Chapter 1: Theorizing Women’s Leadership as Praxis: Creating New Knowledge for Social Change

Social theories, like women and leadership theory, have had a complicated history. Academics debate the merits of theories, classify and define theories, and provide a wide range of processes for developing theories (see, for example, 1989 and 1999 Academy of Management Review special issues on theory building). It has been suggested that practitioners often do not take theories into account when making decisions about practice (Christensen & Raynor, 2003), possibly, in part, because theories are not always seen to produce practical knowledge (Kennelly, 2009). Theories have been called artificial creations (Weick, 1989) and ideological (Hannah, Sumanth, Lester, & Cavarretta, 2014), so it is easy to understand why many individuals, both practitioners and academics, tend to discount the value of theory in their work.