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The purpose of this quantitative study was to assess the relationship between volunteer leadership competencies and stewardship action-taking experiences among Master Gardener (MG) and Master Watershed (MW) volunteers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We collected data from 1196 Penn State Extension MG and MW respondents. The mean summative score for the volunteer stewardship action-taking experience was 2.32 (SD = .79), and volunteer leadership competencies was 3.45 (SD = .60). The results of this study showed a significant moderate association between volunteer stewardship action-taking experiences and volunteer leader competencies (r = .34, p ≤ .001). Volunteer leadership competencies can explain approximately 11 % of the variation in volunteer stewardship action-taking experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The new knowledge that our research brings can significantly contribute to the practice in leadership teaching and learning of Extension organizations’ volunteers. Future leadership trainings on the enhancement of the MG and MW volunteer leaders’ stewardship action-taking capacity can help contribute to the greater good in their communities in a more confident and efficient manner. Further research should focus on identifying other factors that can affect MG and MW stewardship action-taking experiences, including the impact of the demographics and motivation.

During the COVID-19 crisis in Victoria, Australia the complexity of school leadership increased greatly for school principals. This study focused on the lived experiences of early career principals in the independent school sector from March to November 2020 in Victoria, Australia. It investigates transformative work that was undertaken by these leaders in leading their schools over a protracted crisis.

The study builds on constructs of crisis leadership, adaptive leadership, agile leadership and emotional intelligence, exploring the leadership approaches undertaken by twenty-two early career principals in Victoria, Australia. Using a narrative inquiry approach, across three temporal points in 2020, storied productions drawn from the findings present four emergent types of emotionally intelligent leadership approaches undertaken by these principals. These leadership approaches are presented as the commander-leader, the conductor-leader, the gardener-leader and the engineer-leader with each approach demonstrating both organisational leadership approaches as well as individual leadership styles used by these principals as they led their schools.

The findings have direct implications for professional development programs focusing on aspiring principals and early career principals with emphasis on the importance of developing emotionally intelligent skillsets in principals for use during periods of rapid change or high crisis in schools. The findings present insight into the support useful for early career principals in the first five years of principalship.

This study uses a unique emotional intelligence approach to understand school leadership during and after a crisis.

The purpose of this article is to explore how agency is distributed between human actors and nonhuman elements in entrepreneurship.

It is based on an inductive longitudinal case study of a garden in a rural community in northern Sweden. The methodology includes an ethnography of the garden, spanning the course of 16 years, and a careful investigation of the entrepreneurial processes contained within it.

This article identifies and describes different practices to explain how agency is distributed between human actors and nonhuman elements in the garden's context. Three different practices were identified and discussed, namely “calling”, “resisting”, and “provoking”.

Agency/structure constitutes a longstanding conundrum in entrepreneurship and context. This study contributes to the on-going debate on context in entrepreneurship, and introduces a posthumanist perspective—particularly that of distributed agency—to theorising in entrepreneurship. Rather than focussing on a human (hero)-driven change process, induced through the exploitation of material objects, this novel perspective views entrepreneurship as both a human and a nonhuman venture, occurring through interactions located in particular places and times. Coming from the agency/structure dichotomy, this article reaches out for elements traditionally established on the structure side, distributing them to the agency side of the dichotomy. As such, it contributes to an understanding of the agency of nonhuman elements, and how they direct entrepreneurship in context. This theoretical development prepares entrepreneurship theories to be better able to engage with nonhuman elements and provides example solutions for the ongoing climate crisis.