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This thesis is an autoethnographic inquiry into the identity work of leaders working in the public sector in Denmark. The research is about how degrees of freedom can be experienced when it is acknowledged that leaders are paradoxically both enabled and constrained through interdependencies with others. The main puzzle is about what is involved in the processes of leaders negotiating identity when thinking about the mutual constitution of individuality and sociality.
This research argues that identity work within leadership is based on contradictions and ambiguities as well as how leaders simultaneously form and are formed by social rules and norms. The inquiry illustrates the temporality of leadership identity. It emphasizes how the human capacity to adapt to different power relations comes with either the risk of indeterminacy and a weak sense of self or with the risk of determinacy and a weak sense of the other. Losing the paradoxical understanding of these interdependencies might result in either dogmatism or relativism. This research provides critical insight into both positions.
About the author
Mit ekspertfelt er ledelse og læring ift. udviklingen af den offentlige sektor. Mit fokus er på bl.a. tillidsreformen, social kapital, individuel- og organisatorisk kompetenceudvikling, forandringsledelse og innovation og kulturudvikling. Jeg er optaget af, hvordan ledelse kan udvikle sociale verdener, hvor medarbejdere og ledere tilsammen kan agere kompetent ind i en hyperkompleks foranderlig organisatorisk virkelighed.
Arbejdsområder:
Forskning i offentlig velfærdsledelse. Undervisning på Diplom I Ledelse - grundmoduler og valgmoduler, samt udvikling af skræddersyede organisationsudviklingsforløb bygget op om moduler fra Diplom i Ledelse.
