3: Redefining Leadership Through the Commons: An Overview of Two Processes of Meaning-making and Collective Action in Barcelona

Leadership can be understood as transformation (Burns, 1978), mobilization (Heifetz & Sinder, 1988), and ‘the process by which “social order” is constructed and changed’ (Hosking & Morley, 1988, p. 90). Overall, in the leadership literature, when it comes to analyzing how these processes of transformation, mobilization, and construction of social orders unfold, scholars and practitioners have adopted a hierarchical approach based on the leader. This top-down and individualistic perspective of analyzing and practicing leadership results from the dominance of the charismatic leadership paradigm that still embeds the field of leadership studies (Spoelstra, 2018) and legitimizes the accumulation of power in a few hands (Tourish, 2013). However, in the last decades, leadership theories such as contingency, cultural, or power and influence theories have started to lay the groundwork for examining leadership as a process, and gradually the emphasis has been taken away from an individual and put on more distributed forms of leadership (Horner, 1997; Spillane, 2006). According to Horner (1997), “the focus of leadership research cannot be a specific person, even if that person is designated as the team leader, if a comprehensive understanding of the leadership process is expected” (p. 280).