Ledelse og autoritet i interaktion: En interaktionsbaseret undersøgelse af autoritet i ledelse i praksis

This dissertation is a study of how leadership as it is done in practice, in a complex and interdisciplinary context. The context is characterized by situations of differentiation and dilemmas. This dissertation sheds light on the practical leadership work that is carried out in the work of turning a building plan into an actual process of building something, in the given case-company. The dissertation shows, among other things, how authority can be considered a central aspect of doing leadership and, also, how this authority emerges and unfolds based on both formal, hierarchical (micro-structural) and lesser formal and hierarchical conditions. This points to a gap in literature, where authority is often focused on as either very hierarchical/positionally conditioned or something solely emerging as a result of interactions, and thereby, as a point of departure, independent of position. In the light of this discrepancy, I chose to re-visit authority in this dissertation as a central aspect of leadership.
The research is conducted as a case-study in which leadership and authority is investigated with great loyalty to the empirical data from practice. These data have been collected in a large Danish construction company that build buildings and construction projects and thereby functions as the context of his study. This context is characterized by a high degree of complexity, interdisciplinarity, dilemmas, and an unclear hierarchy of authority. This complexity that exists when working with the construction of a building project put things to their extremes, and the case company is therefore an optimal case for realizing and analyzing leadership and authority as it unfolds in practice.