Leadership Development & Practice

Emerging complexities have arisen regarding leadership, leadership studies and leadership development requiring new approaches and new styles of organizational leadership. Changing environmental conditions including globalisation, climate change, increased market volatility, and shifts in the balance of power in the global political economy suggest the need for more creative, interactive and longer-term strategic leadership. In order to address and react to these shifts in understanding, one must review some essential questions: what constitutes leadership in the organisation, what is it that leaders actually do, or should do, and what can leadership achieve?  Once confronted, the critical question addressed in this work is:  how do we develop leadership to be more responsive to contemporary organizational conditions.

This major work on Leadership Development and Practice will engage this question by drawing together some of the most important and influential research from the related domains of leadership practice and leadership development. Volume 1 opens with a newly-written introduction, which explains the rationale for the major work, addresses the key questions set out above and outlines its structure, providing the reader with a clear, concise roadmap for all four volumes.

Volume 1: Individual Leader Development
Volume 2: Leadership Development in Context
Volume 3: Leadership Development in the Plural
Volume 4: Critical Approaches and Perspectives

JOE RAELIN is an internationally-recognized scholar in the fields of collective leadership, learning, and practice.  He is the Donald Gordon Visiting Professor of Leadership at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and the Asa S. Knowles Chair Emeritus at Northeastern University in Boston, USA.  He was formerly Professor of Management at Boston College.  He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.  His research has been centered on the development of a new paradigm of collective leadership via what he refers to as “leaderful practice,” on the emerging movement in leadership known as “leadership-as-practice,” as well as on the field of work-based learning.  He is also a prolific writer with over 200 articles and a management consultant with the firm, The Leaderful Consultancy.