Critical Leadership Studies Research Articles

Critical leadership studies: The case for critical performativity

Existing accounts of leadership are underpinned by two dominant approaches: functionalist studies, which have tried to identify correlations between variables associated with leadership; and interpretive studies, which have tried to trace out the meaning-making process associated with leadership. Eschewing these approaches, we turn to an emerging strand of literature that develops a critical approach to leadership. This literature draws our attention to the dialectics of control and resistance and the ideological aspect of leadership. However, it largely posits a negative critique of leadership. We think this is legitimate and important, but extend this agenda. We posit a performative critique of leadership that emphasizes tactics of circumspect care, progressive pragmatism and searching for present potentialities. We use these tactics to sketch out a practice of deliberated leadership that involves collective reflection on when, what kind and if leadership is appropriate.

The impossibility of the ‘true self’ of authentic leadership

‘Authentic leadership’ is increasingly influential, with its promise to eliminate, and thus surpass, the weaknesses of previous models of leadership. This article uses object relations theory to argue, firstly, that authentic leadership as an indication of a leader’s true self is impossible and, secondly, that attempts at its implementation could lead to destructive dynamics within organizations. The authentic leadership model refuses to acknowledge the imperfections of individuals and despite its attestations to seeking ‘one’s true, or core self’ ( Gardner et al., 2005 : 345), it privileges a collective (organizational) self over an individual self and thereby hampers subjectivity to both leaders and followers. The paper thus contributes to emerging critical leadership studies by introducing the psychoanalytic approach of object relations theory to the study of leadership.

Resistance leadership: The overlooked potential in critical organization and leadership studies

This article examines the role of leadership in mobilizing collective resistance in the workplace. Given the scarcity of dialogue between critical scholars and leadership studies, relatively little consideration is given to the role of leadership in resisting and potentially transforming structures of domination. The article describes some of the reasons why these areas of research have produced so little mutual work. We then make the argument that theories of leadership can be useful to the study of resistance by providing a grounded approach to theorizing agency, highlighting the role of mobilization and influence in change, and emphasizing participant attributions. In doing so, leadership studies gain important insights about the influence of deep structure power issues on perceptions of leaders, as well as material and symbolic limits on mobilization. The article adopts a dialectical perspective as a way of understanding issues of resistance leadership, and then discusses how existing literatures, read with this dialectical approach, can be brought to bear on significant questions concerning the practices of resistance leadership.

Simplicity and Complexity in Contemporary School Leadership: A Response to Grace

Gerald Grace's (2000) paper Research and the Challenges of School Leadership: the Contribution of Critical Scholarship is applauded for making a powerful case for critical leadership studies to be taken seriously and for providing an exhortation for many educationists to think again about headship. However, this paper suggests that Grace's paper is weakened by: (a) traditionalism (e.g. a false equation of leadership with headship and neglect of more recent discourses of leadership, distributed leadership and complexity theory); (b) reductionism, oversimplification, selectivity and misrepresentation in his consideration of educational management studies; (c) neglect of the considerable overlap between critical leadership studies and educational management studies; (d) an untenably negative view of educational management studies (neglecting their potential for realising the same agenda as critical leadership studies); (e) eurocentrism; and (f) his neglect of foundational issues in, and authors on, critical theory.

Research and the Challenges of Contemporary School Leadership: The Contribution of Critical Scholarship

There is a widespread policy assumption that school leaders such as headteachers and governors need to have ‘raining courses’ which are constituted by a growing corpus of Education Management Studies (EMS) if they are to achieve successfully current schooling goals of ‘effectiveness’, ‘quality’, ‘excellence’ and ‘value for money’ Another body of work which attempts to address these issues in a wider cultural framework and which may be called Critical Leadership Studies (CLS) is regarded as interesting for those studying for higher graduate qualifications but hardly relevant for everyday school busyness. While EMS is constructed as ‘practical’and therefore a necessary constituent of the National Professional Qualification for Headteachers and other training courses for school leaders, CLS is constructed as ‘academic’ and more suitable for the EdD seminar. It will be argued here that both cultural analysis and recent research shows this to be a simplistic and reductionist view with dangerous policy consequences. Critical scholarship in education has much to offer to those meeting the everyday challenges of school leadership. In particular, feminist critical scholarship offers oppositional models to both traditional and market forms of patriarchal school leadership.