Leadership and the role of computational objects

I completed my full doctoral proposal today, submitted it, and will be defending it on June 1, 2012. For those of you who have been reading this blog, I have used it primarily as a means to store quotations from the books and papers I have been reading in the process of preparing the proposal.

Below is the abstract from my proposal. If anyone has any questions about the research, please feel free to contact me directly.

Leadership is a central topic in business and one that organisations invest heavily in. Despite the tremendous influx of computational objects in the workplace and their use as part of the mediating framework through which organisational life is enacted, very little empirical research exists exploring the relationship between leadership practice and computational objects. This represents a significant gap in both practical and theoretical knowledge the present research will contribute toward closing. The proposed exploratory study seeks to enquire, scrutinise, and analyse the phenomena of leadership practice and its associated forms of mediation to both understand and highlight its ramifications. Through an anthropologically-grounded work practice study, it seeks to make a contribution toward a theory of leadership that includes the role of computational objects.