By contrast, leadership can be considered a constituent of entrepreneurship in that in a volatile, complex, and ambiguous world, an entrepreneurial mindset and behaviours are essential for effective leadership.
Professor Richard Harrison is currently engaged in three research programmes on leadership and entrepreneurial processes. Papers from these projects have been published in the British Journal of Management, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Regional Studies, R&D Management, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, and Organizational Research Methods. He was involved in a special issue of Leadership on the theme of leadership and authority in a crises-constructing world (2015), and a special issue of Entrepreneurship and Regional Development focused on identity and identity work (2016).
Entrepreneurial Leadership
This research programme explores the role of leadership in the entrepreneurial process in social and corporate as well as new venture and family business contexts as it is reflected in business development (particularly in the financing of innovation and growth), and in the implications of research and theorising for practice and public policy. This includes:
- The analysis of entrepreneurial learning and leadership processes, including the investigation of identity and belonging in entrepreneurial and other organisational settings
- Studies of the role of entrepreneurship and innovation in emerging economies (notably China and sub-Saharan Africa)
- Examination of the nature of leadership and peace entrepreneurship in post-conflict societies (Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Kosovo)
- Investigations of the generation, protection, and exploitation of intellectual capital, including studies of academic entrepreneurship and technology transfer.
Richard has edited and co-edited several research handbooks on entrepreneurial leadership, published by Edward Elgar.
Gender, Leadership, and Identity Work
The project investigates the ways in which women construct their leadership identity through participation on a women-only leadership development programme. Identity work, (the development, revision, and maintenance of identity) can be shaped through training and development. Contemporary pedagogical theories lack coherent, theoretically based approaches to designing and delivering leadership programmes for women.
The research objectives are to explore the role of gender in the design and delivery of leadership development programmes, to investigate the gender dynamics involved in shaping, forming, and maintaining a leader identity, to examine the tactics and processes employed in the practice of leadership, and to identify the impact/effectiveness of leadership development.
Leadership and Crisis
The world is experiencing cyclical and cascading socially constructed crises (of capitalism, of ecology, of democratic institutions). It is also producing insistent and transforming construals of crises (from a credit crisis in the banking sector, to a fiscal crisis of nation states, to a political crisis of the Eurozone, to the fallout from the 'Arab Spring', and to the ongoing crisis in North-South relations). These constructed and construed formations of crises present an opportunity to change our way of knowing the world and allow us to pose radical questions to our concepts of leadership and authority, and to practices that seek to influence these crises.
However, the very notion of leadership suggests the possibility of containment and control that the increasingly 'liquid' or systemic contemporary world calls into question. The notion of leadership is traditionally associated with ideas of individual agency and control, which crises undermine or disrupt. So what forms of leadership come into being in such situations? These issues were explored in a Special Issue of Leadership in 2015.