Search results

The paper discusses sustainability, in terms of creating purposive social value, which is increasingly an inherent characteristic of project leading and doing. Consequently, project scholars are currently grappling with what purposive social value creation means to initiation and execution of projects.

In line with recent development we offer reflections on the empowering nature of leadership enabling social value, its underlying forms of power and the dilemmas involved. Our theorizing is based on recent developments in literature on the value of sustainability in the context of projects, combined with literature on project leadership and reflections on the processes of power.

Based on a process ontology, we suggest that leadership for purposive social value creation calls for a rethinking of leadership as an inclusive patterning of actions, making it relational, boundary spanning and socialized in nature and essentially entailing a politics of representation.

The paper is conceptual, so it has all the limitations of any conceptual paper that innovates a new field of inquiry. It is a not a hypothetic-deductively structured paper but is abductive in nature, combining disparate literary studies in a conceptual framework for further inquiry.

The legitimacy of leadership for purposive social value does not reside in the singular formal position of a project leader but in its broader vesting and representation.

The paper calls for a rethinking of the nature of project leadership power relations, processes oriented toward the achievement of purposive social value and representation of interests.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how purposive social value can be enabled by socialized and distributed project leadership that represents a broad-based and coherent conception of interests.