Leadership studies today resembles a bewildering diversity of theories, concepts, constructs and approaches, struggling in huge part for meaning, relevance and impact. As Dennis Tourish so eloquently puts it, much of the literature suffers from ‘unrelenting triviality’ and ‘sterile preoccupations’. Seeking to create a clean break from this current state of leadership studies, After Leadership begins with the premise of a post-apocalyptic world where only fragments of ‘leadership science’ now remain, echoing Alisdair McIntyre’s imagining of such a scene as the basis for re-establishing the foundations and focus of moral theory. From these fragments, the authors seek to construct a new leadership studies that challenges much of the established thinking on leadership, exposes its limitations and biases, and, most importantly, seeks to construct the foundations of a more inclusive, participatory, bold, relational and social platform for leadership in the future.
After Leadership thus imagines a brave new world where what leadership is and what we seek from it can be developed anew, rather than remaining bound up in the problematic traditions and preoccupations that characterise leadership studies today.
Offering both full length chapter explorations that explore new ways of understanding and practicing leadership, as well as shorter essays that aim to provoke further reflection on leadership and what we seek of it, After Leadership offers a uniquely critical and creative collection that will inspire students, scholars and leadership educators to reconsider their understanding and practice of leadership.
List of Tables and Figures
Foreword
Preface
PART I: Reworking Artefacts and Visual Fragments
- Leadership competencies and frameworks. Brigid Carroll & Vesa Huotari
- Films as archives of leadership theories: The Terminator film franchise. Nancy Harding
- Psychometrics as attempting to ‘measure’ emotional labour and emotional intelligence Marian Iszatt-White
- The last leader. Donna Ladkin
- What is leadership studies took seriously the plurality of voices, perspectives and experiences traditionally excluded from research and knowledge development. Sonia Ospina
- After leader: A world of leading and leadership … with no leader. Steve Kempster & Ken Parry
- "Another world is possible": Imagining ‘authentic’ distributed leadership. Neil Sutherland
- New tensions and contradictions: Vulnerability, dependency, and invincibility. Towards a hopeful future for critical leadership studies? Jackie Ford
- How about affective and embodied leadership. David Knights
- Whiteness. Helena Liu
- The lost metaphysics of leadership – reviving the meaning of leading and following. Scott Taylor
- Can we be done with leadership? Martin Parker
- Walking backwards into the future: Imagining organisation with and without leadership. Suze Wilson
- Leadership in liquid organizations. Stuart Clegg & Miguel Pina e Cunha
- Apocryphal leadership. Jonathan Gosling & Peter Case
PART II: A Series of Provocations on Losing the Leader from Leadership
PART III: Making What Was Invisible Visible
PART IV: The End of Leadership
References
Index
Biography
Brigid Carroll is Associate Professor in the Department of Management and International Business at the University of Auckland Business School, New Zealand.
Josh Firth is a PhD student at the University of Auckland Business School, New Zealand.
Suze Wilson is a Senior Lecturer at Massey University, New Zealand.
