Editorial transitions part 2 – hail and hello

This issue of Leadership marks a new year and a new volume but also our first issue as Co-Editors-in-Chief. We are absolutely delighted to be working with colleagues in continuing the success of the journal and are indebted to Dennis Tourish for all his excellent work in getting the journal to where it is now – a key, critical and contemporary contribution to leadership studies. Thank you, Dennis!

We, as leadership scholars, have grown up with this journal since it was established by David Collinson and Keith Grint back in 2005. Around this time, we were both completing our PhD’s and embarking on an exciting career in academia. We say ‘exciting’ as the journal, at that time, epitomised a critical (Collinson, 2011, 2017) and constructionist (Grint, 2005) turn in the scholarship around leadership, challenging more mainstream ways of thinking on the subject. The journal, and conference ally – the International Studying Leadership Conference (ISLC), has felt like our community, somewhere where we belong in a sometimes challenging and turbulent journey. We hope to continue to develop this community and enable others to have somewhere to ‘belong’.

We look forward to working with the team of Associate Editors - Michelle Bligh, Richard Bolden, Brigid Carroll, Jackie Ford, Brad Jackson, Owain Smolović Jones, Leah Tomkins and Suze Wilson and the wider editorial board. As Dennis (2022) mentioned in his farewell editorial, they have provided a sterling service and we will be grateful for their continued and invaluable advice and support. We also look forward to working with authors who have or will submit contributions, we are excited about the future and what we will receive in our editor in-box.

In Dennis Tourish’s editorship (e.g., 2015, 2022), we have seen great strides in developing the journal as a critical outlet initiated by David and Keith and this is the primary focus of our own editorship. We are absolutely wedded to keeping this journal as a much-needed critical voice in leadership studies where papers have the space to ‘pose awkward questions and critique mainstream scholarship’ (Tourish, 2022: 725). The three ambitions Dennis Tourish had when he took over the journal stand with us today and we will continue to push for criticality, addressing important issues in the world and encouraging a diverse way of theorising and writing (Tourish, 2022). In our view these ambitions are interconnected and require a continued push for diversity and inclusion in how we organise ourselves, write, research, theorise, think, and live. In doing so we have to be careful to make sure that the community that we have built and continue to build does not become exclusionary. Hence, as editors we will strive to enable all to be included in the critical debate around leadership.

We take note of and applaud some of those that have started the journey in the hope that this will help others to scope out their own contributions to the journal. One recent example is the special issue on race and leadership (see Spiller and Watson, 2021) that invites us all into a space that releases the ‘…occlusions that prevent us from receiving the voices of others’ (p. 3). In this special issue Adejumo (2021: 63) reminds us that ‘… the prospects for diversity, inclusion, and belonging are bounded by leadership’. So, if we continue to see the phenomenon we study as ‘the leader’ and through the lens of white leadership theorising (see Ladkin and Bridges Patrick, 2022) then we are in a serious demise in building organisations, communities, and societies where diversity, inclusion and belonging is a natural disposition (see Adejumo, 2021). Ladkin and Bridges Patrick (2022) continue this conversation and build on previous work in the journal (see Liu and Baker, 2016) by challenging the domination of whiteness in theorising and researching leadership. We would like to support this challenge to the ‘normativity of whiteness’ (Ladkin and Bridges Patrick, 2022: 205) that pervades leadership theory. In connection, we would like to see more papers that challenge the westernized and colonialised basis of this normalising process (see Liu, 2018; Ospina and Foldy, 2009) and add to those that have and are paving the way in the journal (e.g., Case et al., 2017; Evans and Sinclair, 2016a, 2016b; Jimenez-Luque, 2021; Stewart et al., 2017; Warner and Grint, 2006). In addition, we would also look to welcome papers that challenge the ingrained masculinity of leadership theory and research.

We take note here, as does Dennis Tourish in his farewell editorial, of Ann Cunliffe’s (2022) challenge to the wider area of organisation theory. In her paper (2022: 2), she highlights how theorising about theory ‘… continues to be rooted in an ideology of masculinized rationality, based on taken-for-granted masculinized values and language, and mainly done by men.’ We sense the same with theorising about leadership and hope to see papers that not only challenge the mainstream but also the ‘malestream’ (O’ Brien, 1981) of leadership research, a challenge, which again, has a strong tradition in our journal (see, for example, Ford, 2006, 2010). To encourage you to submit papers to us along these lines, we would like to offer some guiding words from Ann’s paper. Contributions to Leadership, therefore, should be one or some of the following – reflexive, intuitive, plausible, interpretive, resonant, relevant, plural, diverse, fluid, constructive, relational, surprising, dialogic, embodied, visual, situated, sensual, sensible and sensitive. Ann provides us with enormous choice here. We are not suggesting that you cover all aspects of theorising mentioned above but pick and choose where your contribution sits and show us in your writing and research methods! Ultimately, we wish to enable research and practice to ‘… respond to and work with the contours of the living/lived experiences of people’ (Cunliffe, 2022: 5).

In our role as Editors-in-Chief we will strive to develop the community of the journal so please do get in touch if you are interested in getting involved, either as a reviewer, as part of our editorial team or indeed if you are interested in submitting work to the journal. We also welcome your interest in and ideas for special issues and thought pieces for the journal, so please do email us with your suggestions and proposals. We look forward to some interesting and evocative conversations.