Leadership as a sociomaterial accomplishment in the context of technology-mediated interaction.

In this paper, we draw on a publicly available recording of a video meeting to challenge the
positive views on emerging consensus and to argue that video conferencing offers particular and
powerful capacities for establishing a shared and legitimate sense of organisational reality.
Through a close analysis of the unusual level of conflict in the meeting in question, some of the
fundamental challenges that needs to be handled for organised collaboration to be established
are identified. Further, we show how a collaboration is finally established through a violent act,
uniquely possible in the medium of a video conference. Despite the violence of the act, it is
subsequently treated as legitimate. We discuss this in relation to different types of problems
(Grint, 2005) and how, paradoxically, leadership in our case is accomplished through acts without
any followership, and subsequently gaining followership and legitimacy, despite being in violation
of organisational rationality and formal structure. We suggest that the existing studies of
leadership in practice overly romantises leadership and the collective, and that leadership as
much might be built on authoritarian and coercive acts, as on an emerging and inclusive
consensus.