Abstract
All leaders are embedded in a community context. In this book, the authors consider leaders in organizational contexts. This chapter provides a historical literature review of key developments with regard to academic and practitioner theorizing about organizational contexts of business leaders, the main body of the chapter being structured around organizational mission, strategy, structure, culture, and organizational lifecycle. This chapter provides an outline of the growth of the strategic planning area within organizations which typically emphasized rationality and employed analysis rather than synthesis. The key schools of thought that have evolved over the past six decades or more range from the informal design school which gradually ceded ground to the emergent and more formalized strategic planning school. There have since been a number of others such as the cognitive school, the learning school, the political school, the cultural school, the environmental school, and the configuration school.