: Leader group prototypicality and leadership effectiveness. The Leadership Quarterly 22(6): 1078–1091.

96.

Van Knippenberg

Sitkin

(2013) A critical assessment of charismatic—Transformational leadership research: Back to the drawing board? The Academy of Management Annals 7(1): 1–60.

97.

Wacquant

(2004) Body & Soul. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

98.

Wacquant

(2005) Carnal connections: On embodiment, apprenticeship, and membership. Qualitative Sociology 28(4): 445–474.

99.

Wickert

Schaefer

(2015) Towards a progressive understanding of performativity in critical management studies. Human Relations 68(1): 107–130.

100.

Wood

Dibben

(2015) Leadership as relational process. Process Studies 44(1): 24–47.