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findings from tHe transdisciPLinary exPLorations

We used the constituent elements of leadership, that is, movement and direction, to guide our exploration within the broad disciplinary fields in the previous four chapters. In so doing, we did not narrowly define movement and direction and that allowed for an expansive exploration. Consequently, our exploration included movement and direction of non- human animals in their interactions with each other, the movement and direction of national measures of human well-being, how humans are moved to investigate and create beauty, and movement of and through the relatively thin layer of the earth’s surface that is responsible for sus- taining life. We explored the movements and directions of some tan- gible things like whales and soil. We also explored the movement and direction of abstract concepts like happiness, democracy, and freedom of choice. The context of our explorations varied widely as well. Some of our explorations were on an intimate scale such as our exploration of the emotion of being moved which occurs within an individual human and is uniquely reflective of an individual’s core values. And some of our explo- rations were at the global scale like our exploration of the contribution to the rising levels of CO2 that come from the production of concrete. In addition to the individual research projects we briefly explored and the insights you can glean from those, we also encountered three recur- ring components that each deserve some discussion before proceeding further.

CHAPTER 7

Tenets of Critical Leadership Theory and Their Implications

Chandler, Jennifer L. S., and Robert E. Kirsch. Critical Leadership Theory : Integrating Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Springer International Publishing AG, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5528124. Created from asulib-ebooks on 2025-04-18 21:03:21.

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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96472-0_7

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-3-319-96472-0_7&domain=pdf

168 J. L. s. cHandLer and r. e. KirscH

The Anthropocene Epoch

One of the recurring components we encountered can be presented within the context of what has been proposed as the name of the current Epoch in which we are living, that is the Anthropocene Epoch, described as:

Human activity has been a geologically recent, yet profound, influence on the global environment. The magnitude, variety and longevity of human-induced changes, including land surface transformation and chang- ing the composition of the atmosphere, has led to the suggestion that we should refer to the present, not as within the Holocene Epoch (as it is currently formally referred to), but instead as within the Anthropocene Epoch. (Lewis & Maslin, 2015, p. 171)

The body responsible for defining “the units (periods, epochs, and age) of the International Geologic Time Scale; thus setting global standards for the fundamental scale for expressing the history of the Earth” (2017, p. 1) is the International Commission on Stratigraphy and it has not yet added the Anthropocene Epoch. However, the name is already being used by many who are addressing complex global issues such as Bates and Saint- Pierre’s (2018) work using mathematical viability theory and considering the Earth as a “Social-Ecological System built around Money” (p. 244) to model stochastic uncertainty that can produce conclusions for making public policy decisions that can increase human sustainability on the planet.

The exact date of the start of the Anthropocene Epoch has not been settled and humans have walked the Earth for at least 300,000 years (Hublin et al., 2017). So, some of the human existence has existed within the Anthropocene Epoch. What is it about giving a new name to the Epoch in which we live that impacts the field of leadership? There isn’t a direct connection, but referring to the Anthropocene Epoch stim- ulates a focus on humans’ ever-present and ever-increasing impact on the Earth that reduces sustainability. Human impact, of course, includes climate change and several specific projects addressing climate change appeared in our explorations in the preceding chapters. To announce that those with an interest in leadership will need to be mindful of human sustainability issues is an understatement. The concerns go far beyond a general hand-wringing or a scolding exercise castigating lead- ership as a set of individuals who got us into this predicament and there- fore the current individuals referred to as leaders are now the only ones that must get us out of it. Nor is the constant restating that the current

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situation has been of our own making going to solve anything. But our predicament also calls us to envision alternatives. Thompson and Bendik- Keymer (2012) invited us to do just that:

suppose we thought about how we might flourish in a new global climate? Suppose, too, that we understood flourishing as the ancients did. Suppose it were thoroughly ethical, moving beyond conceptions of subjective well-being to involve a broad conception of human excellence, beginning with the capabilities needed to live a life with dignity and moving onto vir- tues and vices of a new world, even well-worked-out relationships between our lives, our institutions, and the extrahuman world. Flourishing would involve a just and attentive relationship to our environment, rather than an unintentionally destructive one, and would involve restoring aspects of the environment we had unintentionally destroyed or accepting the novel ecosystems we have unintentionally created (Hobbs 2000). To flourish in a new global climate would then include more than adapting to radi- cally new environmental conditions in order to carry on much as we had before. It would eschew desperate and paralyzed resignation to impend- ing catastrophe (Hamilton 2010). It would mean changing our sense of ourselves, especially our virtues and vices, and finding what kinds of social conditions best clarify and support our dignity and decency. (pp. 1–2)

Thompson and Bendik-Keymer’s (2012) invitation is not without its embedded challenges. It is not enough just to imagine all the possible ways for all humans to flourish in a new world; we must also consider how to create and engage with social structures that avoid totalitarian rules emanating from just one definition of what is flourishing. For it does not take much imagination to see doomsday forecasts being used to incite fear that then flows efficiently through social networks allowing people to be effectively controlled. Such flows of energy through social networks are discussed next.

The Constructal Law

Another recurring component we encountered in our explorations was a new law of nature that its proponents claim explains all movement and direction of flows of energy within and through all things, living, or non- living, and thus impacts all disciplines. The Constructal Law or Theory initially proposed by Bejan (1997) from within the field of mechan- ical engineering and materials science was summarized as follows: “for a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a

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way that it provides easier access to the imposed (global) currents that flow through it” (p. 815). Subsequently, Merkx (2007) explained how the constructal law applies to social dynamics and revealed that it relies upon the assumption that people adhere to the rational actor theory. Additionally, Merkx (2007) argued that

any sustained series of human interactions becomes by its very nature a network, and that all networks, other things being equal, evolve toward efficiency. If they do not, they are replaced by other networks. The more that such a network evolves in the direction of efficiency, the more it will tend to look like other efficient networks, i.e., the more it will resemble the tree systems found in nature…. In any case, the individual motivations in social contexts, or the differences among constituent parts in systems of nature, are simply not relevant to understanding the evolution of net- works, which is driven by emergent properties common to tree networks in both nature and social life. (p. 37)

This explanation seems to argue for a sort of relentless progression of human social networks that are not based on enacting collective human values for the sustainability of humans. Rather, it seems to argue for deterministic changes over time such that the network itself becomes more efficient. Such an image evokes a force similar to Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968), making human social networks seem like they are easy to manipulate. Furthermore, if the changes in the net- works are responding and shifting and changing only to make the flow of energy through it more efficient, then it seems like leadership pro- cesses to move specific things and beings in specific directions play no role whatsoever. Let’s take a closer look. The caveat, other things being equal, in this explanation deserves some attention because we argue that critical leadership activities could be those other things and according to the tenets we offer for critical leadership, it would not be equal. This explanation also highlights some of the systemic social organizational processes that we refer to later in this chapter that critical leadership’s purpose is to disrupt.

The Human Brain

The third recurring component that we encountered in our explora- tions presented in the preceding four chapters involves an overall under- standing of how the human brain operates. The influences that one’s assumptions and understandings about how humans’ brains operate are

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extensive. Clark’s (2016) work that we cited in Chapter 4 explained that human brains are prediction machines, constantly creating predictions and then comparing perceptions from the senses to those predictions and only attending to the gaps. This was described as the most efficient processing model because from the synaptic level all the way up, this approach uses the fewest resources. Miller and Clark’s (2018) latest work updated the model to provide a refined explanation of what the human brain does. Their latest explanation describes a tight coordination of “processes of continuous reciprocal causation that weave together bod- ily information and ‘top-down’ predictions, generating a unified sense of what’s out there and why it matters” (2018, p. 2559). This updated explanation is described as:

one in which perception and action are complementary manifestations of a single adaptive regime, whose core operating principle is the reduction of precision-weighted prediction error. Adaptive predictions cannot, however, take shape in an organismic vacuum. What my brain predicts, moment-by- moment, needs to be delicately geared to what I need, and to what I need to be doing. And what I need, and what I need to be doing, are both matters that depend heavily upon both my current physiological states and the shape and progress of current world-engaging activity. (Miller & Clark, 2018, p. 2561)

What does this refined understanding of how the human brain operates (which is still not complete) mean for leadership? It’s complicated. First, we must keep in mind that scientific progress is not linear and that it takes time for researchers and theorists in one field to absorb and inte- grate relevant findings from other fields. While this is happening, we are wise to use caution because “we are at the very beginning of applying brain science to human behavior, including manager and leader behavior, and that there is a lot of junk science to contend with” (Eichinger, 2018, p. 89). And “although proponents of neuroleadership are optimistic, if we know anything about the functions of the human brain and our inter- personal behaviours, it is that they are exquisitely complex and context dependent” (Kuhlmann & Kadgien, 2018, p. 103). Indeed, Wall (2014) mentioned the NeuroLeadership Institute which is a for-profit organiza- tion advertised as “a leading global research organization and the pio- neer of bringing neuroscience to leadership” (NeuroLeadership Institute, 2018) in his critique of such junk science. Yet, we need not wait to root out and discard outmoded representations of how the human brain

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functions that are embedded in leadership imagery, models, and lan- guage. Even if we don’t refer to the human brain explicitly, our personal and inaccurate assumptions about how it functions are embedded in the metaphors and analogies we rely on to convey meaning. Recall the images for the covers of leadership books discussed in Chapter 2 and the movements and directions embedded in those images. Understanding the human brain as a central processor of incoming messages and cre- ating outgoing commands is a persistent oversimplification of the kinds of movements and directions that function in the human brain. Those assumptions and obsolete metaphors are often ingrained in the field of leadership. For example, for over two decades Morgan (2006) relied upon these images as well as a reference to how holograms are pro- duced to discuss the human brain as a metaphor for organizations rather than survey and draw from the ever-growing and current findings from human brain research.

criticaL LeadersHiP tenets

By exploring various fields of inquiry and how they understand and use notions of movement and direction, we have identified the recurring components elucidated above. These components contribute to the bed- rock for the tenets that follow, but the tenets themselves still require some foregrounding to explain how they can be of service to building a study of leadership that is critical. We do not offer these tenets to be a final, exhaustive list of boxes to be checked in order to qualify leadership scholarship as critical. Neither do we assume that these are the only pos- sible tenets for guiding critical leadership scholarship. Rather, the compo- nents above and the resultant tenets are non-exhaustive possibilities for ways of challenging the orthodox patterns of thought in leadership stud- ies that result from our immanent critique. We recommend reading these tenets as potential ways of making critical leadership studies manifest.

We also think it is important to reiterate our insights from Chapter 1 about what it means to do critical analysis and to maintain that narrow frame. By emphasizing its etymological origins of diagnosing crisis and offering restorative action, we emphasize the embeddedness of leadership in broader social contexts and how it interrelates with myriad other fields of study. In so doing, we hope to avoid an understanding of the term critical that defaults either to an evidence-weighing processes of critical thinking, or an understanding of critical that simply means important.

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Additionally, we work to adhere to our own tenets in this discussion. Just like labeling some individuals leaders can too easily result in labe- ling everything they do as leadership which confounds one’s ability to study leadership critically, we do not advocate for labeling some leader- ship scholars as critical leadership scholars as if all their analysis is done critically. Critical examinations of leadership are concerned with all man- ner of topics and constructs; they are not limited to what we address in discussing these tenets. We, therefore, offer these tenets in the spirit of operationalizing a critical perspective. That is, with the understanding of critical analysis and our analysis of movement and direction in vari- ous fields of study, we think these tenets can serve as good conceptual prompts for doing leadership studies critically. In the subsections that follow, we state each tenet and provide our theoretical justification for it and highlight some of the transdisciplinary linkages.

Tenet 1

Those who engage in critical leadership studies act on the rec- ognition that systemic oppression exists in all societies. Critical leadership researchers and theorists examine processes that perpet- uate social inequities that exist in all social organizations, and also acknowledge their own enmeshment in these systems and act to dis- rupt those systems.

Our first tenet acknowledges that oppression is a structural feature of societies. While at first blush this may seem like a claim of resignation or cynicism, looking at the structures of society for oppression opens new opportunities by moving the level of analysis from individual behavior to social structures. Doing so places the emphasis for oppression not solely on the ethical content of individual behaviors or individual interactions, but rather on the ways in which the individual participates within social structures, institutions, and organizations. In other words, changing the level of analysis from the individual to the institutional, organizational, or social precludes the “bad apples” defense. Much in the way that the rules of the game direct the actions of players, so too do the norms and incentives of organizations and institutions direct, reward, or limit the behaviors of individuals within those organizations. Cycles can be observed whereby the basic structure of the game is left in place because only the surface rules are slightly shifted to allow for labeling some indi- viduals as transgressors, which gives the appearance of change, but the

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basic game continues. Shifting patterns of collusion have been exam- ined and detailed, for example, Chandler’s (2016) work with Whiteness norms.

Nevertheless, a leadership scholar adopting a critical perspective might point out the structural complexity of institutional arrangements that produce oppressive social relations and suggest that they change. While this may seem Sisyphean, changing institutions must be possible, since they are historically determined. Further, when the researcher has a critical attitude as established in Chapter 1, the researcher should not accept the inevitability of oppression. As a result, we suggest that part of this tenet is an invocation for the researcher to not only analyze oppressive social structures, but also to work toward changing them. Agitating for change is integral, otherwise, researchers would only devote their time to describing these social arrangements, perhaps not- ing their oppressive relations, but not suggesting that they be changed. Understanding that oppressive relations are not necessary, but rather contingent on historically determined systems, researchers may find that it becomes easier to suggest that while institutions may produce oppres- sion, this need not be so.

The overview of how the human brain operates provided above shows an immediate shortcoming of much of what exists currently in leadership studies for critiquing social structures. The ability for humans to pre- dict or internalize data is less the result of being an efficient calculator of inputs, data, and stimuli, but rather establishes a continuity that is con- tingent on experiences being predictable. As a result, humans tend to, subconsciously, reinforce structures that allow them to make their under- standing of the world coherent. One way of doing this is taxonomizing phenomena. To use the example of leadership, which can be a difficult and ambiguous turn, there are a series of organizational, institutional, and social structures that make the term coherent, and thus a taxonomy of leadership emerges wherein there is movement and direction. Even given that within those assumptions, there are possibilities to flesh out different kinds of organizations, leadership is still too easily reduced to a list of expressions, all that fit in the broader parameter of the organiza- tional, institutional, and social assumptions embedded in that taxonomy. At that point, questions about what leadership means in the context of how it understands its own movement and direction as a force among other fields of study becomes precluded. Instead, leadership scholars refine the taxonomy, and practitioners of leadership select which patterns

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best suit their personalities or situations and do not investigate the phenomenon of leadership itself, or how it is more broadly situated.

Reducing a field of study to a taxonomy can lead to some rather banal applications in the practice of leadership. Where matters of leadership might otherwise prompt a critical investigation of how people might reflect on the modes of oppression that exist, how they perpetuate them, and how they can change, there is instead a toolkit of a certain number of styles of leadership to fix problems that frustrates potentially critical insight. In this case, manifestations of oppression are reduced to pro- cedural technical problems and a search for the right kind of leader or the right kind of leadership strategy, tool, or methdology to solve them commences.

To end our discussion of this tenet, we return to the notion of the individualistic bad apples defense, because it deserves some additional elaboration. We established above that the bad apples defense precludes the social-level analysis that a critical leadership studies should strive for, but it is just as important to point out which dominant norms are being reinforced. We will especially emphasize how an individualistic assump- tion of actors within structures rely on notions of merit and responsibil- ity. Not only are these assumed norms a diversion from the broader level analysis that is required of critical leadership studies, but they also erase any insight into systemic oppression. We will rely on a critical theorist we discussed in Chapter 2, Herbert Marcuse, and his theory of one-dimen- sionality to make our case.

Marcuse (1968a) argues that it is difficult for individuals within advanced industrial societies to envision or strive for alternative social arrangements, because the logic of the established order is so totalizing (Chandler & Kirsch, 2018). The practical implication here is a flatten- ing out of rationality, where the only rational paths of action or ways of life are ones that reinforce the existing order, as we describe above. This also comports with our thematic finding that human brains are always predicting, and they have a capacity to find patterns where none exist. The result is a society where the structural forces are taken as at least a given, if not an ideal good, and since the structures are not perceived as changeable, the unequal or unfair outcome is squarely placed on either ranking by merit or individual responsibility. Claiming that a society or an organization operates using meritocratic processes ignores the real- ity that the tenet forces us to acknowledge. Claims of meritocracy also reinforces the perceived unchangeability of the given order. Merit and

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personal responsibility are thus two sides of the same coin in one- dimensional thought that reinforce existing structures of oppression, by assuming that any hierarchical or oppressive relations are the result of individual actions or ethical worth, all sorted within a fundamentally fair, good, or at least unalterable social structure (Marcuse, 1968a). Looking at these factors as purely individual explanations or modes of analysis fails to take into account the broader social structures that produce oppres- sive social relations in the first place.

Tenet 2

Critical leadership research acknowledges that power is the perfor- mance of hegemonic behaviors that reinforce hierarchies. It also acknowledges that hegemonic behavior exists everywhere thus it is centered in the research.

We do not seek in this tenet to give the final word on what power is, but rather to situate it as a phenomenon vis-à-vis critical leadership anal- ysis. That is, we look at power as an outcome of social relations, as well as constitutive of those social relations, in a codeterminant way. While Dahl (1957) represents a traditional definition of power as the ability of one individual to coerce another individual into doing something, we refrain from overprescribing what power is so as to avoid its instrumental deployment within assumed organizational parameters. In this sense, we refer to power as an “empty box.” By that, we simply mean that we are avoiding an essentializing ontology of what power is. Instead, we look at it as a product of social relations. This is important because doing so is the basis of a critical analysis of the leader–follower arrangement that is often assumed as the starting point of inquiry in the field of leadership.

To draw a comparison from our transdisciplinary explorations, it is helpful to return to the notion of the alpha wolf. Hutchinson, Vickers, Jackson, and Wilkes (2006) and Meglich and Gumbus (2015) referred to people bullying in their workplaces as alpha wolves. That framing places responsibility on those individuals and conjures up a sense of sav- ageness. Consider the knowledge briefly described in Chapter 5 about how wolves interact with members of their packs as cooperative family members and how they move collectively during hunts in complex ways following just two simple rules. The behavior of wolf pack individuals during a hunt had previously been assumed to require communication among them to direct individuals where to go and what to do. However,

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the research indicates that what looks like complex coordinated behav- ior requiring communication and direction results from each individual executing just two identical rules. That complex behavior requiring no communication nor coordination is exhibited not only by wolves, but other group hunting animals as well. Like the assumption that commu- nication was occurring among the individual animals led to inaccurate understandings and models of group hunting behaviors, we argue that widespread assumption that power is an apparatus individual humans lev- erage while leading is misleading.

As we noted in our first tenet, oppression exists in all societies, and is a product of the social relations in those societies. Social relations create hegemony, which is a type of social power or energy because it is how

dominant social groups achieve rulership or leadership on the basis of attaining social cohesion and consensus. It argues that the position of the ruling group is not automatically given, but rather that it requires the rul- ing group to attain consent to its leadership through the complex con- struction of political projects and social alliances. These allow for the unity of the ruling group and for the domination of this group over the rest of society. (Joseph, 2002, p. 1)

This fits our notion of power as an empty box, because “hegemony is not a thing or discrete social object but a series of mutually dependent social relations” (Joseph, 2002, p. 128). For Gramsci (1971) the ques- tion of hegemony is not whether it exists, but rather which groups deter- mine it and benefit from it. Mirroring some of the threads in the first tenet, here too, is the notion that as a class-based analysis, it is not a matter of ethicized individual volition. That is, it is not a question of whether there are good or bad people who possess or do not possess power over other people. Rather, within the social contexts in which people operate, some sets of information are considered the received wisdom which guide and structure daily life of a society; the patterns of which are also reiteratively reproduced (Gramsci, 1971). What this means is that the ruling class stays the ruling class by enforcing and encoding certain norms, habits, and assumptions. Gramsci (1971) sug- gests this is a hegemony of thought and both he and Joseph (2002) would refer to it as cultural hegemony. Neither are referring to a conspir- atorial cabal of elite individuals secretly meeting and plotting to main- tain a stranglehold of thought, rather it is diffuse and collective actions

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through indirect means that results in each societies’ unique set of belief structures and boundaries. We can use an everyday example to highlight the features. When people appeal to human nature as being cutthroat and competitive, or that the wealthy have more access to legislators, those are hegemonic modes of life in the societies where those seem- ing realities apply. Of course, it need not be that way, and at the core of Gramsci’s (1971) project to highlight whose interests are served and why challenges that hegemony. Critical leadership studies, as we show in our transdisciplinary investigation, should challenge the cultural hegemony of such assumptions, such as the assumed leader-follower structure.

Hegemonic behaviors can also be examined within critical leader- ship projects by identifying the specific dominant social norms that are created and used within each specific project scope. The enactments of context-specific dominant norms will reflect the broader dominant social norms, but they will also reveal the particular ways in which the individu- als included in the study are either consciously or unconsciously tapping into and using the invisible energy of the hegemony in an immediate particular instance. Such critical leadership research can also examine the contestations of those dominant social norms because resistance to dom- inant social norms contributes to the overall movement and direction of them—however slowly that materializes over time.

Our expectation that examining and disrupting hegemony be cen- tral in critical leadership projects also reiterates our finding in tenet one that accepting the institutional or organizational arrangements of society overlooks a critical analysis. In the case of power then, it is not enough to ask which group is able to exercise it but why. To answer this question and take the notion of power and challenging hegemony seriously, we suggest that the leader–follower dichotomy itself be subjected to critical scrutiny. In that sense, we suggest moving from the individual lens of power into a class-based analysis thus achieving our goal of paying atten- tion to the broad social forces in which leadership might be best studied. If the leader–follower dichotomy remains fixed in a leadership analysis, then what both leaders and followers are doing in reinforcing and repro- ducing the hegemonic frame of hierarchies is never examined. It is this very reinforcing and reproduction that is a vital part of the problem of power in critical leadership studies because power is not the content or substance of the leader-follower interactions. However, their behaviors produce and reproduce the hegemonic common sense of these hierar- chies at the outset. Challenging the leader-follower duality is thus not

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due to contrarianism but is rather a complement to the research that is done on the content and substance of the given leader-follower arrange- ments (Sturm & Antonakis, 2015).

Power is an illusion, or a myth, that papers over hierarchical struc- tures. We are careful to note here that we do not say this to mean that power does not exist. Rather, we argue that an important critical anal- ysis of power should encompass what produces leaders and followers in the first place, as well as how they interact. It is within this fundamen- tal question that Baudrillard (2010) argues for abolishing the myth of power. He posits that a refusal to be dominated requires undoing power relations at a structural level. This is a massive undertaking, but it fits with our insistence of studying leadership versus cataloging what peo- ple labeled as leaders do. That is, what does leadership without leaders and followers look like? We think that question helps establish this new field of study, in the same way, that theoretical questions in other fields engage phenomena before doing empirical analysis. The reason for this is that if we limit our scope of analysis to people who are already desig- nated as either leaders or followers, then leadership studies also reinforces the common sense hegemony of this hierarchy. The danger, of course, is that because hierarchy produces unjust and oppressive social relations, assuming them away as natural or unchallengeable precludes getting to the root of those oppressive social relations.

We realize that the task of adhering to this tenet is both incredibly large, and somewhat abstract. We are asking researchers to engage the scaffolding that produces the leader–follower dichotomy, and we under- stand that this broad view can be a difficult undertaking. But our trans- disciplinary investigation provides a good logic for just such an analysis of power. As our exploration of the constructal law shows, a study of leadership that insists on rigid structures such as leader or follower insist on boundaries that are too rigid and not fluid enough for what actually occurs in interactions among people. Over various time frames and cir- cumstances, people are simultaneously leading and following in small interpersonal flows of movement or in a large social context. Freezing certain behaviors at certain times and then ascribing a fixed personality trait as someone being a leader or follower does not account for those flows, and ignores the movement and direction of individuals, organi- zations, and society. Further, we connect the insight of this tenet back to our first. If the ceaseless flow that individuals operate in constantly changes their behaviors of leading or following, then we must ask

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ourselves how much of that is noise that does not investigate the phe- nomenon of leadership? We think this tenet orients the critical leadership researcher with an appropriately broad outlook for investigating the role of power within the concept of leadership itself.

Our explorations into research with nonhuman animals provide the backdrop for doing this kind of analysis. Describing the interactions among and between specific animals by classifying some as leaders and others as followers does not necessarily yield insights into essential qual- ities of those animals rather it illuminates processes yielding broader flows. Our second theme that emerged from our transdisciplinary sur- vey emphasizes the environmental milieu in which people behave. Therefore, looking at behaviors within roles is certainly important, but the environmental architecture that emerges from the constructal anal- ysis is just as important to understand to properly contextualize the behavior under investigation. In both the constructal and environmen- tal frame, power becomes a phenomenon that explains social relations, rather than as a constitutive force of those relations. That is, instead of an individual possessing power and leveraging it against others in order to become a leader, the flows of a society and the hegemonic discourses provide the architecture whereby people become designated as lead- ers or followers with the essential categories, and their characteristics, assumed. Any analysis of power within leadership studies must account for the broad flows of power that go beyond particular organizations, or beyond interactions between individuals. In so doing, we hope that a critical leadership studies builds a broader analysis of power as it devel- ops into a field of study.

Tenet 3

Critical leadership studies is not for teaching people how to lead or how to be better leaders or followers. Those who examine leader- ship critically eschew orthodox designations of leader or follower as the starting point of inquiry and focus on leadership as an emergent phenomenon of groups.

As we touched on in Chapter 3, our brains are wired to be distracted by the ubiquitous yet irrelevant human face. So, perhaps in ways simi- lar to the distraction by human faces displaying emotion that Ambron and Foroni’s (2015) examined in their work, those seeking to capitalize on a ready market are attracted to the field of leadership because they

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can take advantage of those tendencies. There is a vast amount of litera- ture on this banal leadership as self-help; too numerous for us to review here. We note only that literature that promises to make people effec- tive leaders , or to provide people with the right kinds of leadership from among all the kinds they might pick from, are not able to engage critical questions of what it means to analyze leadership in its broader contexts, and therefore preclude the critical engagement we lay out. To take only one anecdotal example, then, Kaufmann (2016) promises to give leaders the four virtues they need to be effective. The virtues that are listed are not grounded in any scholarly literature about the social situatedness of virtue ethics, and they make no room for critical analysis of the organ- izational contexts in which individuals are attempting to lead. The end of the text has an appeal to mindfulness, but not in any systematic way that seriously deals with the various cultural or historical traditions that inform this habit of mind. In other words, this is little more than a self- help book to let people give themselves a pep talk, flatter their self-im- portance, or otherwise reify the power relations that are already in place, already in violation of our first two tenets. Furthermore, this feeds the belief that there is some enchanted leadership knowledge or practices that one can discover or learn that will allow one to achieve everything one wants.

Instead, we stress that leadership in action looks fairly ordinary and commonplace. Over a decade ago others have emphasized that leader- ship in action is “fairly mundane, differing little from what other peo- ple do, at least at a behavioral level” (Alvesson & Sveningsson, 2003, p. 1454). And this was identified as a paradoxical challenge of conduct- ing leadership research. This tenet stresses that this paradox is the result of framing leadership as a set of behaviors from an uncritical leader- ship taxonomy which individuals can practice and perfect according to a methodology or a blueprint. When leadership is conceptualized as an emergent property of groups it can be operationalized for measurement in numerous ways by focusing on the movement and direction, then this paradox fades.

The paradox is also maintained by concentrating on the intent of individuals. Some leadership research maintains a focus on efficiency by measuring what individuals labeled as leaders claimed they set out to accomplish (their intentions) compared to what was actually accom- plished. Leadership researchers can stop overconcerning themselves with intent and instead critically focus on the impact of collective behavior

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developing attendant measures of movement and direction. Many exam- ples of how to conduct such critical work focused on oppression based on race can be seen in Measuring Racial Discrimination (National Research Council, 2004). This work supplies any leadership researcher desiring to take a critical approach with the tools necessary for concep- tualizing, defining, measuring, and examining oppression based on race within any social domain. Such a task can therefore readily be integrated within a larger critical leadership research investigation because the pre- paratory work has already been done.

In the lived experiences of individuals playing out second by second, minute-by-minute, each person’s brain is engaged in the same processes of prediction and comparison in their attempts to achieve their own goals. So from an external viewpoint, a researcher could carve up each persons’ seamless movements so that they can label some individuals as tending toward following more than leading or toward leading more than following similar to the designations as shy or bold that Nakayama, Stumpe, Manica, and Johnstone (2013) applied in their research with stickleback fish. Recall in their work, those designations were simply the starting point. They discovered that the following fish was more impacted by the rewards than the leading fish. And of course, people are not fish.

Examining leadership as an emergent phenomenon also means that the context is a full player in the action. And as we noted earlier in this chapter, changing the level of analysis to institutions, organiza- tions, or society also comes with a challenge for critical leadership stud- ies: we must also take it upon ourselves not only to study the systems of oppression, but also how and why they encourage the kind of behav- ior that they do, as well as how these systems are themselves repro- duced. For an example of how this might be done, we can look at the subfields of some social sciences that have embraced institutionalism. Institutionalism emerged from the idea that institutions were the most resilient part of a society, because they have a longer lifespan than indi- viduals, and reproduce social relations by reproducing themselves (Scott, 2014). In political science, institutionalism generally holds government is best understood by looking at the official institutions of governance (Scott, 2014). However, new institutionalists suggest that institutions do not need to be officially constituted by the state and show how individuals within communities identify shared needs and build capac- ity for collective action to best manage resources (Ostrom, 1990). In

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economics, the recognition that capitalism is a system of production that is historically determined and socially embedded led to a study of those institutions (Veblen, 1919). There are, of course, multiple other variants and deviations, but a common thread runs through each: the behaviors and choices of individuals are shaped by, encouraged, or pre- cluded by the institutional arrangements with which those individuals choose to engage. With that in mind, we can claim that these institu- tions are oppressive, not because there are bad individuals (or individuals making bad choices) within those institutions, but institutions them- selves perpetuate the oppressive relations and are responsible for their reproduction.

One of the most exciting things about leadership studies is that it is a relatively young field. It is certainly a newer field than many of the tradi- tional disciplines, and as a result, we think there are novel opportunities to consciously guide the development of this field of study. We think it would be a misstep to insist on disciplinizing leadership studies; that is, building a stock of generally accepted theories, having a toolbox of the generally used methodologies of analysis, and fiercely protecting its intel- lectual space. Rather, we think that leadership studies should embrace its interdisciplinary endeavors, and invite a pluralism of perspective, theo- ries, and methods into this field of study, as our themes show when we put our emphasis on the notion of movement and direction.

Tenet 4

Critical leadership researchers and theorists attend to the politi- co-economic milieu in which the leadership processes of interest function and employ a continually self-reflexive process.

Called to mind here are the problems caused when the researcher artificially ropes off a scope of inquiry as discussed by Pearl (2009) and explored in Chapter 4 as the main reason why causes cannot be truly discovered in most research. Considering this in conjunction with Miller and Clark’s (2018) description of the human brain’s predilection for prediction, and our capacity for seeing patterns that do not exist that Whitson and Galinsky’s (2008) research revealed, attempting to cordon off and determine the specific causes of specific cases of oppressive out- comes that some individuals experienced in any specific organization in order to engineer a precise structural fix is a fool’s errand. We note these initial conclusions to suggest that critical leadership scholars do not have

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some external vantage from which to tinker with the institutional config- urations under investigation or have some kind of privileged or enlight- ened position when undertaking the analysis. This tenet instead invokes a humility for researchers to see this interconnected complex web and their own collusions with the structures and their resultant norms that maintain it. Much like leadership, researchers are also embedded in broad social contexts from which there is no outside, making analyz- ing the broad context in which individuals act all the more important. Chapter 1 makes the case that a critical theory does not accept that logi- cal positivism can always properly capture social phenomenon and argues instead for envisioning a totality of lived experience. This totality is what we mean when we suggest that the researcher needs to be aware of the political-economic milieu. This milieu is undoubtedly multi-faceted with many vectors of analysis, and while this does clearly establish that social change is difficult, it is perhaps just as important to see that it is ongoing, with the researcher being an observer and a participant. Social change is a common way that movement and direction is conceptualized in the social sciences and we believe our notion of movement and direction intuits this, but to make it explicit, this tenet asks the critical leadership scholar to consciously analyze the social relations of leadership in its con- texts, how they are part of those contexts, and the impacts those social relations have. We believe that this is the basis for a self-reflexive under- taking of research that more properly situates the researcher and values intellectual humility on the part of a researcher to recognize that they are just as much part of the problematic processes they are analyzing, to some degree. This self-reflexive unfolding of the researcher as observer as well as participant has no known endpoint, but in the enduring struggle to be consciously aware of norms of oppression and collusion within those norms, the critical leadership scholar is in a better position to recognize and challenge oppression, as well as help build a vision of non-oppressive leadership.

There are larger consequences for the uncritical reaffirmation of the status quo that does not take stock of the political-economic context. Taking the structures in which leadership takes place for granted allows the uncritical researcher or leadership practitioner to advance the fal- lacy of presentism as explained by Stocking (1965). The fallacy of pre- sentism suggests that while the past may not have been as good as it could have been, the present is undoubtedly better, and a trajectory of improvement will continue into the future, merely through the passage

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of time, necessitating no fundamental actions to effect change (Chandler, 2016). There is surely an assumed movement when considering time as an experienced phenomenon, but this uncritical assumption highlights our argument above that not all examples of movement and direction are tied to a higher purpose. Instead, presentism is an example of how easily the observer can fallaciously assume that the chaotic vibrations of social churn are actual patterned meaningful movements showing a clear tra- jectory to somewhere or something better. This ties in with the one-di- mensional thought laid out in our first tenet that assumes that since the social structure is unchangeable, we can only smooth out unfortunate kinks in a system that otherwise works. On a more concrete level, any- one relying on the false explanation of presentism downplays or even denies the social fact of oppression, by positioning it as a feature that is being resolved on its own during the inexorable march of progress. While we recognize the lure because it relieves people of having to con- front oppression, obscuring, obliterating, excusing, or leaving intact the oppressive relations that keep marginalized groups marginalized is cer- tainly no way to critically study leadership.

Within a framework of being continually self-reflexive, and with the cumulative effects of our other tenets in mind, we take up the idea of bad leadership. Within our thematic findings and our foundation of movement and direction, we note that there is a normative dimension to leadership and being aware of the political-economic situation in which individuals exhibit leadership intersects with those normative con- siderations. We will organize our discussion around Kellerman’s Bad Leadership (2004) who stated that “it is my hope and intention that by discussing and distinguishing among the primary forms of bad leader- ship, we might ourselves avoid becoming entangled, both as bad leaders and as bad followers” (p. 48). The book starts by cleaving bad leadership into two subcategories, ineffective and unethical. It then describes several individuals grouped into seven types of bad leadership. The first assump- tions that we tackle are the understandings or the definitions of what is examined. Kellerman’s (2004) definition of leadership can be read as one in which certain people filling certain positions for a specific period of time are considered leaders and everything they did was leadership. The next definitional bundle is the understanding of ineffective that Kellerman (2004) applies. The one used seems to require identifying and measuring what people intended to accomplish and what was actu- ally accomplished, and the degree of the difference is then their degree

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of effectiveness. Then somewhere along the continuum of effectiveness, someone can declare the demarcation between effective and ineffec- tive. This is an example of the intent over impact emphasis that steers attention away from examining systemic social processes that perpetuate oppression that we addressed previously. The last definition issue is the essentialization of good versus bad leadership which we believe facil- itates one-dimensional thought because the good leaders are the ones that reinforce neoliberal hegemonic rationality, and the bad leaders are illiberal. That is, to the extent that illiberal or bad leaders use their lead- ership to pursue those illiberal ends, they are bad; to the extent that lead- ers use leadership to reinforce the existing neoliberal hegemony, they are good. This dichotomy also violates the thematic findings from our transdisciplinary exploration, in particular, the constructal law, as well as the findings in tenet one, where we suggest that finding oppression requires a social-level analysis and should eschew essentializing individ- ual behavior characteristics. In Kellerman’s (2004) analysis the person deemed a bad leader has some sort of vice; they are evil, intemperate, or rigid. Those vices are then positioned as the causes or the reasons why the individuals were bad leaders. However, the argument is still advanced that it is possible to use the same techniques, strategies, that bad leaders have effectively used to accomplish bad things in the service of pursuing good things as long as one steers clear of the vices. Then one can be a good leader. This logic is similar to the argument that one can collude for years with dominant social norms that perpetuate oppression in order to achieve status and financial security and then detach unaffected from those norms as if one did not contribute to the suffering of marginalized people and then set off to “do good.”

We are also concerned with the way Kellerman’s (2004) analysis ignores the contributions of political and social theory as well as recent literature in neurosciences. One of those ideas is human nature. She asserts that human nature is not to do good, and some Enlightenment philosophers have argued the same. The problem with this analysis is that it pulls from a standard canon of Western liberal thought, the Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau nexus. Those writers were themselves trying to make sense of the liberal order emerging with market society. Their treatises on human nature, the state of nature, and government were, therefore, political exercises to make sense of their own movement and direction (Wolin, 2004). Also, in line with our third theme about the human brain, we find that there is no empirical evidence to support

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the notion that humans have a legible nature that is external to society. Human behaviors are co-determinant with the social settings in which people live. So, there is little reason to try to dissociate individuals from their social settings (Fehr & Gintis, 2007). In other words, the question of whether it is human nature to try to do good or bad is empirically irrelevant, and more important, often says more about the political-eco- nomic system of the current context.

We did not single out Kellerman’s (2004) text solely for criticism, however. Her position that we must not simply assume that leadership is when people do good things rings true, and we are well to heed that in leadership studies as well as in other fields of study. But as we have shown, essentializing the good-bad dichotomy as well as the hegem- onic discourses that such a dichotomy reinforces does not help break the pattern of assuming that leadership is synonymous with good actions. We think that critical leadership scholars, by eschewing these moral assumptions, can move into a non-prescriptive realm of studying lead- ership. There are two upshots of this move. The first is that it relieves the researcher of trying to establish what kinds of leadership are good, or emancipatory, or democratic. This helps avoid uncritical taxonomizing and the assumptions of the social structures in which people designated as leaders act. The goal becomes less about what type of leadership leads to good outcomes that good people should adopt, but rather an intel- lectual engagement that people can avail themselves of as they look to understand and undo systems of oppression. We advise being wary of any leadership scholarship that has a kind, or a type of leadership that leads to emancipation; that kind of one-size-fits-all approach is one-dimensional and probably does not speak to the complex situations in which individ- uals act.

Tenet 5

The goal of critical leadership is human flourishing. We realize that as we have established that there is no external vantage

from which to conduct research and that we should avoid being prescrip- tive, essentialist, or overly normative when conducting research because of the chaotic movement and direction of large social flows, a critical leadership scholar may start to wonder if there is any particular goal of leadership upon which to start research. We think human flourishing should be that goal. We wish to avoid the critique that we elaborated on

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in tenet four, so we will establish how human flourishing is non-prescrip- tive, but nevertheless centers the goal of human flourishing as a starting point, while of course keeping its normative content up for debate.

Labeling the current epoch in which we live as the Anthropocene does not, it itself, accomplish anything. It does, however, center our col- lective responsibility because human flourishing as a goal binds us to the well-being of the Earth. Similarly, this tenet asks the critical leadership scholar to engage these big questions so as to better take into account the movement and direction toward a goal, and to act as a reflexive benchmark of that process. In explaining tenet four, we also described the chaotic vibrations that can be too magnified if we only look at indi- vidual behavior, and this tenet reinforces the need for a broad vision of a conscious movement toward a goal. In our transdisciplinary inves- tigation, we find that human flourishing and the conscious movement toward a particular goal of flourishing is a common thread in many of the disciplines we analyzed. Perhaps aesthetics and the social sciences provided the most recognizable discussion of these goals. Philosophers from Plato to Hegel to Kant take up the goal of a good society and how to properly deploy reason to achieve it as their central questions. In the social sciences, too, we see how researchers strive for a better society by understanding how institutions and individual choices can be harnessed or changed. The direction is clearly toward a better world, and the movement is how to get there; this is most easily seen in a broad analy- sis. However, even in the animal sciences and engineering fields, we see that questions of movement and direction are still undertaken with the goal of human flourishing in mind. Animal sciences highlights the com- plex web of life that humans inhabit, and in the Anthropocene, reshape. Engineering takes up explicit questions of how the Earth that sustains us can be appropriated to facilitate the ease of existence. These are perhaps less explicit considerations than the fields of aesthetics or social sciences, but our theme of sustainability helps uncover how these fields undertake their analysis of movement and direction toward a goal that must take into account how humans interact with the environment.

Our emphasis on the ideas of movement and direction serve us well as we build out this tenet of human flourishing, because they allow us to avoid being prescriptive while still being nevertheless normative. What we mean by this is that we do not have an essentialized definition of what flourishing means, and it is part of a critical leadership researcher’s agenda to make the case for what flourishing looks like. We maintain our

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skepticism of any research that claims to divine a standard set of things to do to achieve human flourishing. The discernment of movement and direction at a given place at a given time will inform the researcher what flourishing looks like. Avoiding that prescriptive element leaves the con- cept open to contestation, even if flourishing is generally understood to be the goal. The idea of flourishing ties back to our investigation of crit- ical theory in Chapter 1. When the researcher understands that a society is at a critical juncture, that is, is in crisis, the researcher is compelled to attend to corrective action and that action should aim toward human flourishing.

Although we avoid essentializing the concept to keep it relevant and contestable, we nevertheless wish to establish how we envision it and how it can help build a critical leadership studies. Once again, going back to Chapter 1, we think that a critical disposition helps to envision alter- natives to the current context. Indeed Marcuse (1968b) suggests that as humans consciously tend to the development of reason, there is the pos- sibility of imagining transformative arrangements to the social order, and those alternatives should be fleshed out, debated, and acted upon. Some alternatives are wrong-headed, to be sure, and some are impractical. Nevertheless, we are excited by the prospect of critical research scholars contributing to such a vision.

Our own visions for human flourishing supported our analysis. We think the world is marred by oppressive social relations, but it need not be. In whatever ways we are able, we confront the norms that reinforce oppression, upset hierarchical assumptions, and hold an intellectual humility about the ways in which we are shaped by the very forces that we wish to analyze. We, too, are caught up in the movement and direction, but we hope a critical leadership studies tries to understand it in its totality and consciously work toward building a world where humans flourish.

finaL tHougHts

We believe that studying and theorizing leadership is an interdiscipli- nary enterprise, and its relation to other fields of study is a vital com- ponent to understanding leadership itself as a field of study. We are not seeking to disciplinize leadership studies, but we are grounding it in the broad normative questions that also exist in other areas to try to anchor where we think a critical perspective can be launched. We find that there is no cosmic determination of movement and direction in any particular

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field of inquiry. Rather, a human-centered approach places the onus of social change on an immanent critique of the researcher. Institutions and organizations exist within their broader societies only in as much as they were themselves created and perpetuated. Without taking institutional arrangements as given, nor that any movement or direction is necessarily progressing toward some idea of the good, a critical leadership scholar centers their analysis on the human effects and consequences of systems of oppression and how they might be otherwise.

Every discipline emerges as a broader interdisciplinary venture that eventually builds a body of knowledge that sustains itself (Foucault, 1982). However, that does not mean that the disciplinary structure is necessary or that it is unchangeable. Disciplines tell us how we organize our knowledge; what we value and what is important. We think, for this reason, keeping the disciplinary arrangements at the fore is part of an interdisciplinary investigation (Eley, 2005). To say that leadership is an interdisciplinary endeavor, then, speaks to its emergence on the intellec- tual landscape. We believe that rather than following the path to discipli- narity via theory, methods, and a canon, we think critical scholars should keep the investigation open to insights from multiple fields of study, sus- tain pluralism in methodology, and be open to epistemologies that may not come from traditional sources.

We realize that leaving this new area wide open might seem like too much to ask. To be sure, others in this new field have engaged with crit- ical theory. To a large extent, our work here builds on the works of crit- ical scholars in organization and management (Alvesson, Bridgman, & Willmott, 2011; Alvesson & Willmott, 2003; Alvesson & Spicer, 2014). Not only are there already some scholars at the boundaries of critical inquiry, we have elsewhere taken our approach to critical leadership stud- ies to integrate critical race theory into analyzing traditional leadership studies (Chandler & Kirsch, 2018). There is no one critical approach for everyone for all time. But as the final section of these final thoughts will reveal, there are tangible ways of implementing a critical approach.

Keeping in mind the importance of recognizing crisis for the critical leadership scholar, we recommend looking for critical junctures in the societies in which they live. So, we offer a brief discussion as an example of how we envision critical leadership scholarship engaging in the current context. In the summer of 2018, a media firestorm emerged over the policy of separating family members of asylum seekers or undocumented migrants (Associated Press, 2018). Officials of the US government

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detained the families by taking the children from their parents or care- takers and sent them to separate detention facilities. News reports described the harrowing conditions, children packed into caged areas, and the lifelong psychological damage caused by such separations (CNN, 2018). Public reaction to these actions and the policy includes shock and outrage. A federal judge ordered a halt to the practice and ordered that families be reunified (Jarrett, 2018).

There are a number of ways to analyze the entire situation, but from a critical leadership perspective, for this brief example, we draw your draw attention to just the actions that individuals have taken to disassociate themselves or their organizations from the behavior of the US govern- ment officials. For example, American Airlines and Frontier Airlines both asked the US government not to use their airlines to transport separated children and at least one flight attendant stated publicly that they would not work on flights that included such children (Wootson, 2018). This behavior could be viewed as good and virtuous or it could be charac- terized as righteous indignation stemming from a desire to avoid accu- sations of complicity. Regardless, neither of those characterizations investigates the full context including why this particular policy exists, what attitudes it reinforces, and whom it serves. All these questions are part of researching what can change these oppressive social relations. Note the stark difference between looking at a critical situation and attempting to designate certain individuals as heroes or villains, good leaders or bad leaders. Rather, we ask the researcher to look at these crit- ical junctures and ask how the ongoing processes might be changed to be geared more toward human flourishing, and then provide a vision of leadership to achieve that goal. There are no easy answers, and no sure things. Nevertheless, critically engaged leadership scholars and practi- tioners can contribute to building a world with less oppression.

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