Critical Perspectives on Leadership Studies: A Narrow Normative Programme or a Broad Church?

Abstract

Critical management studies (CMS) and critical management education (CME) have been used as ways of analysing organisation and management for almost a quarter of a century. Research and education from this perspective shine Marxian, post-structural, and postmodern lights on strategy, marketing, accounting, human resource management, and other managerial activities. Yet leadership as an activity and a eld of study has mostly escaped attention from this form of critique. This is an odd neglect, given how central the key critical concept of power has been to both critical analysis and to understanding leadership (Collinson, 2014). The oversight is addressed by recent scholarship which sets out two approaches to critical leadership studies (CLS). One approach suggests a dialectical location of the practice of leadership within organisations, to emphasise the inevitable dilemmas and contradictions produced through the exercise of power (Collinson, 2014). A second approach is more focused on ‘deliberated leadership’, a form of practice characterised by openness to academic intervention that provokes collective deliberation on the nature of leading (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012). The dialectical is designed to surface tensions and dilemmas in the practice of leadership; the deliberated relies on reectionin-action during and after the practice of leadership. Both approaches enable better understanding of leading, in that they bring key conceptual issues in CMS and CME to the centre of our understandings of leading and leadership. However, we see more potential and value in the dialectical approach, as it focuses on what leaders do in an everyday sense, and the organisational conditions that all leaders work within. Here, we also suggest that, if closer attention were paid to identity and subjectivity within critical perspectives, this would enable more purposeful research and more meaningful education in this area. This would help respond to a key tenet of ‘being critical’ in seeking progressive change in leadership practice.