ABSTRACT
Part I of Teaching Leadership focused on leadership mainly as a relationship between leaders and followers (or among a group of people who move in and out of leader and follower roles). In Part II, as leadership educators consider hosting as a leadership practice, we begin to view the socio-material aspects of leadership. From this perspective, leadership emerges in the interactions of embodied humans with each other and with their physical, virtual, and symbolic environments. As these interactions become stabilized they “collectively exert power and generate knowledge” (Fenwick, Nerland, and Jensen, 2012, 6). They also have the potential to generate trust and distrust, the former a powerful contributor to group cohesiveness and productivity and the latter an equally powerful deterrent to group success. Hosting also requires attention to time, prompting our understanding of leadership as not only a socio-material, but temporal practice. Further, as Tara Fenwick, Monica Nerland, and Karen Jensen (2012) point out, a socio-material, temporal perspective directs attention to systems, and one of the prime concerns of leaders becomes staying attuned to system dynamics, timing, and managing the boundaries of the system. A prime leadership skill in hosting is understanding and orchestrating the communication-verbal and nonverbal-emanating from our human bodies and from the media and settings in which we interact.
