Page 403 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

Chapter VI: Implications for Idealized Leadership and Change

Introduction

The data detailed in Chapter IV and the theoretical propositions introduced and interpreted

in Chapter V offer a detailed examination of how Community Conversation participants live and

experience Metasphere represented within their communities through the ways dialogue, tension

and disagreements are handled individually and as a group. The research examined Metasphere in

four civic dialogue settings by focusing on the Albany New York Community Conversation series

where participant gathered to discuss the difficult topics of implicit bias, race and racism. The

foregoing research and analysis, embedded in grounded theory research and what is called PALAR

methodology and dimensional analysis, provides several leaderships and change implications that

are participatory, locally based, and in furtherance of community-based distributive leadership.

Implications for leadership and change emerging from the analysis of participant and facilitator

actions resulting from civic dialogues on the topic of race are best described within the context of

the four theoretical propositions. The propositions, taken together, describe a form of leadership

based on the collective and actions undertaken by individuals who gathered out of a common

interest, although not mutual interest, to seek and explore bias, race and racism from a local

perspective. This chapter includes implications for evolved leadership and change resulting from

research that addressed this form of civic dialogue in the public sphere, areas for further study, and

study conclusions. The implication for leadership and change addresses three areas: the importance

of gathering in the public sphere and two characteristics of leadership that exemplify the work of

civic dialogue participants and facilitators; leader-as-exemplified and relational leadership. This

idea mirrors similarity to the concept of Mahatma Gandhi’s dictum “You be the change!”

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