The Leading Edge of Leadership Studies

Abstract

Thomas Carlyle rang in the modern era of leadership studies in London in 1840, with six public lectures published a year later as On Heroes and Hero-Worship. On that historical milestone, Suze Wilson and Bert Spector are agreed. And their agreement is of interest, since each of them published, in 2016, a critical and historical account of leadership studies. 1 Carlyle's lectures are not, however, about leadership. He shows no interest in corporate leadership, the notion of which still needed at least four years of gestation before Parliament was to pass the Joint Stock Companies Act. Nor is Carlyle especially interested in any sort of formal organizational leadership; that notion only arises in one of the lectures, BThe Hero as King,^where he extols Bthe commander over men; he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated….^2. The word leadership never occurs in the six lectures, and the word leader occurs only five times-less than once per essay. That is because the lectures are about greatness, offering a history of Bwhat man has accomplished in this world.^And that, according to Carlyle, amounts to the history Bof Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world.^3 By understanding their thoughts, we understand the history of the world, so that we too may be inspired to greatness.Carlyle, for all that, is a fine place to begin if your inquiry is into modern leadership discourse. For he has long occupied a rhetorical role in discussions of leadership. Do I believe that leadership makes a big difference, and that the leader should take an out-sized role? Then hooray for Carlyle! Do I believe that leadership is overemphasized, that the leader is only as good as the followers, and that big leaders are big trouble? Then down with Carlyle! Fittingly, Wilson and Spector are indeed inquiring into leadership discourse.

Management, Political Philosophy, and Social Justice

“…The philosophy of management has emerged in the recent decades as an identifiable and self-standing area of scholarly interest (Erkal and Vandekerckhove 2021;Mir and Greenwood 2021). Since its theoretical and conceptual tools are often borrowed from self-standing and well-established disciplines in the academic landscape (philosophy and management) and also given the human significance of their conversations, the inquiries addressed by philosophy of management are both deep, extending into antiquity (Blok 2019;Wilson 2017) and wide, reaching into moral philosophy, social philosophy, economic philosophy, and even aesthetics, ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology, broadly construed (Wilson 2018;Mir and Greenwood 2021;Neesham 2022). However, each of these subfields of philosophy does not receive equal attention from the contemporary scholarship in philosophy of management.…”

Editor’s Introduction

“…We close this issue with a combined book review -a preferred way to present book reviews in this journal. Wilson (2018) discusses two recent books that inquire into the leadership discourse. He explains that whilst both books acknowledge Carlyle as a precursor to trait theory of leadership (cf.…”