Date:         Fri., 1 Dec 2006 16:09
Sender:     ILA Discussion List <ILA-EXCHANGE@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU>
From:        Jim Ulrich <ulrich at duq dot edu>
Subject:     Re: Academic Legitimacy for Leadership Studies

Barbara (in response to your Nov. 28 post) -

I think it could be fruitful to investigate further the historical struggles scholars in other emergent fields have experienced in their efforts to gain recognition as a valid discipline in the academy. Your insights into the interdisciplinary nature of leadership studies, as well as to its ancient past, are indeed trenchant and, I think, right on the money.

One field that I believe could prove instructive for us is design studies. In fact, I think there are close parallels between design as process and the phenomenon of leading. Design can be conceived of as the transformation of the material world; in the broadest sense, leadership concerns itself with the realization of preferred futures, including the transformation of social and material realities. I have tried to draw out some of the parallels I see between leadership and the design process at the links on the bottom of this page: http://www.inflectionpoints.com/ILA.

In the early 1980s, Nigel Cross, a design educator, framed the challenge for the then emergent field of design studies, situating "designerly ways of knowing" in what he called a "third culture." The other two cultures are the arts & humanities and the sciences - an allusion, no doubt, to the Snow-Leavis controversy between literary intellectuals and scientists (see, e.g.,  http://academics.vmi.edu/gen_ed/Two_Cultures.html ).

The importance of understanding the epistemic foundations of these three cultures is especially relevant to educators, be they design educators or leadership educators. Try tracing the argument put forward on the following website for placing design studies in a general education curriculum, but instead substitute the notion of "leaderly ways of knowing": http://www.got.net/~silvia/designerlyone.html. This could be one approach to make the case for including leadership in an undergraduate curriculum and recognizing it as a systematic body of (applied) knowledge.

In the academy, I think we do have (at least) two perspectives on leadership, one generally rooted in the positivist, social science / organizational behavior literature, and a differing one, rooted in the liberal arts. So when we go to our university councils and propose creating a minor or major in leadership studies, our colleagues are filtering such a concept through their respective sets of discipline-bound lenses. It is, in effect, cross-cultural communication. I think unless you're on a campus where a critical mass of faculty have skills in interdisciplinary inquiry, a lot is probably going to get lost in translation.

Following Whitehead's schema for the ways of literacy culture, scientific culture, and technical culture in the educational enterprise (see n. 5 on the preceding web page), leadership as practice can be most effectively taught when we recognize that it is neither art nor science, but craft - an integration of both art and science. Schön (The Reflective Practitioner, 1983) studied how architects and other designers actually solve problems. Leaders and followers together 'solve' social problems by co-designing (collaboratively crafting) 'solutions.' As a leadership educator who sees leadership as design process, I welcome all further dialogue about the implications of such a view for the practice of leadership education. 

Jim Wolford-Ulrich, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor and Team Leader, Leadership Faculty

School of Leadership and Professional Advancement

Duquesne University

Pittsburgh, PA 15282

Phone: 412-396-1640

Fax: 412-396-4711

E-mail: ulrich at duq dot edu

Web: http://www.leadership.duq.edu/

Bio: http://www.leadership.duq.edu/home/main.cfm?SID=185&L=U&facID=14

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Wolford-Ulrich, J. (2006, Dec. 1). Academic Legitimacy for Leadership Studies. Message posted to the Discussion listserv of the International Leadership Association, archived at http://listserv.umd.edu/.

Original post by Barbara Mossberg:

Date:         Tues., 28 Nov 2006 11:05
Sender:     ILA Discussion List <ILA-EXCHANGE@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU>
From:        Barbara Mossberg <mossbergb at aol dot com>
Subject:     Re: Academic Legitimacy for Leadership Studies

I am remembering the efforts to establish the "legitimacy" of emergent fields of the 60s and 70s such as Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, Film Studies, Popular Culture, etc. Those were momentous times. I recall how these discussions could fragment traditional departments historically called "English," for example, or "History," and splinter off into frequently successful entities with their own cultures, journals, conferences, etc. I also recall the recurrent debates about the field of American Studies throughout the 40s, 50s, and on up to the present. Leadership studies to me has some of these issues, since it is interdisciplinary, and can be seen as part of education, business, cultural studies, sociology, etc. People come to it from different fields with different kinds of texts and questions even about scholarship. All new fields, built upon existing fields and drawing together kinds of knowledge from various sectors, and in the process creating new pathways for knowledge, endure and are strengthened by the need to debate a field's utility and value and legitimacy and move it forward: it keeps us thoughtful and it is energizing not to be able to take one's work in a field for granted. But what I would argue is distinctive about the field of leadership, and am writing about currently, is that leadership is the most ancient of studies as well as an emergent one. Academe itself came out of leadership studies, literally. So I would ground a discussion of the field as rooted deeply in a global, multicultural and ancient past.

Barbara

Dr. Barbara Mossberg

President Emerita Goddard College

Senior Scholar James McGregor Burns Academy of Leadership

University of Maryland

Director and Professor Integrated Studies

California State University Monterey Bay

100 Campus Center

Seaside, CA 93955