What Twenty-First Century Leadership Can Learn from Nineteenth Century American Literature

What Twenty-First-Leadership Can Learn from Nineteenth-Century American Literature aims to narrow the gap between leadership theory and practice, offering an account of how leaders in organizations can improve their practice by drawing on the literary imagination.

Eastman analyses how business students can use literary fiction to find solutions to workplace problems, how they can engage with fictional writers’ ideas about work, morality, and the self, and how they can articulate their own ideas about fostering a deeper connection between leaders and their teams in the workplace. The book contributes to leadership studies by setting out the case for using literary fictional texts to explore leadership scenarios. It has several purposes. The first is to provide educators with ideas on how to use fiction with students following a business curriculum. The second is to encourage industry to help their employees to become better able to analyse and synthesize complex and possibly conflicting ideas as well as how to articulate these ideas with clarity. A third purpose is to demonstrate how university and industry can work together.

The work presents an alternative orientation for leaders predicated on the conviction that reading fiction will support students in becoming better at thinking about working relationships and at understanding other people, and it provides the underpinnings of a unifying theoretical framework for learning through fiction in a professional context and aims to demonstrate that reading about how fictional characters respond to the challenges of life supports students to formulate their own innovative leadership thinking.

Christine Eastman, Teaching Fellow, Lancaster University

Dr Christine A. Eastman is a Teaching Fellow at Lancaster University. Her research centres on professional practice, leadership, assessment innovation, and the re-conceptualisation of continuing professional development. Dr Eastman contributes to the leadership programme at Lancaster University where she lectures on the integration of American literature into a business curriculum as well as contribute to various leadership initiatives through a literary lens. She is the author of Coaching for Professional Development: Using Literature to Support Success (Routledge, 2019), Improving Workplace Learning by Teaching Literature: Towards Wisdom (Springer, 2016) and editor of Transforming Sales Leadership: Real Stories from Sales Practitioners (Routledge, forthcoming 2024).