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'More' or 'better' leadership remains a popular panacea for business failure, climate change, educational underachievement and myriad other world problems. Yet there has been a growing concern that traditional approaches to the subject have naturalised oppressive power relationships, particularly in the workplace. Scholars have therefore put more stress on the creative contribution of 'followers' as co-creators of organisational reality. It is now normal to find calls for shared leadership, less leadership or no leadership. This article argues that even when couched in emancipatory terms, many of these perspectives still tend to diminish the contribution of organisational actors who do not occupy formal leadership roles. Communication and process theories of organisation are employed to suggest that leadership could be more usefully envisaged as those practices which see leaders occupying transitory roles within fluid social structures, in which there is no essence of leadership apart from the discursive constructions of organisational actors and in which the facilitation of disagreement and dissent holds the same importance as a traditional stress on the achievement of cohesion and agreement.

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More management scholars than ever are expressing concern about the state of our field.Complaints include the suggestion that many publications are written purely to further our careers rather than to advance knowledge. In this article, I argue that our discipline is in crisis.We neglect really important issues in favour of bite sized chunks of research that are more likely to find quick publication in leading journals. Given that such journals insist on the primacy of theory development, we also increasingly resort to pretentious and long-winded prose to at least create the illusion of 'theory development.' The result is writing that can only be understood by those already on the inside of the debates it references. As opposed to 'imposter syndrome', in which qualified people doubt their suitability for a given job, I suggest that many of us have become 'genuine imposters' in that we pretend to be doing more important work, and more competently, than we really are. Finally, I propose changes in our mind-sets and journal practices to restore some sense of deeper purpose to what we do. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI am grateful to the editorial team of AMLE, who invited me to develop a specific argument from my recent book: Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research, published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. I am particularly grateful to the Acting Editor, Professor Russ Vince, and to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback throughout this process.

We analyse the corpus of CEO letters to stockholders that were signed by a widely revered business leader, Jack Welch, during his tenure as CEO of the General Electric Company [GE], 1981—2000. Our discussion is located within theory pertaining to transformational leadership. We examine Welch's language from the standpoint of how transformational leadership can be conceived as a rhetorical artefact of one-sided dialogue emanating from a powerful leader. We give particular attention to the saturation of Welch's discourse with metaphors, and argue that metaphors illuminate how transformational leadership and the accompanying construct of charisma manifest themselves in practice. Five root metaphors that heightened Welch's persuasive and rhetorical impact on his audience are identified and discussed: Welch as pedagogue , physician, architect, commander and saint . We advocate greater awareness of the rhetorical techniques employed by transformational leaders in attempts to broker compliance with their views.

Leadership is a perennially popular topic in the academic and practitioner literature on management. In particular, the past twenty years have witnessed an explosive growth of interest in what has been termed 'transformational leadership' (henceforth, TL).The theory is closely linked to the growth in what has been defined as corporate culturism -an emphasis on the importance of coherent cultures, as a means of securing competitive advantage. This paper outlines the central components of TL theory, and subjects the concept to a critical analysis. In particular, similarities are identified between the components concerned and the characteristics of leadership practice in organizations generally defined as cults. This connection has been previously unremarked in the literature. These similarities are comprehensively reviewed. Trends towards what can be defined as corporate cultism in modern management practice are also discussed. We conclude that TL models are overly concerned with the achievement of corporate cohesion to the detriment of internal dissent. Such dissent is a vital ingredient of effective decision-making. It is suggested that more inclusive and participatory models of the leadership process are required.

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The audit culture which has developed in public universities has led to counter-productive outcomes. Managerial oversight of academic work has reached a critical tipping point. Extensive auditing of research output by means of performance management assessment regimes motivated by a New Public Management mentality has damaged individual scholarship and threatened academic freedom. Such assessment regimes are perverse and conducive to the development of psychotic tendencies by universities. It is important to understand the effects of a perverse audit culture when re-thinking and reforming approaches to university performance management. We suggest ways for public universities to acknowledge the need for accountability while remaining true to core academic purposes.