Heroic Cooperation, Agentic Atmospheres, and Sacred ReStorying: A Relational Praxis for Sustainability Leadership

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ABSTRACT

The Anthropocene presents a crisis of leadership that is fundamentally a crisis of human formation, yet the field of sustainability leadership lacks a coherent formative praxis to cultivate the necessary ecological reflexivity. This study addresses the gap by exploring the resonance of Charlotte Mason’s (1842-1923) relational social theory within the contemporary sustainability knowledge and practice community. Using Q methodology with 22 sustainability scholar-practitioners, the study investigates how this 19th-century philosophy can inform the challenge of leadership for sustainability. The analysis reveals three distinct approaches constituted by Mason’s social theory, arrived at through viewpoints on leadership for sustainability: heroic Cooperation, Agentic Atmospheres, and Sacred ReStorying. These empirically derived viewpoints provide the foundation for a novel, actionable framework for leadership development that is relational, pluralistic, and ecologically attuned. This research contributes a historically grounded and empirically resonant praxis to the field of critical and relational leadership studies, offering a potent alternative to conventional competency-based models.

BIOGRAPHY

Joanna Stanberry (she/her) lives in Lancaster, UK where she is the Vice Chancellor’s Sustainability Research Fellow and a postgraduate researcher at the Initiative for Leadership and Sustainability, University of Cumbria. She has published on historical, governance, ethical, and cross-sector approaches to sustainability leadership and co-leads the Private Governance Working Group of the SDG Taskforce for the Earth System Governance Project. She is the recipient of the Donald J. Brenner Early Career Award in Q methodology. Previously, Joanna has taught at the MacArthur School of Leadership at Palm Beach Atlantic University, also working for 15 years in New York City in non-profit marketing, tech, finance, and philanthropy. She holds degrees in Organizational Leadership from Eastern University, Pennsylvania, and in Government from Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.