Publications and Research

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2009

Abstract

For social change organizations working to address intractable social problems throughout the USA, tackling race may not only be unavoidable; it may represent a way to fully engage stakeholders in social change work. We argue that illuminating the relationship between race and leadership can advance our under- standing of how social change leadership happens in practice. We build upon scholarship that emphasizes the ways in which seemingly essentialist, intractable racial categories are actually mutable, and the simultaneous emergence of academic research calling attention to the constructed and collective dimensions of leadership. Using a constructionist lens to analyze narratives from 22 social change organizations and building six of these as in-depth cases, we document three distinct means of understanding race, explore how they help to do the work of leadership, and suggest ways in which they seem to move their work forward.

Comments

The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Leadership, 5(2), May, 2009 published by SAGE Publishing, All rights reserved. Available online at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1742715009102927.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.