Call for papers for a Special Issue of The British Journal of Educational Technology

e-LEADERSHIP

Editor: Nick Rushby
Guest editors: Dr Jill Jameson and Professor Sara de Freitas

Overview: Why are there so few articles on e-Leadership?

This special 2013 journal issue, BJET Volume 44, Issue 1, will offer a series of high quality peer-reviewed evidence-based papers on e-Leadership. There is currently no international scholarly journal which effectively covers the interaction between the fields of ‘e-Learning’ and that of ‘Leadership’. This is a vitally important emerging area, given the rapid worldwide expansion in the use of and leadership of e-learning and social media.

We therefore invite papers for a BJET Special Issue situated at the interface between these two fields.

About the Call

There is a significant gap in journal provision between the two fields of knowledge encompassed by ‘e-Learning and Leadership’, which, in the context of this BJET edition, we term ‘e-Leadership’. There are many scholarly communities within both fields, but for the most part these different academic communities do not attend each others’ conferences or publish articles in the same journals. The special issue bridges the divide between the communities involved, notably but not exclusively with reference to the educational aspects which they share: for example, learning about leadership and leadership development in online communities and social media.

This area is amongst many new trends in the interface between these fields that have been emerging in recent years. The issue will include high quality contributions from both domains, since although a small number of existing journals – for example, the E-Journal of Organizational Learning and Leadership, the Leadership Quarterly, the Journal of Group and Organizational Management, the Human Technology Journal and the British Journal of Educational Technology itself – are able to publish some articles at this interface, there is no recent definitive special collection involved. The majority of journals which are situated at the boundaries between these fields either do not cover the emergent issues and research problems at all or do so rarely.

‘e-Leadership’ was described in a business and management context by Avolio, Kahaia and Dodge in 2000. Avolio et al. (ibid.) selected the term ‘e-leadership’ to describe relationships of influence within virtual networks of an emerging global information technology-enabled era. Such relationships, facilitated by or operating within ICT (information and communications technology) environments, have in past decades gradually gained substantial influence within organisations, affecting millions of groups and individuals, changing people’s decisions, attitudes, behaviours and performance across the world. Professional daily interactions between e-Learning and Leadership occur at all levels of hierarchical and informal organisation in virtual communication networks and groups, involving both one-to-many and one-to-one professional, social and personal interactions, comprising an emerging social influence process that may relate as much to one individual ‘e-leader’ or to groups of e-leaders. This new field is important within both formal and informal professional education and training contexts, considering the billions of people using social networking sites daily at home and at work. The concept of ‘e-Leadership’ is relatively rarely used and little understood, although it is a strongly emerging field (Dasgupta, 2011). Other variants of this concept include ‘online leadership’ and ‘leadership and management of virtual organisations and teams’. Innovative approaches to leadership include: distributed leadership, disruptive leadership, quantum leadership and collective leadership. A relatively sparse literature in e-leadership exists, despite the exponential growth of ICT-enabled organisational communication and social networking. ‘e-Leadership’ has innovative global reach in its implications for the development of improved leadership and management understanding of the organisational relationships rapidly emerging through the use of email, the web, social networking, virtual worlds, e-learning conferencing systems and ICT enabled portals for information and knowledge exchange.

These trends suggest that, as an almost unavoidable consequence of the huge growth in online social, organisational and commercial interactions and transactions, an increase in attention to the leadership and management of online communities and organisations – and the development of models, theories, empirical research, innovations in leadership training and related publications - will follow. Furthermore, the evolutionary development of ‘e-Leadership’ does not just involve an easy adaptation of existing theories of leadership and management to online interactions, since, as Avolio et al. (2000) propose, the concept of Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) implies that a co-evolution of leadership and technology interactions may be taking place that is gradually but inexorably changing the nature of online social and organisational structures, systems and cultures, leading to emerging new kinds of leadership.

We invite articles that consider e-Leadership in the context of the complex educational technology issues emerging at the interface between ‘e-Learning and Leadership’.

To access the call on-line, go to: www.blackwellpublishing.com/journals/bjet

Important Dates:

Early submissions opening date: from 1st December 2011onwards
Deadline for submissions: 31st March 2012
Notification of review process: 31st May 2012

Final copy from Authors to Guest Editors: 1st October 2012
Publication: January 2013

For further info contact the Guest Editors:
Dr Jill Jameson or Professor Sara de Freitas:

Dr Jill Jameson
Director, Centre for Leadership and Enterprise
Reader in Education
School of Education
University of Greenwich
Bexley Road, Greenwich
London SE9 2PQ
Tel. +44 (0) 20 8331 8058
P.A. Shirley Leathers
Email: j.jameson@gre.ac.uk
Research Admin. S.Leathers@gre.ac.uk

Professor Sara de Freitas
Professor of Virtual Environments & Director of Research
The Serious Games Institute
Coventry University Technology Park
Innovation Village
Cheetah Road
Coventry
CV1 2TL
Office Tel: +44 (0)24 7615 8208
Office mobile: +44 (0)7974984061
Email: s.defreitas@coventry.ac.uk