Transformative Relations: Horses, Concepts & Leaders

This Ph.D. project explores the emerging yet relatively unknown phenomenon horse assisted leadership training. While the notion of horses in Denmark carry connotations of teenage girl fantasies, juvenile sexuality and horse-whispering cowboys and the phenomenon of horse assisted leadership training has been burdened by the association, successful companies that engage horses as their equal partners in leadership trainings count some of Denmark’s biggest businesses amongst their customers. The marketing of these companies states that interactions with horses can transform managers into authentic leaders, resting the argument on ethology, neuropsychology and management theory. Yet, this scientification of the method and the resonance it has with contemporary management theory only goes so far in explaining why as seemingly esoteric and banal activities as attempting to lead a horse around a round pen or being coached whilst in the same enclosure as one or several horses is appealing to managers of some of the most successful companies in Denmark. What is it about interactions with 500kg living, breathing semi-domesticated animals that make big businesses and managers pay large amounts of money for this service? What does actually take place in these interspecies interactions? And what does the phenomenon’s emergence tell us about the contemporary Danish market and society?  

This project sets out to explore how the commodification and instrumentalisation of relations to nature and self on the one hand and on the other the deep respect for, awe and sense of partnership with both horses and the natural world that both managers and facilitators express and practice in the training on the other, inform conceptions of self and of nature for these persons and to examine how this phenomenon is related to evolving conceptions of the human being and of nature in contemporary Denmark.