Volume 2, Issue 3

Perreault's research examines the use of friendship as a metaphor to define leadership and links it to feminist care ethics. Her work, previously published in A Leadership Journal: Women and Leadership--Sharing the Vision (Summer 1996) – spotlighted below -- and the Journal of Leadership Studies (Winter 1996), focuses on the importance of friendship as a paradigm for a relational view of leadership. She contrasts this model with the metaphor of military battle that she sees as still dominant in our thinking and therefore our actions. She has also written about ethical followership as an important link to ethical leadership. Dr. Perreault argues that new and complex challenges press us to redefine leadership and she proposes friendship as a metaphor and a vision for the type of leadership needed to meet contemporary challenges. She also links her work to that of feminist care ethics -- as defined by Gilligan (1982, 1995) and Noddings (1984, 1989, 1990). She uses illustrations to demonstrate how leadership-as-friendship is present in the views and practices of effective and contemporary leaders to inspire our best selves as leaders. Perreault was contacted about her research.

There are basic assumptions about western systems of government, economics, class structure, education and spirituality that will continue to stifle authentic and widespread efforts to teach college students to become virtuous and active participants in the process of creating healthier communities. Until the dominant culture fundamentally investigates and modifies its essential worldview with one more in harmony with that of traditional indigenous tribes, such as those of America's first nation peoples, moral education and effective civic engagement will remain another failed effort at "school renewal."