Figure-Ground — Rethinking Leadership

In plain terms

Figure and ground is borrowed from perception: what stands out, and what recedes into background. Dominant leadership theory makes the individual the figure and the system the ground. The chapter dismantles that arrangement — neither the leader nor the context has a fixed essence, and each is producing the other.

What the chapter argues

From the abstract to Chapter Four: Figure-Ground
This chapter draws on Norbert Elias’s idea of the figuration and Henri Lefebvre’s account of the production of space to enhance understanding of the context(s) in which leadership operates - its “grounds”. These theorists help us see that it is a mistake to understand context as separate from leadership.
Instead of being a kind of container within which leadership happens, contexts are actively created, contested, and disputed. Leadership does not simply take place “in” space. It helps to produce space.

From the chapter itself

From Chapter Four: Figure-Ground
Leadership, if we reject the figure-ground view, has different tasks that may be in tension with each other. The first is spatial: to create and maintain the holding environment, the figuration within which difficult questions can be asked. The second is discursive: to refuse the premature resolution of those questions by comfortable narratives.

Related concepts

Terms you will meet in this chapter, kept in the author's vocabulary:

Figuration
Homo clausus
Production of space
Representations of space
Tidying
Amortiguador / shock absorber
Holding environment
Elenchus
Aporia
Premature closure
Exclusion

One short example

A question to sit with

In your situation, what is being treated as background that someone else would put in the foreground — and who benefits from that arrangement?

Where to go next

This lens is developed in Chapter Four: Figure-Ground.

Status: the abstract and the passage above are quoted directly from the manuscript · surrounding text is site-written · author review required