ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on Leadership-as-Practice, a new movement in leadership research and practice destined to shake the foundations of the very meaning of leadership in the worlds of both theory and application. Lucia Crevani and Nada Endrissat provide a comparative explanation of the leadership-as-practice movement to help frame the book as well as to enable prospective researchers to understand the promise and challenge of conducting research from an L-A-P perspective. The book looks at leadership-as-practice from the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, and especially from "Hermeneutics". It explores some of the undiscovered elements of leadership practice, looking in particular at how the design of material elements contributes to the achievement of leadership, defined in terms of directing, shaping, and ordering activities. The book illustrates some prospective interventions in dialogic training, using skilled facilitation and what is called the "polyphonic" reflecting team.
