Bradford Scholars -how to deposit your paper Overview Copyright check• Check if your publisher allows submission to a repository.• Use the Sherpa RoMEO database if you are not sure about your publisher's position or email openaccess@bradford.ac.uk.

Bradford Scholars -how to deposit your paper Overview Copyright check• Check if your publisher allows submission to a repository.• Use the Sherpa RoMEO database if you are not sure about your publisher's position or email openaccess@bradford.ac.uk.

This article considers issues of leadership and leadership development by reflecting on the notion of the refrain as pattern. Drawing on our research of leadership within UK further education (FE) we examine how tracing ‘patterns of leadership’ can provide an insight into the practical accomplishment of leadership in FE as everyday ‘ordinary’ work. In an era of increased change and uncertainty about the character of leadership within the sector, we use our ethnographic data and interdisciplinary backgrounds to consider leadership development as essentially a design problem through adopting and adapting the notion of patterns that emerge in the architectural work of Christopher Alexander and the organizational studies of Tom Erickson. In doing so we point to the comforting effect of both the refrain and the pattern to repeat, return, renew, react, refine, reconstruct and resolve. We conclude by suggesting some of the ways in which the documenting and describing of such patterns of leadership can be used as ‘teachable moments’ for the design and deployment of programmes of leadership development and training.

Citation: Riach K and Kelly S (2015) The need for fresh blood: understanding organizational age inequality through a vampiric lens. Organization. 22(3): 287-305. AbstractThis article argues that older age inequality within and across working life is the result of vampiric forms and structures constitutive of contemporary organizing. Rather than assuming ageism occurs against a backdrop of neutral organizational processes and practices, the article denaturalizes (and in the process super-naturalizes) organizational orientations of ageing through three vampiric aspects: (un)dying, regeneration and neophilia. These dimensions are used to illustrate how workplace narratives and logics normalize and perpetuate the systematic denigration of the ageing organizational subject. Through our analysis it is argued that older workers are positioned as inevitable 'sacrificial objects' of the all-consuming immortal organization. To challenge this, the article explicitly draws on the vampire and the vampiric in literature and popular culture to consider the possibility of subverting existing notions of the 'older worker' in order to confront and challenge subtle and persistent monstrous discourses that shape organizational life.

Drawing on our experiences of parenting during the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, we explore the potential for a feminist parental ethics through which parenting can be rethought, reclaimed, and so brought forth as a vital and valuable assemblage of collective articulation work, shared "motherings," and embodied interconnectivities of caring for and caring with the other. A feminist parental ethics is particularly important in the neoliberal academic context, where the responsibilities of caregiving that lockdown has thrust upon many workers in higher education have been largely downplayed, dismissed, or even ignored across the sector in the interest of maintaining "business as usual." In response, we ask: "who is caring for the parents?" and we call for an extended idea of parenting beyond the familial as a means of differently organizing our societies, workplaces, and institutions around a shared locus of care.