Tough at the Top

The grounding of leadership theories in the
practical doing of day-to-day leadership work is a
vital, though often neglected, aspect of leadership
research. This missing what (Button, 1993) of
leadership the routine, day-to-day practices that
constitute its doing is the essence of the
ethnomethodological approach taken in this book.
With its emphasis on making visible the
everyday, taken-for-granted practices of leadership
work it offers the reader a unique adequacy
(Garfinkel,1967) in the practices of the study
setting and explicates the accomplishment of
leadership work from within . Based on extended
shadowing of college leaders, the book thus seeks to
present a detailed understanding of the practical
accomplishment of leadership work in the often
neglected learning and skills sector. This book will
be of interest to leadership practitioners who find
the generalisation and abstraction of more
theoretical approaches unrecognisable in relation to
their own need to do leadership better , as well as
to students and academics in the field who wish to
draw on its rich resource of situated detail in
support of theory development.