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This paper aims to disrupt assumptions about leadership by arguing those who are ostensibly “followers” may be utterly insouciant towards the existence of people categorised as “leaders”. It contributes to anti-leadership theories.

This article uses an immersive, highly reflexive methodology to explore subjective meanings of leadership at community levels ostensibly governed by local government leaders. It uses a case study of the South Wales Valleys, one of the hubs of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century but now economically deprived.

Through drawing on their rich and complex history, the author shows how in these communities there is a culture of neo-communitarianism that is anti-leadership and suspicious of attempts to establish hierarchies of superior over inferior. The author explores the complex webs of meaning through which ancient experiences reverberate like dead metaphors, informing contemporary understandings without conscious awareness of such a heritage. This is a history in which “leaders” betrayed or oppressed and exploited the population, which in response turned against hierarchies and evolved practices of self-government that continue today, invisible and unrepresentable within the wider culture.

The study draws on contemporary feminist research methods that emphasise subjectivity, flux and change. These are often not understood by readers not accustomed to stepping out of a positivist onto-epistemological frame.

The paper challenges the universalising tendencies of leadership theories that assume a shapeless mass; “followers” await the advent of a leader before they can become agentive.

The paper offers insights into a day-to-day world that is rarely explored.

The article demonstrates how emerging forms of qualitative research give insights into communities that undermine dominant, universalising theories of leadership, followership and government more generally.

This paper tracks how a policy recommended by management consultants becomes embedded as an integral part of leadership practice. It explores the launch of the concept of “talent management” by McKinsey & Company and how it becomes adopted as part of expected leadership practices in the English National Health Service. The use of Management Consultants globally has increased exponentially, and the paper considers this phenomenon and the ways in which management consultant advice influences public sector leadership and practice at local level.

A case study approach is adopted, focussing on the introduction of the concept of talent management into the English NHS, following the wider emergence of the concept through influential reports published by McKinsey & Company in the late 1990s. An analysis of the emergence of the concept is conducted drawing on this series of reports and the adoption of talent management policies and practices by the English government's Department of Health.

These influential reports by the management consultancy firm, McKinsey & Company, constituted an urgent need for this newly identified concept of talent management and the secrecy surrounding its reception. It is this mystery surrounding the decisions about a talent management strategy in the NHS and the concealment of decisions behind closed doors, which leads us to offer a theory of management consultants' influence on leaders as one of performative seduction.

Management consultancy is a vast business whose influence reaches deeply into public and private sector organisations around the world. Understanding of the variegated policies and practices that constitute contemporary modes of governance therefore requires comprehension of management consultants' role within those policies and practices. This paper argues that management consultants influence public sector leadership through insertion of their products into definitions of, and performative constitution of, local level leadership.

This chapter offers five poems that aim to provide an affective and embodied engagement with the question why women stay silent after experiencing sexual violence. It aims to trouble the idea that coming forward as a victim or survivor is a one-time action or ‘event’. Instead it seeks to make felt how both staying silent and speaking out need continuous negotiation and effort. The poems provide a personal account of the difficulties inherent in navigating systemic power structures such as misogyny and rape culture that produce victims as shameful, guilty and broken. The writing speaks to both ongoing discussions in organisation studies regarding #MeToo (e.g. Ozkazanc Pan, 2018; Pullen & Vacchani, 2019) and efforts that aim to resist norms of academic writing, grouped under the heading ‘writing differently’ (e.g. Fotaki, Metcalfe, & Harding, 2014; Gilmore, Harding, Helin, & Pullen 2019; Grey & Sinclair 2006; Meier & Wegener 2017; Phillips, Pullen, & Rhodes 2014). More specifically, it uses poetic inquiry (cf. Prendergast, Leggo, & Sameshima 2009; van Amsterdam & van Eck, 2019) as the starting point of a feminist ethic of care in order to capture affect, embodiment and tacit knowledge, provide resonance and make an impact on the reader that goes beyond rational understanding.

This chapter takes the form of an open feminist letter, a complaint and a manifesto presented to the Critical Management Studies (CMS) Academy. It is posted with urgency at a time when Patriarchy is resurging across the globe. My complaint is against the misogyny and the moral injury done to all of us and to our participants through our detached, disembodied, non-relation, pseudo-objective, masculine ways of becoming and being CMS scholars. Drawing on the thinking of Hélène Cixous, I offer five gifts as strategies to break with the masculine reckoning and open up our scholarship to féminine multiplicity and generativity: loving not knowing, return to our material bodies, rightsizing theory, knowledge made flesh-to-flesh and women’s writing. I visit, and suggest our scholarship will benefit from visiting, Cixous’s School of the Dead and her School of Dreams. I advocate for social theatre/performative auto/ethnography as a way to effect change in organisations. Finally, I present a manifesto for women’s writing that can help take our scholarship ‘home’ and contribute to the creation of flourishing organisations. This letter is a Call to Arms.