Current Volume: Volume 3 (2024) What's Wrong (and Right) With Leadership Studies

Introduction

Laura E. Knouse, Co-editor IJLS

Although scholars throughout history have studied leaders and effective leadership practices, the scholarly project of understanding leadership from a multi-disciplinary, scholar-practitioner perspective is merely decades old. As leadership studies scholars, our project is a thorny one. Interdisciplinary work requires us to overcome barriers in our own thinking, in our communication with scholars with other perspectives, and in the division and allocation of resources and prestige in our institutions and the academy at large. Creating space for both basic scholarship and the development of evidence-based practices requires us to value both an ever more complicated and nuanced understanding of leadership and to value systematic efforts to extract general principles that can be implemented by leaders (hopefully) for the benefit of others. Finally, studying leadership often requires us to shed our pre-conceived notions of who leaders are and what leadership is—notions that are often implicit, culturally constrained, and deeply rooted in structures that exist in the present rather than those we can imagine from the past or project into the future.

Given these challenges and the relatively infinitesimal time-scale of the existence of leadership studies relative to other disciplines, there is surely much to be proud of in terms of the growth and evolution of the field. Yet, as scholars, our inclination is toward creative self-criticism rather than laurel-resting.

Therefore, for our third issue of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies, we turn our lens inward to examine the current state of leadership studies as an academic discipline. We asked contributors to consider the state of scholarship in the field—what is promising, what is lacking, and what should come next.

We reviewed a diverse and thought-provoking set of pieces, which we are pleased to present to our readers. To foreshadow, as a reader of the pieces in this issue, I observed the following themes:

First, in “Leading Toward the Queerest Insurrection: Queer Anarchism and Leadership Studies,” Josie Holland argues for the queering of leadership studies in the sense of questioning its norms, decentering our prototypical notions of what leadership looks like and who leaders are, and perspective-taking from the margins. She analyzes queer anarchist movements with their decentralized and, at times, temporary networks of autonomous actors pursing desired ends of utopian liberation to disrupt notions of leadership and argue for a deeply contextualized understanding of what leadership is and what it can be.

Next, Dr. Sandra Peart reflects on the present and future of leadership studies in, “Promise and Progress: Assessing Achievements, New Directions, and Gaps in Leadership Studies.” Peart, like Holland, argues for an understanding of leadership as a relational process-in-context. In particular, she encourages us to more deeply consider the constraints that are placed (or not placed) on leaders and how those constraints contributed to their successes and failures. With respect to failures, Peart cautions that the field has largely ignored the study of ineffective leadership, which is likely to yield crucial insights for both basic and applied work. Finally, Peart argues strongly for renewed focus on what constitutes leadership for the “greatest good,” emphasizing the need for collaborative scholarship—particularly in the humanities—to achieve this.

Drs. Paul Sanders and Martin Guttman echo this theme in their piece, “Why Leadership Needs History.” They call for re-focusing the definition of “good leadership” to address the most pressing challenges of our time. To this end, they argue for re-invigorating the historical approach to leadership studies, which will enable a greater understanding of the role of both context and constraint in leadership. Sanders and Guttman also invite us to complicate our notions of what good leadership is—particularly in situations where no obvious good options exist but leaders are called to lead nonetheless. Finally, they offer thoughts on the challenges and promise of collaboration between the humanities and social sciences.

Kathryn Reda brings the perspective of the natural sciences to bear in her piece, “The Role of Leadership Studies, Science, and Political Leaders in Combating Science Polarization.” Reda argues that leadership studies has neglected to study the role of scientific evidence in leaders’ decision-making, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of scientists themselves as leaders in society. She argues that this topic is more urgent than ever in the current U.S. context, where political polarization has increasingly undermined the public’s trust in scientific expertise. Reda provides recommendations for how leaders can use scientific evidence in their decision-making and how scientists can lead more effectively by tailoring their communication to different stakeholders.

We hope our readers will be inspired to meet the challenges set forth by the authors of these thoughtful pieces.

Articles

Commentaries