Critical Realism and Morphogenetic Leadership

“Pretorius’s Critical Realism and Morphogenetic Leadership offer a rare, rigorous, yet practical framework for leaders intent on shaping systems toward justice and flourishing. By treating structure, agency, and ideas as distinct but interacting realities, this study traces their stage-wise evolution, enabling renewal, change, or stagnation. Avoiding hype and platitudes, the book reframes leadership as a generative, diagnostic practice—sequencing interventions, sustaining care-driven action, and orienting toward inclusive well-being. Clear, theoretically robust, and actionable, it guides scholars and practitioners toward nonlinear, iterative approaches that cultivate enduring, reflexive social change.” Scott Macklin, Associate Vice President of Trinity Western University

“Deon Pretorius offers a rare and timely rethinking of leadership for an age marked by institutional fragility, inequality, technological disruption and polycrisis. Drawing Critical Realism, morphogenetic theory and practical developmental insight into a coherent framework, he shows why leadership cannot be reduced to individual competence, charismatic direction or the management of immediate crises. This book’s distinctive achievement is to connect structural diagnosis with practical judgement: it helps readers see how inherited conditions, ideas, institutions and human agency interact over time, and why meaningful change must be sequenced rather than merely announced. Ambitious, humane and intellectually substantial, Critical Realism and Morphogenetic Leadership offers scholars and practitioners a more searching way to understand complex systems, cultivate collaborative agency, and orient leadership towards human flourishing.” Grant Freedman, Programme Leader in Executive Education at Nelson Mandela University Business School