The Paradox of freedom in Everyday Leadership Practice - an Inquiry into the Identity Work of Developing Leadership in the Public Sector in Denmark

Abstract

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. Relying on a mixture of collaborative autoethnography and reflexive narrative inquiry, I research into my own practice of leading and facilitating leadership development. The research is problem-driven and based on an exploration of experiences of my interactions with the people I work with. The paradoxical approach to identity leads to a perspective on freedom, which acknowledges the ongoing interdependencies between individuals and their relationships with others. The understanding of freedom in this thesis is opposed to the idea of freedom as liberation from the constraining character of our relationships with others. I argue against an understanding of freedom from constraints and emphasize how freedom can be found within interdependent and constraining relationships. This research considers how I and other leaders, both formal and informal, can find degrees of freedom to engage with how we are continuingly both enabled and constrained and improvise within these entanglements. The inquiry emphasizes the importance of resonant relationships with others in the processes of negotiating identity based on the assumption that humans more fully recognize themselves in relationships with others. Resonant relationships and the perspective on the mutual interdependencies within the leadership identities that emerge might enable us to find ways to move on in everyday leadership practice. In this research, I suggest that the ongoing exploration of the emergent power relations, in which we get caught up, and the rhythms of work as navigation through time and space are important in understanding the emergent identities – regarding both the self and others. Through such inquiry, we might be able to negotiate and find greater room to manoeuvre, in this thesis emphasized as a position of being with oneself in another. Further, the research presents an argument of how contemporary idealisations about leadership and organizational life might create problems regarding our sense of freedom when leading. An important aspect of leadership is to explore the character of our interdependencies. Such an inquiry takes time, where the perceived need for speed within the organizational life can be a stumbling block. Further, the idealisation of individual freedom, that comes with the demand for self-management, builds on an understanding of autonomous individuals, and a perspective on humans as resources, which breaks with the paradoxical approach of this thesis. Paradoxically the experience of some degree of freedom comes, in the arguments presented within this thesis, by acknowledging the ongoing enabling and constraining character of the emergence of leadership identities.