"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 Theme 1: Philosophical perspectives on leadership Chapter 2: What Heidegger can offer critical leadership studies: An ontological approach Chapter 3: Polycentric order Chapter 4: What critical leadership studies can learn from (reading) Plato Chapter 5: Leadership and post-human ethics Theme 2: Process, practice(s) and power dynamics in leadership Chapter 6: Leadership, power and politics: An overview and research agenda Chapter 7: Collaborative leadership: A processual approach Chapter 8:The skein of language that contains us: Narrative holding environments as leadership Chapter 9: Critical leadership dialectics Chapter 10: The critical edge of studies of leadership in interaction Chapter 11: Community leadership and power Chapter 12: Leaderless leadership in radically decentralised organisations Chapter 13: Leadership-As-Practice: Appreciation, critique and future directions Theme 3: Diversity and leadership Chapter 14: The legitimacy trap for women leaders: Why leadership legitimacy is unstable for women Chapter 15: Decolonial perspectives of activism and climate justice in Latin America: Resisting, re-centering, and redefining leadership from the margins Chapter 16: The art of creative brokering: Leadership in the Chinese Punk scene Chapter 17: Navigating gender and religion in leadership: Identity construction of women leaders in Islamic contexts Theme 4: Leadership education and development Chapter 18: From containers to concerns: The communicative constitution of leadership development actors Chapter 19: Bringing intersectionality into critical leadership development and learning Chapter 20: Mapping the leadership industries: Leadership coaching and leadership assessment Chapter 21: Not becoming a leader Chapter 22: Teaching leadership critically: A metamodern remix Theme 5: Lessons from the dark side of leadership Chapter 23: The gift of populism Chapter 24: The allure of strongman leaders Chapter 25: Burning love: The incendiary psychology of Trumpism Chapter 26: The organization of ideological discourse in times of unexpected crisis: Explaining how COVID-19 is exploited by populist leaders Chapter 27: The canary in the coalmine: Using linguistic markers to identify the early warning signs of hubristic leader behaviours Chapter 28: Business beyond politics? A-political corporate leadership in authoritarian Russia Chapter 29: Leadership and the tactics of alternative facts Chapter 30: Leadership, vision and the fallacy of corporate purpose Theme 6: Reimagining leadership – and leadership studies Chapter 31: Leadership and the promise of democracy Chapter 32: Making a difference: Opportunities and challenges for critical leadership studies Chapter 33: Norm-critical leadership Chapter 34: Leadership and climate change Chapter 35: Getting rid of the L-word: Are our aspirations for ‘leadership’ not leadership at all? Chapter 36: A critical race analysis of leadership theorizing
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.
Reviews for The Routledge Critical Companion to Leadership Studies
"""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"
