Scholars within the field of Leadership-as-Practice (LAP) address the way that individuals ‘transcend their own immediate embeddedness’ to achieve volitional coherence known as collaborative agency. The process of collaborative agency is described as inseparable from LAP, yet it remains a nascent field of enquiry requiring additional empirical research. This article presents an investigation of collaborative agency through an abductive case study using video ethnography and interviews. To interpret our results, we turn to the Japanese ideogram for ‘place’, known as ‘Ba’. Rather than a physical reality, Ba is considered an existential space in which leadership groups weave together to create and ripen collaborative agency. Ba guides us to look across and around a group and its socio-material practice. We find that collaborative agency is trans-subjective in nature and sits on a spectrum on which we identify the outer reaches, from one end where Ba is woven through to the other end, called Collapse. We suggest that the place of leadership is within the warp and weft of collaborative agency, including but not limited to a special place woven in Ba where collaborative agency is high and where the group reports they are able to transcend their individualism.

This article constitutes an interview between a new researcher of the field of Leadership-as-Practice (L-A-P), Jenny Robinson, with one of the co-creators of the field, Joe Raelin. It is dedicated to providing an update and refinement of leadership-as-practice “practice theory,” which has gone through a fair degree of transformation since this journal’s first article on the subject in 2008. The call for such an update is precipitated by the need for emerging L-A-P researchers to appreciate the subject’s conceptual boundaries for more consistent and integrated exploration. In particular, L-A-P claims to differentiate not only from other plural traditions in leadership but from other “as-practice” approaches in the wider management field. Some of the other distinctions covered in this article comprise the role of theory in L-A-P, its contribution to leadership research and leadership development, its connection to other related fields, and its phenomenological, ethical, democratic, and post-humanistic foundations.

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