Enno Freiherr von Fircks – författare

The present work discusses the phenomenon of conservativism from a qualitative, cultural-psychological perspective. As such, the text breaks with current mainstream research about political ideologies wanting to assess a political culture within the simple administration of a questionnaire. The SpringerBrief will oppose such a perspective trying to assess how the conservative-minded person will structure space and time in peculiar ways. In the first part of the study, participants were invited to reflect about how they preserve or conserve meaning in various activities whereas the second part of the study tried to shed light onto how something preservable or conservable comes into being and what it actually makes it preservable. Here, an autoethnographic study revealed that something becomes meaningfully preservable when it satisfies multiple demands of the Self as well as of the environment. Readers will realize the insufficiency of the positivistic attitude analyzing conservativism from a simple quantitative perspective, and researchers are shown how political ideologies or cultures can be assessed ecologically – something that has not yet been undertaken. This leads to an appeal for scientists to study the phenomenon of conservativism more wholistically.

The present work introduces innovative research on Symbolic Action Theory, blending theoretical insights with practical applications in psychology. It revisits Ernest Boesch''s foundational concepts in Symbolic Action Theory and proposes further advancements in the field. These contributions pave the way for theoretical refinements as well as applied research aimed at enriching clinical, educational, and life-philosophical interventions both within and beyond academic contexts. This book is designed to engage psychologists from diverse specialties while also serving as a valuable resource for practitioners operating in clinical and non-clinical settings alike.

This book presents a new theoretical and methodological framework to study leadership from a cultural-psychological and developmental perspective. This framework includes a new theory – called Small Act Psychology – and a new methodology to analyze leader-follower interactions in irreversible time. This perspective is inspired by current microgenetic (aktualgenese) developmental research within the wider domain of Cultural Psychology. Drawing on Kurt Lewin''s field-theory, E.E. Boesch''s Symbolic Action Theory and L.S. Vygotsky''s semiotic theory, the present work defines leadership socially, and hence from a qualitative perspective, contributing to the development of a cultural-psychological theory of leadership.

This new approach seeks to break with the current prevailing paradigm of the leadership research centered round the big-hero myth and interpreting leadership as a personal quality of a given person.  It also aims to feel a gap within the general literature about qualitative leadership by proposing an encompassing and wholistic theory and methodology to make sense of leader-follower interactions from a developmental perspective.

After presenting this new theory and methodology, the book also presents the results of empirical ethnographic and autoethnographic studies in which the new framework was applied. These studies provide not only empirical proof how leadership can be understood from a field-theoretical perspective but also show how leadership trajectories can change depending on specific interventions, providing evidence to the developmental nature of leadership as a social phenomenon.

Studying Leadership from a Microgenetic Perspective: Towards a Cultural-Psychological Theory of Leadership will be of interest to organizational and educational researchers, as well as qualitative psychologists in any domain of psychology striving for a theory that makes sense of leadership dynamically, and developmental psychologists interested in seeing how developmental approaches can be adopted in the study of a wide range of social phenomena.