Current Volume: Volume 4 (2025) The Changing Face of Leadership

Introduction to Issue 4: The Changing Face of Leadership: How leadership has changed and how we should think about it moving forward

Since 2020 and the arrival of the global COVID-19 Pandemic (the subject of IJLS’s inaugural issue), scholars, politicians, and ordinary people alike have been discussing the failures and crises in leadership that were either made evident or caused by said pandemic.

But it isn’t only crises that emerged out of or were engendered by the pandemic. There were—as have been described by many others—positive transformations and sea changes of other varieties, as well. Conversations about academic accessibility and hybrid working formats emerged that have enabled people with disabilities and the need for flexible schedules to work better and more productively in online or hybrid formats. Community organizations found new and better ways to organize and communicate with their members. Individuals and leaders were galvanized by not only the pandemic, but the social upheaval that characterized 2020.

In both good and bad ways.

No matter how you look at it or what your politics are, however, it is clear that the world and leadership have both changed and been changed by the social, technological, political, and cultural shifts that have taken place since 2020—or, perhaps, even earlier (say, 2016?).

The pieces in Issue 4 of IJLS are all talking about what has changed—or what needs to change—about leadership and leadership studies in the past decade. They grapple with concepts from the very specific, such as the work of interfaith hospital chaplains, to the very theoretical, such as how James MacGregor Burns’s highly influential work might impact the way we consider (or reconsider) pedagogy in this new age of AI (which was talked about in Issue 2). Technology and social media are an increasing presence in our daily—even hourly—lives, and have impacted the way leaders lead, followers follow, and we all think about what it means to be a leader and engage in leadership.

We cannot hope to think about leadership in post-2020 society without also thinking about the long effects of COVID-19, about populism, about technology, and about what we have to do in order to move ourselves and our societies forward in a positive direction, which, I would argue, at least, must come from and within education.

Those of us who teach in institutions of higher education—a common calling among academics--are extremely aware of the ways that education has the capacity to influence the ways both we and our students engage with leadership practice in political, social, cultural, and technological terms. Social media, AI, political and social activism, and news stories about the culture war between conservative students and progressive faculty—as well as faculty and their administrations or boards of directors, on every conceivable side of the fence—mean that higher education and the academy are not only not immune, but at the very center of many of these conflicts and conversations.

So many of our social, political, cultural, educational, and leadership structures are built on foundations and principles that predate not only 2020, but the twenty-first (and, in some cases, even the twentieth) century. We still teach and talk about Great Man [sic] Theory, still discuss Plato and Socrates, and still rest, at least in the United States, on the foundational texts of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Payne, and George Washington (to pick a small selection). We talk about Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the philosophical works of Emmanuel Kant. White men who lived, worked, and attempted to lead in a world that was very different from the one we face today.

This is not to say that we ought to ignore the lessons of history—I’m a Shakespeare scholar by trade and training, and I’m happier talking about the sixteenth century than the twenty-first on pretty much any day of the week. And, yes, I do believe there are lessons we can take from Shakespeare or any of the other dead white men listed above.

But I also think that it’s critical that we not forget that there are many, many other people who live and have lived in the world who do not fit the very narrow scope of these men. People who are introducing new ideas of leadership, service, and community in whatever ways they can in the attempt to bring the frameworks of leadership into the more diverse, divergent, and divisive world we now occupy.

In light of that—and with the caveat that this journal cannot hope to ever, in the many years it will hopefully continue to exist, fully encapsulate that diversity—I want us to consider how we might use the lessons from this issue’s articles to consider how we might continue to transform leadership for the brave new world in which we live.

From Samuel Fianko-Ofori and Stephen Apolima, we might imagine new ways for both ourselves and our leaders to engage with the modern digital age, bearing in mind how populism is fostered (with the potential for good and ill) by social media and digital technologies. From Evan Dutmer, we might consider new ways to think about education and teaching as leadership, and leadership as an opportunity for education, drawing on a new way of thinking about Burns’s Transformational Leadership. And from Zachary Wooten and Jocelyn Brown we might consider the ways in which COVID-19 has changed our perception of leadership and the ways that servant leadership might be emerging unrecognized—even by those engaging in it—all around us in times of crisis, such as among hospital chaplains.

I want to invite all of us who read these pieces to examine them not simply as works of scholarship about what was or what is, but as speculative research that examines wand what leadership has the potential to become.

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