Abstract
The arts and cultural sectors are increasingly seen as holding out potential for new models of leaders and leadership. The discipline of leadership has thus become alive to the notion of drawing upon and learning from arts-based methodologies to improve practice and development. However, there remains a paucity of emphasis on leadership from and within the arts. This chapter provides an empirical account of how that can take place.
Using a narrative inquiry approach, the chapter explores the journey of a select cohort of arts practitioners from Southeast Asia and shows an emerging rich framework for leadership capacity building. In commenting on how the study evolved, the chapter provides insight into gaps in the theory and practice of leadership development within the arts.
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Notes
- 1.
The study at the center of this chapter, also known as Regionally Speaking is a unique model of engagement and capacity-building designed, developed, and led by Griffith University Professors Ruth Bereson (Dean Academic, Arts Education and Law Group) and Caitlin Byrne (Director, Griffith Asia Institute). Created in 2016 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the project focuses on building the critical capacity and connections of emerging arts practitioners from ASEAN to deepen regional understanding and connections, promote co-operative engagement, and strengthen their collective voice as cultural advocates and leaders across the region.
- 2.
The ASEAN Strategic Plan for Culture and the Arts 2016–2025 identifies its vision as building, “an ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community that engages and benefits the people and is inclusive, sustainable, resilient and dynamic.”
- 3.
Dr. Farish Noor took part in a workshop discussion with the participants hosted by The Asia Europe Foundation in Singapore in 2017.
- 4.
Here too we find a connection between the role of the arts practitioner the diplomat – the latter often referred to as a “constant gardener.” Donna Oglesby (2017) reminds diplomacy involves the caretaking “of an instinctual art wherein day-in day-out toil takes vision, commitment, technique, the right cultural material and time. To succeed they must cultivate feeling, because the personal is the ground in which the seeds they cast either germinate or fall fallow.” It is an enduring metaphor that recalls ancient philosophy of Socrates and Plato. Voltaire (1751) too famously urged that we must cultivate our gardens.
- 5.
Bolman and Deal (2003) identify the four frames of organizational leadership in the following way and order: (i) structural leadership; (ii) human resource leadership; (iii) political leadership; and (iv) symbolic leadership. For the purpose of this study we have adapted the order to reflect a logic more suited to leaders and leadership in a global context. Similarly, we have renamed human resource leadership to social leadership to reflect a community-oriented approach.
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Byrne, C., Bereson, R. (2022). Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia Pacific Region. In: Neesham, C., Reihlen, M., Schoeneborn, D. (eds) Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_37
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