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1.4 A Brief Sociological Analysis of Leadership

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To facilitate the examination of leadership from a sociological perspective, it must be recognized that leadership studies owe a debt to Weber’s concept of bureaucracy as a functional means of shaping employees into a coherent group of efficient service providers (Hatch, 1997). In fact, it is difficult to think of a more social act than that of leadership, since it could not exist without the relationship between a leader and her/his followers. Further, leadership is a dynamic interaction that appears in all societies (Hackman and Johnson, 2000). In spite of the fact that leadership literature abounds, however, authoritative definitions for the terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ have yet to be widely embraced. Uhl-Bien’s (2006) Relational Leadership Theory approaches the complicated discussion of leadership by differentiating between the study of leadership ‘effectiveness’ and her focus on the ‘relational processes by which leadership is produced and enabled’ (p. 667, emphasis in the original). From this focus, she calls for a more sociological examination of the contexts within which leadership develops. Elliott and Stead’s (2008) study of a group of women leaders took such a sociological perspective, and concluded that this ‘sociological lens’ was better suited to explorations of leadership outside of the contexts within which it has traditionally been housed (p. 178). Postmodern leadership studies have thus seen the advent of complex and adaptable theories of leadership, creating a growing chasm between traditional positivistic definitions and ‘new ideas about the nature of reality and of life’ (Barker, 2001). Most recently, leadership has come to be understood as a ‘moment of social relations’, in which a group of people are moving towards a common goal, and during which leadership may appear in one of many forms (Ladkin, 2010).

Rural Women in Leadership

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