Leadership Across Boundaries

Leadership Across Boundaries: A Passage to Aporia theorizes on leadership in an unprecedented manner by stepping outside of conventional leadership theory and importing into leadership studies the implications of certain innovations in the social sciences, such as pluralism, complexity theory, and the dialogical turn, to change the way scholars discuss and study leadership. Leadership Across Boundaries anchors theoretical passages that generate a new way of imagining what it means to lead and follow with concrete examples about Martin Luther, the Common Law, dialogue as a practice, a painting by Diego Velázquez, synchronized fireflies, and the strange career of Francis of Assisi. This book acknowledges the limitations of existing leadership research as being too leader-centric, simplistic, static, and in many cases oblivious to the power of images to shape our understanding. To rectify these limitations, Leadership Across Boundaries examines alternative images of leadership grounded in concrete examples that present leadership in an unprecedented light. The book includes a discussion of invigorating ideas of homeward leadership (looking backward), extra-ordinary leadership (going forward), and what will be defined as the perennial need for aikido politics. An interdisciplinary text, Leadership Across Boundaries: A Passage to Aporia will appeal not only to scholars, instructors, and students of leadership, but also to those in the many fields in which leadership theory applies, such as history, economics, sociology, archetypal psychology, the law, political philosophy, applied mathematics, and the martial arts.

Nathan Harter is Professor of Leadership Studies at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Previously, he practiced law in Indiana and became a full professor at Purdue University in the Department of Organizational Leadership.

1. Surrounded by icons: Seeing through images 2. Leader in context: Martin Luther translating the Bible into German 3. Studying the whole within which leadership takes place: Social action and spontaneous order 4. The emergent order of the Common Law 5. Macro/Micro perspectives: A basic dichotomy holding us back 6. Being at the center of tensions: Las Meninas 7. Leadership as a mode of participation in history: A peregrinal image 8. Dialogue as a mode of participation 9. Oscillations, chaos, and sync (oh my!) 10. Turbulence as the shape of things to come 11. Making sense in the turbulence: Leadership homeward 12. Making use of the turbulence: Extra-ordinary leadership 13. Embracing aporias, suffering, and death: the leadership of St. Francis 14. Arrival at port: Mediation and aikido politics