| This document explores the nature, scope, and products of transformational leadership by offering different means of explicating and understanding it as a creative practice. Rejecting the traditional approaches of trait theory, it proposes a much more comprehensive, sociocultural method for understanding transformational leadership as a creative practice of ecological scope which engenders products of an efficacious and moral nature at both individual and collective levels. The content of the document employs perspectives and considerations from a wide variety of sources: Creativity theory, Foucault's histories and Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, western literature and literary criticism, the myth of Orpheus, eco-literature, leadership studies, the Tao to ching, and social-cognitive theory comprise many of the main sources.; The structure and method of this dissertation is unusual, employing “post-modernist” techniques which challenge readers to engage in analogous connective or relational treatments of the material. Using sidebar textboxes, introductory quotations, political and social commentary cartoons, wide ranging footnotes and literary allusions, and an episodic, fictionalized autobiography, the document attempts not only to portray how to understand transformational leadership as a component of our ecologies of living, but also how to understand it as such by what it is not. Additionally, it attempts to model many of the practices it endorses, including but not limited to analogy, sociology, history, postmodernism, analogistics, narrative, and mythopoesis, while using premises and assumptions indebted to phenomenology, epistemology, various aspects of philosophy, historiography, semiotics, etymology, feminism, chaos theory and other -ologies, -eories, -itics, and -isms.; Highlights of the document include, among others, the role of play, networks of enterprise, deviation amplification, the import of notness, the nature and scope of bridging individualism and the individual with otherness, mythological and Arthurian motifs, analogical thinking, the panopticon, discipline and docility, and driving a VW bug. This document assumes that its readers will employ creative practices to help them understand the comprehensively subversive and emancipatory nature of transformational leadership.; This dissertation, in short, focuses on those who practice true transformational leadership, indeed those who are the major emancipators of humanity from slavery, misery, diasporas, culturally imbued social injustice, and inhumanity of ecological proportions. |
