1st Edition
Women Leaders in Central and Eastern Europe Organizing, Politics, and the Path to Change
Introduction: Inscribing new meanings into leadership – Central and East European women
Anna M. Górska and Monika Kostera
Chapter 2: Against destruction: Cultivating human decency through entrepreneurship
Martyna Śliwa and Monika Ślufińska
Chapter 3: Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen: From the Chessboard to the Parliamentary Hemicycle
Irmina Matonytė and Rūta Kazlauskaitė
Chapter 4: Bulgaria: Maria Spirova’s Career Path: from Post-Socialist Margins to Transnational Influence
Irina Cheresheva
Chapter 5: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya: Leadership in Exile and the Belarusian Democratic Resistance
Hanna Vasilevich
Chapter 6: Zofia Daszyńska-Golińska: A scholar and organiser with a pro-social vision
Martyna Śliwa and Michał Śliwa
Chapter 7: Coda
Anna Giza
Biography
Anna M. Górska, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at Kozminski University and Director of the Women and Diversity in Organizations Research Center. She is a member of the Young Academy of the Polish Academy of Sciences, member of General Council for Science and Higher Education and an Associate Member of the Centre for Work, Organization and Society at the University of Essex. She studies gender in organizations and higher education institutions. She is Co-EIC of Tamara: Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry, and Co-AE (Provocations) at Management Learning, AE at Culture & Organization and Frontiers in Education, and sits on the editorial boards of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, Feminism & Organization, and Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.
Monika Kostera is Titular Professor in economics and the humanities. She works as Professor in Management at Warsaw University. She is visiting professor at Södertörn University, Sweden, Rennes Université, France, as well as L'Université Paris Nanterre, and Elected Member of the Sociology Committee of the Polish Academy of Science. She writes and publishes texts on organization theory as well as poetry. She is Co-Editor-in-Chief at Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry as well as Associate Editor at Management Learning, the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion and at Culture and Organization. Her current research interests include organizational imagination, disalienated work and organizational ethnography. Member of Erbacce Poets’ Cooperative.
“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]
