Tough at the Top (Paperback)

The grounding of leadership theories in the practical doing of day-to-day leadership work is a vital, though often neglected, aspect of leadership research. This 'missing what' (Button, 1993) of leadership - the routine, day-to-day practices that constitute its doing - is the essence of the ethnomethodological approach taken in this book. With its emphasis on making visible the everyday, taken-for-granted practices of leadership work it offers the reader a 'unique adequacy' (Garfinkel,1967) in the practices of the study setting and explicates the accomplishment of leadership work 'from within'. Based on extended shadowing of college leaders, the book thus seeks to present a detailed understanding of the practical accomplishment of leadership work in the often neglected learning and skills sector. This book will be of interest to leadership practitioners who find the generalisation and abstraction of more theoretical approaches unrecognisable in relation to their own need to 'do leadership better', as well as to students and academics in the field who wish to draw on its rich resource of situated detail in support of theory development.