1st Edition
The Routledge Critical Companion to Leadership Studies
The Routledge Critical Companion to Leadership Studies offers a rich and insightful overview of critical leadership studies for students, teachers, researchers, and practitioners. The volume draws together 35 chapters from 56 authors who represent the vibrant diversity of the critical leadership community. It includes chapters from emerging and preeminent scholars who share an interest in directing leadership theorizing, development and practice toward the aims of liberation, justice, and equity.
The Companion is organized into six themes: (1) philosophical perspectives on leadership; (2) processes, practices, and power dynamics in leadership; (3) diversity and leadership; (4) leadership education and development; (5) lessons from the dark side of leadership; and (6) reimagining leadership and leadership studies.
The book has been curated to serve as a "go to" resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, academic staff, and researchers seeking to understand the current state of play on a given topic, as well as inspiration for how they might contribute to its development. Each chapter provides a comprehensive yet succinct review of contemporary literature and offers the reader avenues for future research. Leadership practitioners will also find provocative ideas among these pages to help them interrogate and transform the ways they lead.
Chapter 1: Introduction
David Knights, Helena Liu, Owain Smolović Jones and Suze Wilson
Theme 1: Philosophical perspectives on leadership
Chapter 2: What Heidegger can offer critical leadership studies: An ontological approach
Alice McCance Gibson, Michelle Greenwood, Julie Wolfram Cox and Justin Oakley
Chapter 3: Polycentric order
Nathan Harter
Chapter 4: What critical leadership studies can learn from (reading) Plato
Paul Scade and Sverre Spoelstra
Chapter 5: Leadership and post-human ethics
Nik Winchester
Theme 2: Process, practice(s) and power dynamics in leadership
Chapter 6: Leadership, power and politics: An overview and research agenda
Johan Alvehus and Anders Klitmøller
Chapter 7: Collaborative leadership: A processual approach
Linda Buchan and Barbara Simpson
Chapter 8:The skein of language that contains us: Narrative holding environments as leadership
Sarah Chace and Adrianna DeSantis
Chapter 9: Critical leadership dialectics
David Collinson and Gail Fairhurst
Chapter 10: The critical edge of studies of leadership in interaction
Magnus Larsson
Chapter 11: Community leadership and power
Thomas Morton
Chapter 12: Leaderless leadership in radically decentralised organisations
Perttu Salovaara, Johanna Vuori and David Collinson
Chapter 13: Leadership-As-Practice: Appreciation, critique and future directions
Martyna Śliwa and Peter Case:
Theme 3: Diversity and leadership
Chapter 14: The legitimacy trap for women leaders: Why leadership legitimacy is unstable for women
Carole Elliot, Valerie Stead & Sharon Mavin
Chapter 15: Decolonial perspectives of activism and climate justice in Latin America: Resisting, re-centering, and redefining leadership from the margins
Antonio Jimenez Luque
Chapter 16: The art of creative brokering: Leadership in the Chinese Punk scene
Anthony Ryan
Chapter 17: Navigating gender and religion in leadership: Identity construction of women leaders in Islamic contexts
Amna Yameen
Theme 4: Leadership education and development
Chapter 18: From containers to concerns: The communicative constitution of leadership development actors
Brigid Carroll & Frank Meier
Chapter 19: Bringing intersectionality into critical leadership development and learning
Suzanne Gagnon, Tomke Augustin & Larissa Kanbai
Chapter 20: Mapping the leadership industries: Leadership coaching and leadership assessment
Eric Guthey & Nicole Ferry
Chapter 21: Not becoming a leader
Doris Schedlitzki & Eda Ulus
Chapter 22: Teaching leadership critically: A metamodern remix
Neil Sutherland & Simon Kelly
Theme 5: Lessons from the dark side of leadership
Chapter 23: The gift of populism
Ruth Capriles
Chapter 24: The allure of strongman leaders
Yiannis Gabriel
Chapter 25: Burning love: The incendiary psychology of Trumpism
George R. (Al) Goethals
Chapter 26: The organization of ideological discourse in times of unexpected crisis: Explaining how COVID-19 is exploited by populist leaders
Ajnesh Prasad
Chapter 27: The canary in the coalmine: Using linguistic markers to identify the early warning signs of hubristic leader behaviours
Eugene Sadler-Smith & Vita Akstinaite
Chapter 28: Business beyond politics? A-political corporate leadership in authoritarian Russia
Olga Solovyeva & Alexandra Bristow
Chapter 29: Leadership and the tactics of alternative facts
Leah Tomkins
Chapter 30: Leadership, vision and the fallacy of corporate purpose
Dennis Tourish
Theme 6: Reimagining leadership – and leadership studies
Chapter 31: Leadership and the promise of democracy
Charles Barthold
Chapter 32: Making a difference: Opportunities and challenges for critical leadership studies
Richard Bolden
Chapter 33: Norm-critical leadership
Jannick Christensen, Bontu Guschke & Sara Muhr
Chapter 34: Leadership and climate change
Jonathan Gosling
Chapter 35: Getting rid of the L-word: Are our aspirations for ‘leadership’ not leadership at all?
Marian Iszatt-White
Chapter 36: A critical race analysis of leadership theorizing
Donna Ladkin
Biography
David Knights is Professor Emeritus, at Lancaster University where he was a Distinguished Professor until Nov 2020. He has held professorships in 9 universities in the UK and internationally Visiting Professorships in Dublin, Gothenburg, Macquarie, Melbourne, Sydney, Stockholm, and Tampa.
Helena Liu is an Associate Professor of Management at Bond Business School, located on the unceded lands of the Kombumerri people of the Yugambeh language region. Her research interrogates the gender, race, and class dynamics that underpin our enduring romance with leadership.
Owain Smolović Jones is a Professor of Organizational Studies at Durham University. His research focuses on power and resistance in practices of leadership, particularly concerning salient social and global issues, such as climate change, equalities, and housing.
Suze Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management at Massey University in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research interests pertain to issues of power, identity, gender, ethics, discourse, practice/s, context, character, communication, and crisis with regard to leadership and its development, as well as the history of leadership thought.
"A fabulous collection of articles and authors for anyone interested in critical approaches to leadership and a worthy stand against the complacency and conceit that passes for so much literature in the leadership field. This is a veritable beacon of light amidst the conventional sea of leadership fog and formulae that promise so much and deliver so little." Keith Grint, Emeritus Professor, Warwick Business School
"The articles in this Critical Companion take leadership studies from a dismal science to a dazzling art. The authors poke at the field’s positivist dogma, tackle pressing questions about today’s leaders, and even take to task the word “leadership.” They do this to offer new and better ways of understanding and imagining leaders and followers." Professor Joanne B. Ciulla, Rutgers University
"This invaluable collection features the most interesting and insightful scholars writing about leadership today. A critical perspective is front and centre, with an essential focus on power and inequality and how these shape theory, development and practice. An essential book for those concerned with how we do leadership now, and how this can change." Professor Kate Kenny, Professor of Business and Society, University of Galway
