Outlining a research terrain for resistance leadership: An editorial for the special issue ‘Don’t look up! Rebooting leadership with resistance from below’

Abstract

Why is resistance leadership a vital topic for our field? In the editorial for this special issue, the editors make the case for studying resistance leadership as conceptually important, empirically urgent and practically essential. The article proceeds in two stages. First, the authors offer conceptual and empirical grounding, claiming a foundational status for resistance in the genesis and development of leadership theory and practice. Having provided a definition of resistance leadership that accounts for its material, discursive and affective richness, the authors consider the empirical importance of resistance leadership research. Drawing on the notion of brutalism offered by political theorist Achille Mbembe, the authors survey the devastating and technologically intensified accumulation of violence, misogyny and racism that has gripped our world, highlighting the resistance leadership dynamics at work. Second, a resistance leadership compass is offered to guide future research. The compass plots the multiple ways in which resistance leadership may manifest: as more or less geographically dispersed, tilted towards reforming or transforming, and temporally bounded or expansive. From this basis, four tentative modes of resistance leadership are posited, drawing and expanding upon the articles in the special issue, while also offering examples from practice and existing research. These modes, which may be interrogated and adapted through further research, are: ‘appropriating resistance leadership’; ‘strengthening resistance leadership’; ‘progressing resistance leadership’; and ‘revolutionising resistance leadership’.