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Developing leaders for a diverse democracy is an increasingly important aim of higher education and social justice is ever more a goal of leadership education efforts. Accordingly, it is important to explore how dominant leadership models, as blueprints for student leadership development, account for and may unwittingly reinforce systems of domination, like racism. This critical discourse analysis, rooted in racialization and color-evasiveness, examines three prominent college student leadership development models to examine how leaders and leadership are racialized. We find that all three leadership texts frame leaders and leadership in color-evasive ways. Specifically, the texts’ discourses reveal three mechanisms for evading race in leadership: focusing on individual identities, emphasizing universality, and centering collaboration. Implications for race in leadership development, the social construction of leadership more broadly, and future scholarship are discussed.

Inclusive leadership education espouses a generalized set of values that it hopes to impart to students, what Foucault (1978) would call discourse. However, students may choose to embrace, resist, alter, or challenge particular aspects of a class’s discourse. Qualitative analysis compared multicultural leadership course students’ pre-test and post-test responses to a question that asked them to define inclusion. Four changes in narratives emerged: some students 1) exhibited heightened awareness of difference, 2) transitioned away from egocentrism in leadership thinking, 3) expressed more comfort with thinking about inclusion as an abstract concept, and 4) challenged the charge to define inclusion.

This article focuses on the leadership development of young adults. The topic is of significant importance as leadership identity tends to form early in life, and its long-term implications contribute to leadership formation. The objective of this study was to gain insights into how leadership is constructed in young adults and how it is manifested in their preferred leadership identity.

This research was approached from a constructivist perspective, utilizing discourse analysis. The authors conducted a study involving 24 written essays by young individuals with a business background, in which they shared their early leadership experiences. Drawing upon a modified life story interview structure, the authors meticulously analyzed the content.

The authors identified eight discourses clustered into two groups according to the types of leadership orientation: toward oneself and toward others. The discourses in the toward oneself group consist of leadership as taking responsibility, leadership as courage, manifesting personal strengths and as a role/status. The toward others group includes discourses approaching leadership as balancing directivity, coordinating and organizing work, personalized approach and as performance management.

The major methodological limitations stem from the qualitative design per se. The findings based on qualitative data have limits in generalizing.

The authors' findings have practical implications for educators. The authors propose the utilization of critical self-reflection on early leadership experiences and self-narration as effective tools in nurturing and developing young leaders.

This paper underscores the importance of educating young leaders, as they can create a positive impact on their subordinates and society as a whole. By providing them with leadership skills, the authors initiate a chain reaction of influence that extends through different levels of leadership, leading to significant social change.

The authors' originality and contribution to the literature on leadership development lies in showcasing the diversity of perspectives on leadership among participants sharing a similar background and developmental stage. This holds valuable implications for educators working with this cohort.

Responsible leadership is a concept that links leadership, corporate social responsibility, sustainability and ethics to business performance and actions of senior executives and board members. This keynote illuminates how responsible leadership mindsets and their diverse understandings of the purpose of business are related to organizational level stakeholder engagement and corporate social responsibility approaches at the upper echelon. A first link is established between broader social movements (e.g., US Business Roundtable, Conscious Capitalism, Social Entrepreneurship movement) and the social identity of responsible leaders, thereby contributing to the discussion of the changing nature of the purpose of business. The article closes with a Q&A session.

Although numerous women have contributed essays and research on servant-leadership there is still a considerable gap in literature addressing feminist perspectives and issues of gender in servant-leadership. This theoretical paper attempts to fill that gap by presenting a discussion of servant-leadership that is informed through feminist scholarship. The intent is to build a theoretical foundation for conceiving servant-leadership as a gender-integrative approach to leadership. A further purpose is to propose gender-integrative discernment in leadership education programs and suggest using servant-leadership as a framework for discussing gender in leadership and organizations. Examples of implications for leadership education programs are discussed in terms of outcomes and assessment. Suggestions for course content are made.

In the last decades, the notion that leadership comprises responsible leadership has gained support and the academic debate has shed some light on the antecedents, processes, and multi-level outcomes of responsible leadership. Being at the intersection of the leadership and sustainability discourses, responsible leadership has benefitted from the increasing interests that both fields of study have received. Nevertheless, the debate has left several questions around the nature and development of responsible leadership unanswered. Among these questions we reckon an understanding of “responsible” in the definition of “responsible leadership,” the width of leaders’ responsibility and the depth of their impact including the role of personal alongside formal leadership, and the distinction between “responsible” and “non responsible” leaders. The aim of this theoretical paper is to further the academic discussion on leadership in the context of sustainability and its integration in higher education settings. We review the literature and explore the academic debate while step-by-step building a description of responsible leadership that could form the basis for leadership programmes in higher education. Then, borrowing insights from pro-environmental psychology, we share a tripartite description of responsible leadership, which centres around identity, behaviour and responsiveness. As a final step, we share our experience in building an undergraduate programme based on this tripartite description of responsible leadership. Here, we illustrate how the leadership description can be visualised in a figure and used to develop an undergraduate Liberal Arts and Sciences curriculum centred on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Educators have had good reason to be concerned with social justice in a context where diversity has become more pronounced in both our schools and communities, with widening divisions between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Internationally, increasing emphasis has been placed on utilizing the role of school leadership to address issues of social justice and equality, within a scenario where comparative studies of the performance of educational systems dominate the policy imagination globally, thus leading to increased pressure on school systems. This chapter presents a problematization of the social justice concept within education as presented in the literature, while setting out to critique this concept as an educational goal, as well as the role educational leadership is expected to play in the promotion of equity and social justice discourses through the lens of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). This theoretical chapter has implications for theory, policy, and practice.

Despite widespread acknowledgement of the importance of leadership education, undergraduate leadership degree programs in Canada are limited and, in some cases, struggling for survival. This case study examines the ways in which competing discourses of careerism, postsecondary corporatization, liberal arts education, and business education impact an undergraduate leadership program’s sustainability.

This paper explores the implications of using Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs as a “paradigm case” of transformational leadership by comparing the practical metadiscourse of remembrances published at the time of his passing to the theoretical metadiscourse of transformational leadership. The authors report the frequency of transformational leadership characteristics that appeared in characterizations of Jobs in the months after his passing in October 2011. Results show that people do remember Jobs as a leader, and as one who possessed three key personal characteristics of a transformational leader: creative, passionate, and visionary. People also remembered Jobs as an innovator, which is not typically associated with transformational leadership but which does reflect the discourse of the consumer electronics industries upon which he had an impact. However, the results also show that two important interpersonal characteristics of a transformational leader were absent in the remembrance discourse: empowering and interactive. The authors discuss the implications of the two missing terms for pedagogy and theorizing, including how problematizing Jobs as a paradigm case might lead to fruitful discussions about the importance of a transformational leader’s engagement with followers.

As teachers of leadership, we have noticed that our students often get “stuck” thinking about leadership in overly simplistic ways that dichotomize task and relationship-orientations, often resulting in overly simplistic understandings of leadership processes. In this reflective essay, we draw upon two approaches to leadership theory—leadership psychology and discursive leadership—to consider why the leadership dichotomy occurs and provide ideas for how leadership instructors might restructure and refocus their courses to help students transcend it to develop more reflexive, contextualized understandings of leadership. We suggest four ideas for innovating leadership pedagogy: 1) rethink the typical chronological organization, 2) challenge students to identify leadership myths, 3) engage students in applied leadership contexts, and 4) emphasize leadership as a communicative practice.