An Ethnographic Study: The Ethical Work of Leadership: Doing and Making as Doing

This thesis investigates how the ethical work of leadership materialises as practices for VS practitioners as participants of Leadership Learning Clubs. I adopt a new materialist ontology, representing a shift toward a posthumanist approach to leadership and ethics, emphasising the entanglement of human and non-human actors in the ethical work of leadership. I further analyse how the research process itself, resulted in my own involvement in the ethical aspects of leadership experienced by participants. I use new materialist perspectives to help me to understand how the practices at the intersection of ethics and leadership materialise. Drawing from these perspectives, I examine how practices take shape. In particular, I engage with Karen Barad’s concepts of agential realism and responsibility as justice-to-come; Jane Bennett’s account of ethical responsibility; and Rosi Braidotti’s account of sustainability as ethical practice that is embodied and embedded. My methodological approach uses a new materialist ethnography, positioning me as an interactive participant rather than a detached observer. Participants included individuals at executive level, those responsible for fund raising, care delivery oversight, and contracted consultants, all contributing to leadership development within the sector. The LLCs were comprised of both small and large organisations, based in the United Kingdom and internationally. I identify three practices that materialise as the ethical work of leadership; the first practice of Becoming an Ethical Leader, enabled an understanding in the way that participants intra-acted (Barad, 2007) with previous experiences and learning as ethical responsibility. The second practice of Working Differently with Ethics enabled me to reveal practices of closing down relational leadership as an agential cut (Barad, 2007) and via Bennett (2001) and enchantment and disenchantment. Finally, the third, Practices at the Intersection of Leadership and Ethics, emerged as entangled, embodied and relational practices that materialise in leadership development and the research process, understood through Barad’s (2007) agential realism and Braidotti’s (2011) sustainability.