Making sense of middle leadership: community, power and practice

Making Sense of Theories of Leadership for Capacity Building

Leadership is defined as an ability to influence a group toward the achievement of goals.(1) There has been an explosion of literature on leadership. In 1999 alone, more than 2,000 books on leadership were published;(2) some of them even repackaging Moses and Shakespeare as leadership gurus.(3) Even though so much has been written about leadership, there is no consensus on the right mix of qual...

Power: Making sense of an elusive concept*

The concept of power is a core term in political science, and an important one for other social sciences as well. According to Elster it is “the most important single idea in political theory, comparable perhaps to utility in economics” (Elster 1976, 249). Indeed political science can be conceived mainly as the study of power phenomena (Mokken and Stokman 1976, 47). Yet the discipline seems to ...

Power, agency and middle leadership in English primary schools

The relationship between sense of power, sense of status and status seeking style with self-beneficial and other-beneficial unethical decision-making

Unethical decision making could be divided to selfish or self-benefical and other-benefical forms. The aim of this study was to investigate the differential rehationship between sense of power, sense of status and status seeking styles ( dominance and prestige) with two forms of unethical decision-making.The result of this study supported the conceptual distinction between two forms of unethica...

Learning to Improve Software Processes: Making Sense of Practice

Software Process Improvement (SPI) programs are frequently considered to be planned in nature. However, there is recent evidence to suggest that SPI can be understood as a form of learning. Drawing on the organizational learning literature, this paper proposes an active learning perspective of improvements in processes. This view recognizes the various actors in the project to be reflective in ...