Chapter 5: Enacting Leadership in the Favela: An Empirical Investigation Using a Dialogical Heuristic Framework

This chapter examines the emergence of leadership in a particular context in which wicked problems are prevalent and institutionalized: the favelas of São Paulo, Brazil. These spaces of exclusion reflect marginality, social inequality, ethnic division, and segregation (Imas & Weston, 2012). By taking a relational approach to the creation and development of leadership, we aim to contribute to the understanding of how distinct components of leadership create both opportunities and constraints for particular leadership practices to come to the fore and become institutionalized. Favelas foster particular ways of organizing associated with economic and social survival which we believe can inform the creation of several individual and collective identities, practices, history, and discourses (Imas & Weston, 2012). More specifically, favelas pose particular challenges for developing leadership as leadership needs to be constantly created in the face of significant odds. As community leaders and residents living in favelas face the significant challenge of securing infrastructural necessities for sustaining everyday life (Das & Walton, 2015), they engage in leadership practices through a mutual influence process. We believe that this work is instructive to those who develop leadership for organizations located in less extreme contexts which are becoming more exposed and sensitized to wicked problems in their daily routines (Grint, 2005, 2010; Rittel & Webber, 1973). Wicked problems are those that are complex, intractable, open-ended, and unpredictable (Alford & Head, 2017). To examine the creation of leadership to tackle wicked problems, such as those present in these favelas, we may be able to use these learnings in other contexts that also face wicked problems.