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In this article, I reflect on how my white racial identity shaped and, in turn, was shaped by my dissertation data collection. I identify specific choices and experiences in the research interviews that were influenced by my race, using data both from my own journal as well as feedback about my interviews from two informants of color. I also trace how conducting the interviews and writing about them in my journal affected how I make meaning of my racial identity. I offer these reflections as a contribution to two conversations, both related to exploring and learning about race. First, my discussion of how being white influenced my study contributes to important dialogues about how researcher identities reverberate through the research process. Second, my consideration of the change in my racial identity suggests implications for those interested in learning from and about race. Specifically, it suggests that whites must claim a voice on race in order to contribute meaningfully to cross-racial learning.

Public‐sector organizations tend to be more racially and ethnically diverse than private‐sector organizations, leading to the challenge of enhancing heterogeneous work group effectiveness. Recent work suggests that a group's "diversity perspective," or set of beliefs about the role of cultural diversity, moderates diverse group performance. One perspective, the integration and learning perspective, argues that heterogeneous groups function better when they believe that cultural identities can be tapped as sources of new ideas and experiences about work. However, simply holding the integration and learning perspective may not be sufficient. Research on general group learning has shown that it requires particular behaviors and cognitive frames. This article integrates recent work on diversity perspectives with long‐standing research on team learning to propose a conceptual model of learning in culturally diverse groups. It suggests that both the integration and learning perspective and more generic learning frames and skills must be present.

Ample research documents the ubiquity of routines in street-level practice. Some individual-level and organizational-level research has explored how to break street-level routines, but little has looked at the work group level. Our study observed teams of state child welfare workers over 2.5 years, documenting whether they discarded old routines and learned new ones. Results suggest that team characteristics such as dear direction and reflective behaviors had greater influence on team learning than individual characteristics such as stress level, tenure, and educational level. We suggest that group-level factors be included in future models of what enables the re-creation of street-level practice. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThis qualitative study integrates critical race theory to examine the practice of multicultural competence and the mechanism of discursive racism in the context of child welfare workers. We troubled the dominant paradigm of multicultural competence taken up by practitioners, and deployed discourse analysis on racial dialogue in a real‐life setting to highlight how the multicultural competence approach risks becoming a form of colorblind racism that diminish the importance of structure racial power which we call race dismissiveness. In our findings we identified four distinct patterns of race dismissiveness that the practitioners adopted to deflect racial dialogue: race identity fetishism, racial peripheralization, racial erasure, and racial externalization. We argue that the separation between semantic expressions of multicultural beliefs and enacted racial practices needs to be conceptualized as a part of the discursive enactment of colorblind racism that functions to keep structural racism intact through everyday practice.

In this introductory article we explain the impetus for creating the Special Issue, along with its goals and the process by which we created it. We present a map of the terrain of collective leadership (CL) that builds on earlier frameworks, recognizing that the terrain is expanding and has become increasingly difficult to traverse. The map is comprised of two axes or dimensions. The first axis, the 'locus of leadership,' captures how scholars conceptualize where to look for manifestations of leadership. That is, does the leadership reside in the group or does it reside in the system? The second axis is the view of 'collectivity' that plots how scholars conceptualize the collective. Do they see it as an empirical type of leadership or a theoretical lens through which to study leadership? We then plot distinctive CL research into four cells, providing definitions and references to empirical work emblematic for each cell. In introducing and summarizing each of the five articles we have selected for this Special Issue, we show where each of these is located on the CL research map, and distil how each provides a clear connection between theory and method in a way that advances our understanding of CL.

In the concluding article, we move from providing a map of the collective leadership (CL) research field that has been conducted to date to providing a travel guide that we hope can inspire both experienced and novice travelers to push out the frontiers of exploration of CL. A Rapid Appraisal analysis of the extant CL research revealed that most of the work to date has focused on shared and distributed leadership; taken an empirical rather than a conceptual focus; and strongly emphasized qualitative versus quantitative research methods. Looking ahead to future CL research, we identify the following three challenges as being the most significant for leadership researchers to confront: the fundamental ambiguity of the space in which CL resides; the definitional problems inherited from leadership studies and exacerbated by its ambiguous nature; and the need to more fully embrace issues of process in CL. In response to these challenges, the following three guidelines are provided: the need to decipher CL configurations and its power-based foundations; the need to establish how leadership is made relevant in a collective setting; and the need for CL researchers to adopt strong process models.