“Leaderless leadership in radically decentralized organizations” – the article is out, published in The Routledge Critical Companion to Leadership Studies. I finally got hold of my physical copy of the book 😅
Thinking about the title of an academic article is often quite a struggle. It should entail the right key words and be informative about what the article is about. That should, typically, be an easy task. But it seldom is…
However, this time I think we hit the sweet spot: regardless of the reader, I think it becomes pretty clear what we are writing about.
The above title suggests that there is leadership even in leaderless organizations. Yet if one scratches the surface of the title a bit more, that is, starts thinking about it, it soon becomes clear that no matter how clear the title, it is just a generalization.
Despite all the technical wording in the abstract below, I think the main contribution we are making into understanding decentralized, self-managing organizations is introducing “the concept of community-led practices, where social practices function as formal and systematic collective leadership processes that support egalitarian ways of working”. – Social practices are commonly agreed ways of working in a peer-based fashion, for instance in decision-making, target setting or feedback (that we prefer to call ‘joint responsiveness’).
Thank you Johanna Vuori & David Collinson for cooperation!
A new article on the collective practices will, I hope, be submitted by the end of this year.
So here’s the abstract.:
Our chapter contributes to understanding the phenomenon of leadership in radically decentralised organisations (RDOs). We argue that in RDOs leadership is not a person, but a collective system where responsibility and decision-making are decentralised to allow potentially all to take care of the processes of organising. Sustainable RDOs are able to abolish hierarchy by relying on patterns, structures and practices that sustain egalitarian ways of working. They have avoided the risk of oligarchisation by designing holistic systems with an egalitarian-inducing infrastructure and a bundle of co-occurring social practices. We first analyse the terminology that refers to various forms of RDOs and problematise how decentralised organising is talked into being. The findings are then summarised into the concept of community-led practices, where social practices function as formal and systematic collective leadership processes that support egalitarian ways of working.
