Bücher der Reihe Elements in Leadership

The intersection of leadership and culture is undertheorized. This Element looks behind familiar titles in leadership at materials from anthropology, sociology, and history to gain a more nuanced understanding of culture. Of particular relevance is an interpretive approach, elaborated in the works of Simmel, Cassirer, Ortega y Gasset, and Gadamer. A five-part schema examines permutations pertaining to the relationship between culture and leadership - as separate, conflicting, derivative, or engaged - with the most attractive being the possibility that leadership and culture are mutually constituting. To explain cultural change, Ortega y Gasset suggested as a unit of analysis the idea of a generation, illustrated in a historical account of translating the Bible. Archer proposed as a mechanism for cultural change the idea of social morphogenesis, which this Element applies to evolving issues of race in the civic order. This process illustrated in the thinking of pundit William F. Buckley, Jr.

Beginning with the belief that the study of leadership belongs to all and to no one in particular, the author offers 27 stable and unchanging elements for the study of leadership, and collects them under four themes: context, shared purpose, language, and human agency. He (a) argues that the rational interest in making our world a better place cuts across all academic disciplines/boundaries, (b) grounds the quest for an integrated theory of leadership in the Desire for Shared Agreement, and (c) offers the possibility that this Desire as a Governing Standard can potentially unite the multiple approaches to leadership studies.