'Unknowing' Leadership
This book treats language as the ethical infrastructure of leadership, through which relationships of knowledge, authority and responsibility are formed.
Combining relational leadership and linguistics, it develops ‘unknowing’ leadership, the discipline of acting without disguising partial knowledge as certainty while remaining answerable for what follows. Readers learn to notice how an inclusive ‘we’ can claim a decision made by a few, and how an invitation to contribute can leave the outcome untouched. The chapters move from narrative, silence and metaphor to organisational change, identity and compassion. The book also proposes relational care contracts to make hidden emotional work visible, and ethical re-entry to carry learning back into practice. Each chapter turns the analysis on the reader, asking what their own knowledge authorises.
It is written for leaders, educators, students and researchers willing to question how they lead.
Ofelia A. Palermo, PhD, PFHEA, is Associate Professor of Relational Leadership at Nottingham Trent University. She has published widely on leadership in everyday working relationships, including control, resistance and professional identity. Her work with co-authors on three continents examines how relational intentions succeed or fail in organisations and classrooms.
Annalisa Zanola is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Language Centre at the University of Brescia, Italy. An internationally recognised scholar, she publishes widely on applied linguistics, professional communication, public speaking, and academic writing, and contributes to the “Euro(pean)-Languages and Specialised Terminologies” at the University of Naples “Parthenope”.