Making Common Sense: Leadership as Meaning-making in a Community of Practice

People in Positions of Authority: A New View of Five Concepts

We are now better able to say what we mean when we talk about leadership as if it were meaning-making in a community of practice. We refer to leadership as a social meaning-making process that takes place as a result of activity or work in a group, instead of referring to leadership as a social-influence process in which individuals get others to engage in activity or work. We mean leadership as the process of connecting people to one another and to some social activity, work, enterprise. We mean leadership as that subspecies of culture-building that arises in communities of practice. We speak of leadership as flowing from meaning instead of meaning as flowing from leadership. We refer ...