Leadership as practice: understanding the emergence of conscious coalescence through video ethnography

Rather than impose a normative view of what leadership should look like, new emancipatory ideas using process and practice encourage researchers to consider what is happening when people come together to create leadership. I am generally interested in the activity and agency from which leadership emerges and I locate this interest in the literature of Leadership-as-Practice (LAP). LAP considers that collaborative agency is inseparable from leadership. However collaborative agency relies on multiple individuals transcending their embeddedness, and yet this process is not well articulated, nor has it been studied in a manner that is congruent with the underpinning assumptions of LAP. In this thesis, my specific purpose is to uncover the processes by which individuals transcend their embeddedness, a process I call ‘Conscious Coalescence’. My guiding research questions are: What is the lived experience of participants when Conscious Coalescence emerges? And: How does Conscious Coalescence emerge (and not emerge) in groups of collaborative agents? My research demonstrates that Conscious Coalescence is a vibrant state that people recognise even if they cannot name it. Participants reported “all pinging off each other” and moments that were “kinda magical”. These exuberant expressions leave me in little doubt that they felt a shift, like a gear change, signalling an unspoken understanding of ‘‘an I that is we and a we that is I’’ (Hegel, 1977, sec.177). This powerful existential shift is more possible and more prevalent than might be imagined. It seems that Conscious Coalescence is not a once-in-a-meeting experience but might fleetingly arise and fade in micro segments. As a qualitative study, my aim is theory elaboration, drawing on and extending important ideas from research on LAP. In total, I seek to put forward eight contributions to the field of LAP along with a further contribution to Method based on my novel research approach