Title: ‘Reimagining leadership: the potential of place-based and collective leadership in the voluntary sector’
Editors:
James Rees Institute for Community Research and Development, University of Wolverhampton
Carol Jacklin-Jarvis Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership, The Open University
All too often the voluntary sector appears as an afterthought in both practice and academic discourses about place leadership, with implicit assumptions that the public sector and politicians are ‘in charge’. We believe this underplays the role that the sector plays in shaping place and its leadership and are developing a book proposal to more fully position the sector in the place leadership debate. Contemporary leadership theory, with its emphasis on the collective and on the distribution of leadership, provides one approach to re-framing the debate and re-positioning the voluntary sector as a key actor in place leadership. We have written more about our emerging understanding of the voluntary sector and place leadership here: https://www.vssn.org.uk/
Key questions we want to address are in the book are:
- What, conceptually, are the relationships between place, voluntary sector and leadership?
- Which characteristics of a place enable voluntary action to make a difference?
- What difference (if any!) does the voluntary sector make to place?
- How does voluntary action influence and shape place through sharing leadership with other actors — formally and informally?
- How and in what ways does voluntary sector leadership vary by place? How does the nature of places influence how leadership is practiced?
We invite abstracts for proposed chapters, including but not limited to:
- Chapters exploring the voluntary sector contribution to shaping place and its leadership
- Case studies that illustrate and extend understanding of the complex relationship between the sector, place and leadership
- Chapters that explore the leadership practice of place-based and place-focused voluntary sector organisations and the impact of that practice
- Chapters that explore the social interactions that construct place, with a particular focus on the part played by voluntary and community sector actors in those interactions
- International and comparative studies that highlight differences in the relationship between sector, place and leadership in different social and political contexts
Please send chapter abstracts of no more than 250 words to james.rees@wlv.ac.uk by January 13th, 2023. Following chapter selection, we will submit a full book proposal to Policy Press in early 2023.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Regards
Carol Jacklin-Jarvis and James Rees
James Rees
Reader and Deputy Director
The Institute for Community Research and Development
Mary Seacole Building
University of Wolverhampton
Wolverhampton
WV1 1AD
Twitter: @DrJamesRees
