My background is highly interdisciplinary. As an undergraduate, I was a double major in psychology and philosophy. As a graduate student, I studied new religious movements, which resulted in an M.A. in History and Phenomenology of Religion. In my doctoral work in sociology, my research was on the Catholic university. Immediately afterwards I focused on emerging trends in U.S. Catholicism, but when I joined the School of Education faculty I began to focus on education policy and leadership using mostly qualitative data and analysis. The still very young field of leadership is my principal current research. My background enables me to investigate the many ways in which leaders (and professionals of many types) embrace and regularly operate according to the kinds of myths and rituals usually associated with religion. In my book The Leadership Imagination, I propose a new method for identifying and analyzing how these patterns emerge and their consequences in organizations and groups.
I teach mostly leadership, organizational, and social theory courses, and have chaired almost fifty dissertations in the Leadership doctoral program. I have also served as a university research administrator, organizational consultant, and principal investigator for many non-profit and educational organizations.
