Shaping Leadership for Today: Mary Parker Follett’s Aesthetic

Abstract

In this article we explore a view of Mary Parker Follett’s leadership writings that adopting an aesthetic lens un folds. Our approach leads us to images of circularity as experienced in both our own sensory response to her arguments as paradoxical, and as an image of her intellectual abstractions. This aesthetic inquiry values a paradoxical both-and over a bipolar either-or approach, and demonstrates that Follett’s pragmatism stems from her notion of integration and her use of circularity as a recurring leitmotif. Follett argues that leadership integration is contingent on a continual review of the total situation in all its complexity and fluidity. This leads to paradoxical notions of the subordinate role of the leader in organisational processes and the pre-eminence of leadership as an activity that concerns all actors regardless of their place within a hierarchy.