ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how leadership and identity play out in pure practice. It deals with identity as intimate, intuitive, and resolutely "common", albeit fluid and ambiguous in leadership moments and episodes, and demonstrates how seeing and working in identity ways can shape and impact leadership practice. The chapter builds around an interaction about a high tech, high growth, rapid pace, entrepreneurial and medium-sized business. Both the team leader and this interaction leader were chosen by the organization as exemplars of the kind of leadership that occurred in this context. The chapter highlights three constitutive practice elements that traditionally have not been strong in identity research: physical space, routines and artifacts. It proposes that identity becomes center-stage when the focus moves to how leadership emerges from the practice of people connected to each other through their work.
