definition of 'plenary' - full, complete, entire, absolute

Here we all are, back in the big room, the full jar, with an array of academics sat at the bottom of the room, the ranks of amassed practitioners stacked in a bank above them, waiting to discuss. What is practitioner oriented about this staging? What is full, complete, entire, absolute (dictionary definition of plenary) about this? Jonathan Gosling is asking "what benefit will come about, what are we adding to via our studies of leadership studies?" Are we closer to an anatomy of leadership via these efforts: what are the affordances of productions such as this conference and its wider discourse? So these questions, or proxies for these questions, have been posed to our august panel.

Keith Grint is starting: he's criticising comments from a critic of 'all this philosophic nonsense' rather well, using humour. The below the belt target that Keith has centred in his sights are the banks of airportainia books that are consumed on flights, at airport gates, in snatches of time where we're acting the travelling business person. What is the ineluctable draw towards normativity? Are we compromising ourselves, or rather, why do we compromise ourselves? It's as if there's a gigantic magnet pulling at our metallic clothes, at our suit of armor, drawing us inexorably towards normativity. Keith is naked in front of us: he's unmeshed himself from the suit - and receive a ripple of applause.

Robin Wensley is now in the pedagogic cockpit of this laboratory room 16. Most of the issues that can be posed about leadership research can be easily classed under the management debate. Robins is enumerating several issues that are true of both discourses, e.g. the role of the normative pull: what are our scholarly outputs; epistemology and ontology questions. It's only partly a Mode 1 and Mode 2 issue. We should be more interested in what is the specific nature of leadership knowledge? What is the balance between folk wisdom and 'scientific' knowledge? We cannot but engage in these debate, but there are some underlying differences in the nature of these knowledge. So what have scholarly outputs to do with this? Let's look at the annual UK consultancy business revenues - approx. £10 billion. UK b-schools, £1bn. RAE and research funding, £10m. So, we are "small bit players" in this game, based at least on these foundational figures. Or, we could look elsewhere for affordances: we should look at more than just stories; to look more carefully at which the argumentation is presented in particular fields. There are various ways of being critical and rigorous in our endeavours; but we should be doing more that just stories. And so the the 'ologies. A particular version is to argue that management knowledge is so context dependent that effectively management itself ia 'category mistate' It could be that this is even truer in the case of leadership"

Jean Hartley is staying seated: should we be contributing to theory or norative practice. We should be looking at both, says Jean. What are the ways to link theory to practice? PRAXIS is the best notion to explain this: theory informs practice and practice informs theory. Weick's notion of sense making is a good example of praxis. How about walking a tightrope, with a balancing pole, with theory on one end and practice on the other. Loose hold of either of these pole components and you'll fall to your (academic) death - in fact you're dead already [my comments, though I know Jean thinks this, so that's OK]. How annoying to have this simplistic bipolarity: this is Jean's point but my point to Jean. Practicing thinkers and thinking practicers - really Jean? Why do we uphold this distinction still, after all this time? Who's talking here, panel? Weick, and sense making or sense imposing? A dialectical process - is that all that's left to superglue theory to practice? Trouble with glue is you get it on your hands; don't get superglue on your hands cos you'll stick your fingers together: you'll fail in your enjoining intentions, but succeed in not using what is surely a normative solution to the T/P gap. Jean is talking about 'time' now, and now methodological - access to research fields and the kind of evidence we're able to collect. What is evidence anyway? And CONTEXT is important too - really? What has that added precisely?