Jakob Rømer Barfod

The purpose of this chapter is to conceptualize leadership communication through the lens of a communicative approach to the constitution of organization (henceforth CCO). First, we note that to date relatively few leadership scholars have engaged with CCO. To address this lacuna, we select three current trends in leadership research, notably: the material, the discursive, and the post-heroic. We argue that, to a large extent, these trends are developing in silos and we suggest that taking a CCO approach to leadership can provide fertile ground for developing a synergy between these increasingly important approaches to leadership. Focusing specifically on the Montreal School's ventriloquial approach to CCO, and working from an illustrative analysis, we argue that ventriloquism can provide a lens that not only allows the researcher to consider the distributed network of actants (both human and other-than-human) that "do" leadership as part of everyday mundane communicative practice, but it also adds new insights to our understanding of leadership.

Transformational leadership has entered the doctrines of many militaries and has become a fundamental aspect of military training and an aspiration in military practice. However, prior research has not sought to analyze the in situ doing of leadership on combat zone service. To address this research gap, using video and audio-recordings of Danish soldiers on combat service in Afghanistan in 2018, this article takes an inductive and qualitative discursive approach to leadership. More specifically, it investigates the extent to which behaviors associated with transformational leadership are observable in the in situ practice of army teams. We present this article as exploratory research which analyzes what is happening in a limited number of cases to come up with tentative conclusions that suggest avenues for further research that may be investigated in more extensive studies.

Post-heroic perspectives on leadership, which approach leadership as process, practice and a relational phenomenon, have shifted the theoretical understanding from individual characteristics to significant so-called moments of leadership, where direction emerges, and actions are re-oriented and organized. However, despite considerable theoretical development, research struggles to explore these processes in detail. Utilizing video and audio recordings, in this article we present a systematic approach for analysing the production and realization of moments of leadership as they happen. We propose a four-step procedure which combines an interpretative stance, guided by a sensitizing concept, with an ethnomethodologically inspired inductive analysis of the subtle moves and mechanisms of the construction of social order in interaction. We illustrate the procedure using data from a study of high-risk military leadership, showing how deliberate shifts of analytical stance between the steps - from reliance on researcher sensemaking to a close focus on participants' own sensemaking, and finally to theoretical interpretation - enable both a unique assessment of the phenomenological nature of sequences selected for close analysis and support the development of theoretical contributions. The approach presented in this article enables a deep exploration of the realization of moments of leadership, complementing the existing emphasis on consequences of such moments of leadership. Such a detailed analysis of the realization of leadership offers new possibilities for empirically well-grounded theoretical developments of relational and processual perspectives.

Ledelse i militæret har en lang og stærk tradition, og som mange uden for militæret i årtier har ladet sig inspirere af. Ledelse i felten − Inspiration, læring og erfaringer fra ledelse i militæret dykker ned i erfaringer fra militære øvelser og operationer i henholdsvis Grønland og Afghanistan og sætter fokus på, hvad vi kan lære af militær ledelse. Gennem feltnoter belyser forfatterne, hvordan ledelse fungerer i barske situationer, hvor beslutninger kan betyde forskellen på liv og død, og hvor vigtige ledelsestemaer som tillid, forandringer og psykologisk tryghed sættes på spidsen.

Ledelse i felten tager udgangspunkt i den militære kontekst og fortæller om ekstreme situationer, der tydeliggør, hvorfor ledelse er vigtig. Målet er at inspirere og give et spændende indblik i en anderledes ledelseskontekst og i arbejdet som soldat, leder og forsker i felten. Bogen er ikke kun relevant for militærfolk, men er i lige så høj grad skrevet til ledere, konsulenter og andre praktikere samt studerende og undervisere.

High-risk military teams work in complex contexts. Soldiers in high-risk military teams need to cooperate to perform planned and unplanned tasks that require close coordination and clear communication. This cooperation can be demanding in itself, but becomes even more challenging due to the fact that it often takes place under difficult climatic conditions, time pressure and unfamiliar cultural conditions. At the same time, the soldiers must continuously adapt to possible changes in the tactical environment and relate to the demands of other stakeholders, such as foreign units and the local population. Furthermore, they are required to work closely with both other coalition partners and local military forces, in another language or through the use of interpreters. This thesis closely examines practice and how soldiers in highrisk teams coordinate actions through leadership, how – in their interaction in situ – they create meaning in the complex work context, and how they deal with various forms of irregularities and uncertainties.
The analyses in the thesis are based on various forms of empirical material with focus on in situ video recordings, supplemented with interviews of soldiers and teams and observations of and active participation in the soldiers' work activities. The empirical material has been collected in small units from the Danish defence operations in Afghanistan, with special focus on the deployment of a particular unit in 2018. The thesis takes an ethnomethodological perspective and is centred on three analyses that seek to answer how leadership is conducted by high-risk military teams in connection with the practical task solution prior to and during deployment in the field, including the handling of irregularities. Through micro-analyses – in particular in the form of multimodal interaction analyses of tactical deployments – the analysis chapters reveal how the soldiers, for example through routines and bodily interaction, coordinate and create direction and meaning in their daily, complex work context, and how the soldiers handle various unexpected problems in their work and the uncertainties created by these problems.
By studying the situated practices of high-risk military teams, this research project contributes to an extended understanding of how leadership in a military context is actually performed. It is concluded that the soldiers coordinate their actions through leadership by drawing on their military professional vision, thereby producing results. Across the analyses, it is shown how the body, speed, a well-developed role understanding, focus and innovative readiness constitute essential resources in the generation of leadership and thus are essential to be able to handle and create meaning in the sometimes-complex tactical situation. Theoretically, the thesis especially 8 contributes to the research areas on military leadership and leadership in interaction, and particularly to the sparsely developed practice-oriented branches of these research areas, by showing the situated and interactional practices that soldiers perform, how coordination, meaning and order are created through these practices, and how the situated practices are included as a normal part of the overall everyday practice.

The paper will outline and discuss how to conduct qualitative, up-close studies of military teams in action, by being embedded as a participant observer, and the possibilities and challenges of this kind of research. The purpose of the project is to analyze how leadership emerges in military high-risk teams where the soldiers are subjected to exceptional conditions. Work in high-risk environments is characterized by a complexity that makes it impossible to predict all scenarios, as an unexpected or unforeseen mistake or incident can affect all aspects of the organization in unexpected or unforeseen ways. The subject is a Danish tactical military unit consisting of eight teams in action in Afghanistan, in total about 80 individuals. The research project takes as its starting point leadership in several Danish military high-risk teams. Different units are embedded and the research takes place while conducting tactical operations, and in the periods between conducting actual operations. I take on the role of an active team member, and when possible I conduct interviews ‘on the move’, and recordings from a helmet camera is used in follow-up interviews after action. Being in the beginning of a three years research project, the focus of this paper will in particular be on methodology and a discussion of some of the advantages of this type of research, including what this type of research is able to shed light on, but also some of the issues which obviously are difficult to address.