Transforming Leadership in the California Literature Project: Ethnographic Narrative as True Fiction

With rare exception leadership scholars and practitioners focus on individuals as leaders. However, to investigate leadership only through the activities of individual leaders is to miss its essential feature, namely, that leadership is a particular kind of relationship in which leaders and followers create changes. Relationships are difficult to describe because researchers cannot observe them directly; instead, they must infer them indirectly. This study investigated leadership relationships in the California Literature Project. An exploration of leadership relationships required that I implement research methods that would support the construction of detailed descriptions of transforming leadership processes. These methods developed in part out of three background assumptions about social science research: (1) social truths are socially constructed and represent only a partial reality; (2) the narrative paradigm and related concepts of true fiction and story shape how a researcher reads and interprets the experiences in the field and, later, authors the text; and (3) the researcher's experiences in the field setting and the written reconstruction of those experiences constitutes two distinct components of the research process. To that end, following an emergent design, qualitative study format, I became a participant observer for a year at the California Literature Project, in which collaborative leadership is part of the organization's stated methods of operation. I attended a project academy and regional summer institute and conducted informal, open-ended interviews with selected members. From my field notes, transcripts, and selected memory, I then reconstructed a translation of the field experiences into an ethnographic narrative of collaborative leadership relationships. The narrative depicts aspects of influence relationships among leaders and followers who intended real changes that reflected their common purposes. From the narrative I develop a leadership framework under the headings leadership, intending changes, common purposes, and influence and power. As a result this narrative contributes to a new metaphor--relationship--for reconceptualizing leadership as collaborative, nonhierarchical and episodic in nature.

Name thesis:degree_name

EdD Doctor of Education

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation: Open Access

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Education

Year dc:date.available

1994

Author dc:creator

• Davies, Jon S., EdD

• California Literature Project
• collaborative
• Ethnography
• leadership relationships
• Leadership studies
• narrative
• transformational leadership

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digital.sandiego.edu/dissertations/591

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digital.sandiego.edu:dissertations-1596