Women Leaders in Central and Eastern Europe
Organizing, Politics, and the Path to Change
Monika Kostera editor Anna M Górska editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:13th Jul '26
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Women Leaders in Central and Eastern Europe: Organizing, Politics, and the Path to Change is a groundbreaking edited volume that redefines leadership through the lens of women’s experiences across a historically and culturally unique region. Drawing on rich, qualitative narratives, the book explores how women have led transformation in politics, public institutions, and organizational life in Central and Eastern Europe. This concise and compelling volume features case studies of individual women leaders, each situated within their country’s socio-political context. Highlighting leadership as a practice of meaning-making and collective action, the book challenges dominant Western models centered on hierarchy and individualism. Instead, it offers inspiring accounts of resilience, cooperation, and visionary organizing. Each chapter includes analysis and reflections that bridge personal stories with wider themes in organization and gender studies. Ideal for researchers, scholars, students, and practitioners in organization studies, management, leadership, gender studies, and Central and Eastern European studies, this book is a vital contribution to the global conversation on inclusive and alternative leadership models. It also serves as an invaluable resource for educators and professionals seeking diverse perspectives on organizing and governance.
“This book arrives at exactly the right moment. What it names, I know from the inside: as originator and director of the first women's leadership academy in Europe, and practitioner working at the intersection of executive development, medicine, psychology, and neuroscience for three decades.
Górska, Kostera and their contributors take seriously a form of leadership the mainstream canon consistently overlooks: relational, meaning-driven, rooted in authenticity and resilience rather than dominance or the performance of certainty. Moving beyond heroic individualism, they reframe leadership as a practice of meaning-making shaped by relationships, institutions, history, and everyday constraint. Central and Eastern Europe emerges not as a peripheral case study, but as an epistemically generative place – with its own answers to what organizing, agency, and resilience can mean.
The portraits resist both idealization and victimhood. They hold contradiction. They show leadership as it actually unfolds: negotiated, costly, and deeply human. Essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and anyone who leads in conditions that textbooks rarely acknowledge.” Dr Anna Kieszkowska-Grudny, CEO Minds of Hope | Instytut BezStresu; originator and director, LiderShe Women's Leadership Academy & advanced executive program – Academy for the Leaders of the Future, Kozminski University; Editor, co-author Formuła Wygrywania [The Winning Formula, The Leadership book]
ISBN: 9781041118299
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 330g
82 pages