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It is the responsibility of leaders to bring about this shift in behavior by having both a vision of integrity for the organization and a strategic plan for ensuring such integrity. This vision must be articulated in a way that is relevant and actionable by employees. A vision that aims too high will not be taken seriously while one that is too pedestrian will not motivate employees.

a wide base of knowledge and a life filled with challenge. Maturity expresses a commitment to courageously choose to define and protect ones social space in the presence of hostile forces while maintaining an adroit process of self-criticism and accountability for those choices. A wide base of knowledge infers more than a mere accumulation of data but rather an ongoing quest to be conversant with the many discourses and varied articulations they entail. Challenge-filled refers to a belief in a bursting forth of possibilities. This belief in open possibilities, limited by responsibility, explains the relationship between management and contextual leadership. Simply put, contextual leadership calls into question the very core of historical management rationale that emphasize rules, universality, and impartiality over contingent ways of reasoning that emphasize relationships, particularity, and partiality.

This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable but it cannot advance Liberalism's social and political goals. In fact, Rorty believes that it is literature and not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. Specifically, it is novelists such as Orwell and Nabokov who succeed in awakening us to the cruelty of particular social practices and individual attitudes. Thus, a truly liberal culture would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. Rorty uses a wide range of references--from philosophy to social theory to literary criticism--to elucidate his beliefs.