Leadership Theory, 2nd Edition

2Critical Perspectives as Interpretative Frameworks

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

—DOUGLAS ADAMS

If leadership is the sense that we make of it, then perception is a powerful arbiter of the reality we construct. This positions our understandings of, experiences with, and enactments of leadership as necessarily delimited by the perspectives we hold. These perspectives often represent informal theories we carry with us that frame what is defined as “normal.” They also reflect broader socialization systems that teach us ...