Enabling leadership: Whitney Young, Jr as dramaturgical director of the US civil rights movement

Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018) presented a persuasive argument for recognizing the concept of enabling leadership as a critical form of leadership for adaptive organizations. This study aims to narratively explore the concept of enabling leadership in the context of social complexity.

To explore how leaders enable adaptive processes, Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018) called for future research using in-depth case studies of social actors centered on emergence in complex environments. In this in-depth case study, the authors pursue theory elaboration by using a form of analytically structured history process to analyze primary and secondary sources.

During archival research of Whitney Young, Jr’s largely overlooked and misunderstood leadership in the historic social drama of the 1960s US civil rights movement, the authors discovered compelling evidence to support and extend the theoretical arguments advanced by Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018).

The reflexivity associated with interpretive case approaches confronts the issue of subjectivism. The authors ask readers to judge the credibility of their arguments accordingly.

Using a relational leadership-as-practice lens, the authors interpret the dramaturgical performance Whitney Young, Jr directed to facilitate coherent emancipatory dialogue, affect the social construction of power relations and enable the adaptive space needed for social transformation to emerge.