Impressionist stories of leadership followership nursing relationality movement encounter and withdrawal

Abstract

Relationships are at the heart of leadership followership. Nursing continues to grapple with leadership enactment in practice. Nursing research indicates the efficacy of leadership in relation to workplace cultures, workforce movement and patient safety. Moral imperative is declared in relation to nursing leadership. Moral transgression in healthcare systems however have been reported in Australia and internationally in relation to vulnerable populations accessing health services and, in some circumstances involving nurses and others providing healthcare. Responsible leadership, has over the past decade, developed into a new paradigm of thinking in the extant literature beyond nursing. Leadership and followership thought about in this way is truly relational, shared and characteristically entangled, and as such a driver for building sustainable, and truly responsive and mutually person focused healthcare services. According to Barad (2014), diffraction 'queers' binaries and calls for a rethinking of notions of identity and difference. Drawing on the work of Barad (2007) I have pursued an agential realist approach to explore the entangled nature of leadership followership in nursing to “imagine and accomplish an inquiry that might produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently” (Lather, 2013, p.635) Narratives are used as valuable heuristic forms that can set in motion multiple social and material forms that cooperate, come into conflict, and overlap, without claiming an ultimate cause. This diffracted inquiry draws on process philosophy, thinking and responsibility and integration as a different way of thinking about and illuminating differences that matter for people entangled in healthcare services.

Date of Award	2021
Original language	English
Supervisor	Karen Strickland (Supervisor), Patrick Crookes (Supervisor), Keith Lyons (Supervisor), Jenny Browne (Supervisor), Catherine Hungerford (Supervisor) & Denise Blanchard (Supervisor)