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This paper seeks to understand leaders as material presences. Leadership theory has traditionally explored leaders as sites of disembodied traits, characteristics and abilities. Our qualitative, mixed method study suggests that managers charged with the tasks of leadership operate within a very different understanding. Their endogenous or lay theory understands leadership as physical, corporeal and visible, and as something made manifest through leaders' material presence. This theory-inpractice holds that leadership qualities are signified by the leader's physical appearance: the good leader must look the part. Actors consequently work on their own appearance to present an image of themselves as leader. They thus offer a fundamental challenge to dominant exogenous, or academic, theories of leadership.To understand the unspoken assumptions that underpin the lay theory of leadership as material presence, we interrogate it using the new materialist theory of Karen Barad and the object relations theory of Christopher Bollas. This illuminates the lay theory's complexities and sophisticated insights. In academic terms it offers a theory of how sentient and non-sentient actors intra-act and performatively constitute leadership 2 through complex entanglements that enact and circulate organizational and leadership norms. The paper's contribution is thus a theory of leadership micro-dynamics in which the leader is materialised through practices of working on a corporeal self for presentation to both self and others.

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The risk that flexible forms of employment are harmful to the health of workers is a major public health issue for the many countries, including Australia, where such forms of employment are common or have been growing. Casual, contract and part-time employment in Australia rose rapidly in the decade to 1998 and remains high at 40% of employees in 2011. We investigate the impacts on mental health of employment on these terms and of unemployment. We use nine waves of panel survey data and dynamic random-effects panel data regression models to estimate the impact on self-rated mental health of unemployment, and of employment on a part-time, casual or contract basis, compared with permanent full-time employment. We control for demographic and socio-economic characteristics, occupation, disabilities status, negative life events and the level of social support. We find almost no evidence that flexible employment harms mental health. Unemployed men (but not women) have significantly and substantially lower mental health. But among the employed, only men who are on fixed-term contracts, most especially graduates, have lower mental health than those who are employed on full-time permanent terms. Women have significantly higher mental health if they are employed full time on casual terms.