Considerations of rigour and relevance rarely acknowledge students, learning or the textbooks many of the academic community use to frame education. Here we explore the construction of meaning around rigour and relevance in four leadership studies textbooks-the two most globally popular leadership textbooks and two recent additions to the field-to explore how these ideas are represented. We read the four texts narratively for structure, purpose, style and application. We further embed the analysis by considering the cultural positioning of the textbook-as-genre within leadership studies as a field more generally. This exploration of the textbook raises critical questions about rigour, relevance and the relationship constructed between them. From this, we argue for a re-commitment to the genuine 'text-book' written to engage students in understanding leadership as a continuing conversation between practices, theories and contexts, rather than as a repository of rigorous and/or relevant content that lays claim to represent an objective science of leadership studies.
Leadership development for youth is an increasingly large global business that has to date lacked sustained critical scrutiny. Our inquiry is based on application, interview and reflection data from participants in a university-based leadership programme, capturing them at the point they transition to early work lives. We argue that leadership has become such a prevalent career and work discourse that the leadership development that happens in youth offers a unique window into new organisational workers, the leadership development industry and a complex leadership theoretical terrain. A set of five ‘leading’ discourses – separate, suspended, small, self and semi – were identified that invite critical inquiry. While youth leadership scholars have previously noted the suspended and separate discourses, we empirically refine those and offer the other three (small, self and semi) as important to current contestations between leaders, leadership and leadership development. In doing so, we question whether current leadership development for youth creates substantive leadership capacity in individuals, organisations or society.
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