Posthuman Leadership and the Role of Computational Objects

Leadership is a central topic in business and one in which organisations invest heavily. Despite the tremendous influx of computational objects into the workplace and their use as part of the operational framework through which organisational life is enacted, little empirical research exists that explores the relationship between leadership practice and said objects. This study helps to close this critical gap in both practical and theoretical knowledge. Through an interrogation of leadership practice and their enactments with computational objects across a range of situational and comparative empirics, this research develops three original theoretical contributions. First, it presents and develops a range of roles through which computational objects are enmeshed within leadership practice. Second, the study proposes a novel posthuman perspective that attempts to address a historic privileging of the human, positing a disjunction of responsibility from authority. And third, it theorises leadership as a processual phenomenon produced through citationality in material-discursive practice. Through an ethnographic work practice study, this research contributes an original articulation of a posthuman, practice-based theory of leadership not fully accounted for by received conceptions.