Methodological crises and contextual solutions: An ethnomethodologically informed approach to understanding leadership

The view of context as something which restricts the range of research but is not an integral part of that which is being researched is implicit in many traditional approaches to leadership theory development. Some recent approaches have sought to address this by taking a more directly situated approach to the understanding of leadership, and by paying close attention to the practical accomplishment of leadership work within a given context. It is the premise of this paper, however, that there is still much work to be done in this important aspect of leadership research, and that considering this from a specifically methodological perspective may have a contribution to make. In support of this argument, the paper adopts the ethnomethodological notion of ‘mutual elaboration’ to explore leadership practices as irreducibly events in a social order. By placing context centre stage, and explicating the practice of leadership as an inherently contextual performance, it offers a relatively untapped approach to the understanding of leadership work and suggests the value of this approach in providing a rich resource of data for the development of innovative theory.