'Theorising the Ordinary and Everyday of Leadership: Lessons from Modernist Literature and Virginia Woolf', a seminar by Prof Brigid Carroll (University of Auckland)

Theorising the Ordinary and Everyday of Leadership: Lessons from Modernist Literature and Virginia Woolf

Research in progress from Professors Brigid Carroll (University of Auckland) and Barbara Simpson (University of Strathclyde)

Abstract:

‘Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old. . . . Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’ (Woolf 1968: 188–9)

Critical leadership studies has long sought to displace the heroic, grandiose and exceptional assumptions that persist in much leadership research activity to both support and further more recent post-heroic, processual, practice, relational and collective approaches to locate leadership in the everyday, normative, run-of-the-mill organisational activity that is an inevitable and necessary part of all social processes including change, crisis and challenge-nonetheless such assumptions are surprisingly persistent. The dynamics of the ‘small and ordinary’ though, are subtle, slippery, and elusive and hence tend to often go unnoticed by researchers who tend to be drawn more to crises and extraordinary events where leadership exceptionalism can be more visible, striking and amenable to traditional research scrutiny. The search for ‘ordinary leadership’ thus invites a sensitivity to the happenings, movements, and changings, the ‘more-than’ that sits behind or aside to the grand gestures of leadership.

This inquiry turns to modernist literature which pioneered the capture of vibrant, luminous moments of realisation as embedded in, and inseparable from the ordinariness of the everyday. It thus seeks to contribute new insights from modernist writers-predominantly through Virginia Woolf- about how to capture the ordinary, to grasp the minutiae of everyday experience in the context of leadership studies. Three dimensions of the ordinary that modernist literature-as seen through the work of Woolf- offers other fields and particularly leadership studies are identified: 1) the significance of the impression and its challenge to representation 2) the relationship between heightened and prosaic experiences and 3) attention to the liminal and liminoid. Given this interest in the everyday and ordinary, this projects draws particularly from Woolf’s ‘self-writing’ which includes her memoir, journals, diaries and letters given those supplied both an ongoing focus and a reflexivity on the everyday and ordinary. 

This thinking to the leadership of Jacinda Ardern, former Prime Minister of New Zealand. The year 2025 marks her own point of ‘self-writing in her autobiography A different Kind of Power and in the recent documentary Prime Minister drawn from years of footage from her husband Clarke Gayford and offering perhaps unparalleled access to the ordinary and everyday activity of a world leader that is normally invisible. In both these sources the everyday and ordinary are an essential dimension and contributor to a leadership narrative that encompasses extraordinary crises and both national and global challenges. Ultimately this inquiry seeks to catalyse approaches that draw attention to the unseen, unnoticed, and constantly changing subtleties of the leadership process.

About the speaker:

Brigid Carroll is a Professor in the Department of Management and International Business and holds the Fletcher Building Employee Educational Fund Chair in Leadership. She teaches broadly in the area of leadership, organizational theory and qualitative research methods at undergraduate, postgraduate and executive level and does extensive cross sector leadership development work with corporate, community, professional, and youth organisations. In her development work Brigid has specialized in whole system, collaborative and cross organisation leadership development alongside a focus on leadership identity, mindset and practice. Increasingly she works with cross-faculty and interdisciplinary research and development teams. Brigid has recently begun a series of research and development work involving participatory, grassroots and adaptive governance, and complex, multi-sector collaboration.

Ongoing research themes revolve around identity work, power and resistance, leadership development, distributed and collective leadership and discursive/ narrative approaches. Ultimately Brigid is interested in leadership as a discourse, identity, and practice and in exploring how it is constructed and shaped between people, spaces, and artefacts in different organisational contexts. She has written recently on the management/leadership relationship, the re-theorisation of role, the dynamics of leadership development, leadership as practice, and the relationship of leadership to constructs such as authenticity, resistance, aesthetics, responsibility and learning.