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This article sets out a new research agenda for decentered public leadership. Nested in the concept of decentered theory, it examines the messy and contested nature of public leadership practices in different contexts. Drawing on recent empirical studies that have adopted a decentered approach to examining public leadership, it sets out a future research agenda that places individuals, history and context at the heart of explanations for public leadership in action.

The practitioners of postmodern organization theory have had to respond to the charge that postmodernism has a declivity toward skepticism. Their response to organizational skepticisim is to decenter dominant theories, paradigms and organizational forms, rather than to negate them. Decentering supplements discourse by augmenting its repertoire; the opposite of skepticism, which diminishes its object. The main ways in which postmodern organization theories try to overcome the specific sceptical position of paradigm incommensurability (the reduction of discourse about organizations and organizational discourse to a solipsism of private language games) are described and assessed in terms of three positions: John Hassard’s “multiple paradigm” approach on the level of methodology, Stewart Clegg’s “embedded rationalities” on the level of empirical conceptualization, and Kenneth Gergen’s “heteroglossia” on the level of discursive practice. Hassard and Clegg are engaged in the mapping function of postmodern organization theory, whereas Gergen is engaged in deconstraining organizations.

This paper is a response to Gary Marshall, Colin Macleod, and Amit Ronʼs careful discussions of my book, A Theory of Governance. The word “governance” is used in two contexts that might initially appear to have little relation to each other. Governance is used, first, as a general term to discuss abstract theories of coordination and organization. And governance is used, second, to narrate a historic shift in public organization and action. A Theory of Governance offers a decentered theory (part one of the book) that seeks to combine a general analysis of various forms of coordination and organization (part two of the book) with a narrative of recent changes in public organization and action (part three of the book). In this paper, I emphasize that decentered theory turns to historical genealogies to avoid determinism, reification, and foundationalism. Contemporary governance is, therefore, the variegated product of contests over meanings, specifically those reform agendas that have sought to spread markets and networks. I conclude the essay with some reflections on the nature and importance of democratic innovations within governance.

The paper discusses the evolution of leadership practices performed by local political leaders in the last decade (2009–2019, a period which we might call post-global financial crisis and pre-COVID-19). It offers some new theoretical concepts to make sense of emerging contemporary public leadership practices, namely: leaders-hip hop; charismatic followership; and digital fabrication of charisma (digital charisma).

The paper is based on a single case study, and it relies on qualitative data coming from multiple sources and collected at different points of time, specifically interviews, participant and non-participant observations from an ethnography conducted in 2009; interviews conducted between 2019 and 2020, and an analysis of the posts made within one Facebook group between February and May 2016.

The paper focuses on three stories of local political leadership at three different points in time which describe three leadership practices: political managerialism; charismatic followership; and hands-on relational leadership. It highlights the importance of hands-on relational leadership through popular acts of leadership which are performed face to face and/or on social media and the shift in the dominant technologies of local political leadership from the logic of managerialism toward the logic of social media.

The paper is focused on a limited temporal (2009–2019) and sociocultural context (North Italy). Findings are presented as three stories, although other ways of showing qualitative data could have been used.

Practical implications deal with the attempt to enable a reflexive view of local governance and public leadership attentive to soft and sociocultural variables. It is important to consider these implications for the purposes of training and learning.

The paper introduces new concepts to understand contemporary public leadership practices; it combines insights from a decentered theory of governance and collective theories of leadership; and it makes use of storytelling as a method for analyzing and reporting the findings.

Governance is central to our current understanding of public administration and policy. Mark Bevirʼs work provides governance studies solid epistemological grounding through a social constructionist approach which gives rise to a decentered theory of governance. This article explains decentered theory by examining the entrepreneurial subject as an artifact of neo-liberal governance. In doing so, it explores the key concepts that give shape to decentered theory.

This paper offers a critical commentary on Mark Bevirʼs recent book A Theory of Governance from the perspective of normative political philosophy. It explores three ways in which Bevirʼs analysis can be brought into dialogue with political philosophy. First, it considers the role of generalizations in successful explanations of social phenomena. Second, it explores how a decentred theory of governance can help identify solutions to important social problems. Third, it explores the relation between Bevirʼs account of governance and theories of deliberative democracy.

I summarize my views on democratic governance before responding to critics. Governance arose partly from the impact of modernist social science on public policy and it limits the space for democratic action. My preferred alternative is an interpretive social science inspiring more participatory and dialogic democratic practices. In defending these arguments, I concentrate on the nature of interpretive social science and its relation to democratic theory. I define interpretive social science in theoretical terms as based on recognition of the role of meanings in human life and the holistic and historical nature of meanings. This interpretive social science does not lead to any particular methods or topics, but it does rule out reified and deterministic appeals to structures. Democratic renewal depends on promoting interpretive social science, not institutional blueprints.

This essay critically assesses Connell’s Southern Theory. Operating from the premise that knowledge is a “project” embedded in power relations, the essay suggests that while the scope of ideas surveyed in Southern Theory is an important accomplishment, two main dilemmas can be found. The first is that Southern Theory inadvertently puts “Northern theory” at the center. The second is that the southern theorists examined tend to be educated elites from the Global South, thereby overlooking other actors in the Global South and their ways of doing theory. Struggling to change, not just the ideas, but also the ownership, vested interests and institutional actors of social theory as knowledge project might create space for much needed dialogues across differences in power.