Challenging leaderism

Judging by the number of submissions to this special issue there is considerable interest in the subject of leadership in higher education. The 45 papers received from researchers based in 16 different countries provided an insight into how the concept of leadership is being (re)interpreted and (re)constructed in a university context across the world. In the recent past, this has largely tended to mean researching the views of vice chancellors, deans and heads of department. It was about formally designated and highor middle-ranking ‘leaders’. The research agenda focused on investigating their traits, challenges and tribulations. Yet only five of the papers submitted to this special issue focus on this line of enquiry, represented here by Pat O’Connor, Teresa Carvalho and Kate White’s exploration of the challenges facing senior positional leaders in a cross-national study involving Australia, Ireland and Portugal. By contrast, the majority of papers submitted can be classified as about some aspect of distributed leadership. This is an understanding of leadership based on open boundaries within organizational communities where expertise is, in reality, shared between the many rather than seen as the preserve of the few (Bennett, Wise, Woods, & Harvey, 2003). Hence, who ‘counts’ as a leader is broadly interpreted or, perhaps, more rigorously questioned, a perspective succinctly conveyed in the title of Adisorn Juntrasook’s paper ‘You don’t have to be the boss to be a leader’. In her paper, Kathleen Quinlan presents a model of leadership for student learning needs on the basis of an inclusive and community-based ethos while Linda Evans provides a distributed definition of research leadership via an analysis of the perspectives of ‘the led’. Interest in distributed leadership in higher education is not in itself anything new and has featured in the work of Whitchurch, on the ‘third space’ professional (2008), and Bolden, Petrov, and Gosling, in their multi-level analysis of professional practice (2008). The role of full university professors who as ‘intellectual leaders’ may not necessarily hold a formal managerial position has also become the subject of recent attention and enquiry (Macfarlane, 2012; and see the paper by Evans). What does appear to be new is that distributed leadership has now become a mainstream, and even perhaps dominant, mode of analysis if submissions to this special issue are anything to go by. It is no longer an alternative or marginalized way of understanding leadership in higher education. Contesting who counts as a leader in this way has both practical as well as theoretical implications. In comparatively recent years, universities have started to take the business of leadership training more seriously. But this has tended to be bounded by the conventions of ‘great man’ theory and only those holding formal, senior positions are usually invited. If leadership is genuinely distributed what does this mean for leadership development? We will know that distributed leadership has started to have a real impact when university development programmes start to considerably broaden their pool of recruits. Distributed leadership represents part of a broader challenge to what has been termed ‘leaderism’ or the ‘leaderist turn’ (Morley, 2013; O’Reilly & Reed, 2010). This critique suggests that leadership has turned into a dominant discourse in the public sector, including higher education, in the heroic mould of ‘great man’ theory.