CAMERA OBSCURA
KNOWING BY DOING
This section sets out the epistemological and ontological commitments that govern how this thesis can be read. It is the prior question to the methodology: not how the inquiry is conducted, but what is believed about how knowledge is formed, where the researcher stands in relation to what is studied, and what kind of inquiry this thesis is. Chapter 2 sets out how these commitments are operationalised through specific methodological protocols. The chapters that follow rest on the commitments named here.
This doctorate is grounded in the premise that knowing is generated through active practice rather than detached observation. Practice is understood here as situated, embodied engagement with organisational life, in which understanding develops through action and is refined through reflection on that action over time. This orientation aligns with what Ingold (2011) describes as “knowing by doing”, where knowledge emerges through direct engagement with the world. This practice-based way of knowing forms the onto-epistemological spine of the thesis. It positions lived professional engagement not as illustrative context, but as the primary site through which knowledge is produced, examined, and rendered meaningful. This orientation parallels the logic of Camera Obscura: knowledge becomes visible only when experience is held within disciplined containment rather than exposed to unfiltered illumination.
This doctoral inquiry names and structures that practice. Rather than separating action from reflection, I hold them in tension, allowing insight to surface as I move between doing the work and making sense of it. The knowing in this thesis is produced in and through that movement and is held accountable by three disciplines: situating the researcher within the system, triangulating experience against the archival record, and sustaining dialogue with relevant scholarship. The result is not a separate protocol, but an examinable form of practice-based knowing in which lived experience is tested against evidence, context, and the Spirit-Accountability paradox frame.
Ontologically, this thesis approaches leadership as something lived rather than prescribed: a paradox encountered in practice, not a model to be applied. Leadership is experienced as tension, shaped by competing demands, values, and interpretations that are rarely resolved through formulaic solutions. It is enacted relationally and emerges within the social, historical, and organisational conditions in which it is practised. From this ontological commitment, the thesis advances a constructive move: while leadership cannot be modelled, the conditions within which it is enacted can be designed. The thesis, therefore, distinguishes between leadership-as-encountered (lived under paradox, irreducible to technique) and leadership-as-architected (the structural conditions through which the paradox is held under consequence). The two are not in tension. The second is the institutional translation of the first. The organising paradox of this thesis, Spirit and Accountability, names the two forces that define this tension. Spirit refers to the animating human energy that gives life to work; Accountability refers to the structural conditions through which intention is translated into action and held to consequence. The thesis does not treat these as opposites to be balanced but as interdependent demands to be held simultaneously, a capacity it terms Paradox Literacy™. The thesis is grounded in the South African political economic context, where structural inequality, racial hierarchy as historical inheritance, persistent unemployment, and uneven economic participation are not treated as contextual backdrops but as constitutive conditions of the leadership phenomena examined. Under these conditions, leadership appears less as a matter of choice and more as moral action under constraint. The practitioner’s own positionality, as a white South African examining the structures she has inherited and participates in, rather than examining them from outside, is treated as part of the analytical resource rather than excluded from it.
Analytic autoethnography is the primary Critical Lens of this thesis. Anderson’s (2006) articulationdistinguishes this approach from evocative autoethnography through five interdependent characteristics: complete member researcher status, analytic reflexivity, narrative visibility of the researcher’s self, dialogue with informants beyond the self, and commitment to theoretical analysis. This is a retrospective inquiry: the autoethnographic frame is not the guiding principle by which the practice was conducted, but the analytic discipline through which the completed public works are now examined. Anderson’s framework is held as the closest articulation of what the practice itself had already been doing. The thesis holds itself to each of these as integrated features of the inquiry, not as procedural compliance. They are enacted through the writing of the chapters rather than declared in advance of it. The complete member positioning carries through two complementary registers within the public works: an analytical reading of the system as evidenced through the archive, and a lived reading of the system as encountered in practice. Both are governed by the same epistemic stance, the researcher inside the system, not adjacent to it. The remaining four characteristics are present in how the chapters proceed: reflexivity is performed in a dialectic between lived account and analytic insight; the personal is foregrounded as the medium of analysis rather than illustrative material; dialogue with named others and with the primary archive disciplines what would otherwise remain self-referential; and theoretical engagement is woven into the lived narrative rather than appended to it. This is not an invitation to self-expression but a disciplined form of inquiry in which lived experience is subjected to evidentiary constraint.
The inquiry is transdisciplinary in orientation and in execution. It engages the problem of leadership-as-condition through disciplines that resist easy integration: organisational behaviour, leadership studies, paradox theory, service management, change theory, systems thinking, reflective practice, governance, and (in the second public work) capital markets disclosure. The work does not draw across these disciplines as parallel reference points. It operates between and beyond them, treating their boundaries as porous and their integration as a methodological obligation rather than a stylistic preference. This is Mode 2 knowledge production (Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny et al., 2001): knowledge produced in the context of application, engaging real-world organisational stakeholders, and accountable to practitioners and to the academy simultaneously. The Spirit-Accountability paradox is itself transdisciplinary in form – refusing the binary, holding both poles under consequence, and generating a third logic that no single discipline can accommodate. The work draws on Nicolescu (2010) and Adams and Maguire (2023) for theoretical grounding. Chapter 2 sets out the transdisciplinary architecture in full.
Autoethnographic work carries recognised risks, including subjectivity, selective memory, and over-identification with one’s own evidence. These risks are addressed structurally rather than performatively: through longitudinal engagement that spans years rather than moments; through archival triangulation in which contemporaneous documentation disciplines retrospective memory; and through the construction of a claim-led evidential spine in which every substantive claim is anchored to identifiable archival material. Reflexivity in this thesis is therefore enacted architecturally, through the relationship between lived narrative and archived evidence, rather than through line-by-line interrogation within the narrative itself. Credibility rests less on case quantity than on depth of engagement and positional triangulation across the two public works. This triangulation is accomplished architecturally rather than chapter-locally; each case is presented in its own integrity, and the comparative patterns are drawn out through doctrinal synthesis in Chapter 5, where each claim is tested across both works. This structural decision preserves the depth of each case while allowing patterns to be examined across context rather than being inferred from isolated moments.
The central commitment of this approach lies in treating context as primary, recognising that meaning, insight, and leadership practice are inseparable from the conditions in which they take shape. My professional life unfolds inside organisations rather than observing them from a distance, and it is through sustained attention to context that leadership and performance become intelligible. This Critical Lens is therefore offered not as a claim to certainty, but as an interpretive compass and a set of commitments about how practice is lived, contested, and made meaningful over time. The chapters that follow are governed by it.