Symposium Review: 25th Anniversary of Moral Boundaries by Joan Tronto

The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. By Virginia Held. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 220p. $45. In her latest book, Virginia Held elaborates on themes from previously published articles to explicate and defend the ethics of care. For those unfamiliar with this well-developed tendency of feminist thought, she reviews its evolution from the 1980s writings of Sara Ruddick, Carol Gilligan, and Nel Noddings to the more recent work of theorists including, among many others, Eva Kittay, Annette Baier, Joan Tronto, and Selma Sevenhuijsen. Held also underlines the differences between the ethics of care and dominant moral and political perspectives, including Kantian universalism, utilitarianism, liberal contract theory, and virtue theory. She proposes that care is, compared with justice, the more basic value, on the grounds that society can exist without the latter but not without the former. She recommends that men and women participate equally in care activities; that care infuse citizen as well as familial relations; and that society beat back the imperializing thrust of the market ethos and the conflict-mongering thrust of the militarized state to improve the well-being of children, the elderly, the sick and disabled, the community, culture, the environment, and deprived regions of the world.

The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global

This article presents a constitutive approach to the study of organizational contradictions, dialectics, paradoxes, and tensions. In particular, it highlights five constitutive dimensions (i.e., discourse, developmental actions, socio-historical conditions, presence in multiples, and praxis) that appear across the literature in five metatheoretical traditions—process-based systems, structuration, critical, postmodern, and relational dialectics. In exploring these dimensions, it defines and distinguishes among key constructs, links research to process outcomes, and sets forth a typology of alternative ways of responding to organizational tensions. It concludes by challenging researchers to sharpen their focus on time in process studies, privilege emotion in relation to rationality, and explore the dialectic between order and disorder.

Contradictions, Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizations: A Constitutive Approach†

Consumption and Identity at Work.

Learning to lead.

Leadership development theory and practice is increasingly turning its gaze on identity as a primary focus for development efforts. Most of this literature focuses on how the identities of participants are strengthened, repaired and evolved. This article focuses on identity work practices that are underdeveloped in the literature: the deconstruction, unravelling and letting go that can be experienced when working upon one's self. We group these experiences, among others, under the conceptual term identity undoing' and, based on findings from an 18-month ethnographic study of a leadership development program, we offer five manifestations of how it can be experienced. Through foregrounding the undoing of identity, we are able to look more closely at how power relations shape the leadership development experience. In order to raise questions and propositions for leadership and its development we use a micro-sociological and interactionist approach to explore the interplay between identity and power.

Identity undoing and power relations in leadership development

That leadership development is a contested terrain, like any organizational terrain, can scarcely be considered a new idea, yet research into the intricacies of resistance in this context is very much in its infancy This article takes recent critical scholarship on resistance as its starting point to explore the interdependencies of power, resistance and struggle in a leadership development environment Drawing on extensive online interactions collected from an 18-month, cross-sector programme with emergent leaders, this article asks whether the different stakeholders in leadership development could benefit from a more open exploration of power and resistance Such dynamics offer new insights into the relationship between participants and facilitators and raise a series of alternative questions, challenges and strategies for leadership development

Helen Nicholson

Papers

Identity undoing and power relations in leadership development

Resistance and struggle in leadership development

Essay: so you want to be authentic in your leadership: to whom and for what end?

International Collaboration