Abstract
Leadership development for youth is an increasingly large global business that has to date lacked sustained critical scrutiny. Our inquiry is based on application, interview and reflection data from participants in a university-based leadership programme, capturing them at the point they transition to early work lives. We argue that leadership has become such a prevalent career and work discourse that the leadership development that happens in youth offers a unique window into new organisational workers, the leadership development industry and a complex leadership theoretical terrain. A set of five ‘leading’ discourses – separate, suspended, small, self and semi – were identified that invite critical inquiry. While youth leadership scholars have previously noted the suspended and separate discourses, we empirically refine those and offer the other three (small, self and semi) as important to current contestations between leaders, leadership and leadership development. In doing so, we question whether current leadership development for youth creates substantive leadership capacity in individuals, organisations or society.
Introduction
Leadership development research is often prefaced by remarks that quantify the sharp growth of the development industry, its associated investments and revenue (Day, 2011; Gagnon and Collinson, 2014) and its perceived strategic and competitive importance to organisations (Mabey and Finch-Lees, 2008; Saslow and Buss, 2005). Much leadership development is targeted at youth, a ‘blurred category’ that incorporates pre-teens, adolescents, students and young or emergent adults (Gabriel, 2013). We premise this inquiry on the proposition that the leadership development of youth facilitates new questions about (a) the expectations and experiences of emergent workers, (b) the incremental move of leadership development into not just education but career and work trajectories and (c) contemporary leadership scholarship. We ask, What happens when youth from leadership development programmes try to lead? How might this illuminate leadership and leadership development in general?
This article draws from a longitudinal research project which followed students as they progressed through a university-based leadership development programme and out into societal commitments and the workplace. It focuses on the liminal spaces between these positions: participants still self-identified as youth but were beginning to take adult-like responsibilities. The programme was designed and delivered by a university provider, which strongly identified with the emergent, critical literature on leadership. The participants were undergraduates aged between 17 and 19 at the time of the programme but between 19 and 25 when interviewed. This research explores how they constructed a leadership that felt within their power to accomplish, compared with the stark reality of leadership within formal organisational and societal structures.
We first explore the literature on youth and society and then focus on youth leadership development. We then outline our research design and methodology and describe the empirical analysis, and we provide evidence of youth constructing a distinctive version of leadership which poses some interpretive challenges that speak to youth, yet go beyond it.
Theoretical perspectives on youth and society
Youth has become a contentious categorisation. The predominant perspective argues that youth – what it tends to call adolescence – is a natural, essential and universal stage of life. This essentialist position maintains that youth is a distinct period of development with its own characteristics (Besley, 2002; White and Wyn, 1998, 2012), traditionally described in terms of storm and stress (Hall, 1904), with pugnacity, risk and emotionally instability being exhibited. In a familiar picture, individuals navigate a rapidly changing body and an increasingly complicated social terrain involving new responsibilities, pressures and decisions. Youth is characterised as a formative time of finding and forging oneself; hence, there are multiple agencies and institutions to monitor support, guide, protect and police youth (Besley, 2002). These perspectives underscore a natural biological immaturity inherent to adolescents (‘youth’ literally means immature and incomplete, Bucholtz, 2002) and seek to justify excluding youth from having responsibility and voice and protecting them from risky or unsanctioned behaviour.
In contrast, we take an alternative position based on various strands of theory, including critiques of postmodernity (Strickland, 2002), subcultural sociology (Hebdige, 2002) and constructionist theory- heterogeneous voices that are nevertheless united by their perception of youth as a construction rather than a natural, essential categorisation that the term ‘adolescent’ conjures up. Our perspective seeks to de-naturalise youth (Lesko, 1996) and instead ‘confront age as a socially constructed category of difference and inequality rather than a simple reflection of biology’ (Gordon, 2009: 5), and to distinguish between the meaning of youth as constructed and the biological fact of being young (Hacking, 1999). Here, we assert that what youth means and how it is positioned and bounded in relation to adulthood is continually being (re)constructed as a historically and socially contingent category. Constructionist perspectives thus seek to problematize assumptions around youth and deny narrow age-bounded, naturalised definitions. Instead, youth is a problematic, contested and ambiguous category encompassing a muddy transition between childhood and adulthood (Gabriel, 2013). Such perspectives would also question whether youth can be held considered a universal, homogeneous category, or should rather be constructed differently across changing times and cultures and only understood as it intersects with other constructed categories (White and Wyn, 1998).
Here, we assert that the definition of, and qualification for, youth is starkly different between essentialist and constructionist perspectives. Essentialist youth research considers adolescence as encompassing the time of high school (between 12 and 18 years old), the narrowly age-bounded period of biological life between puberty and adulthood. The more constructionist, sociological and cultural studies literatures take a more socioeconomic line, with youth encompassing ‘a period of social semi-dependency, framed by legislation and cultural norms, which forms a bridge between the total dependence of childhood and the independence of adulthood’ (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997: 55). In age-related terms, youth would therefore be ‘between around 15 years and the mid-twenties, though both these age “boundaries” are constantly rising’ (Jones, 2009: 11). This constructionist research focuses on the point of movement from lives dominated by study to lives starting to be dominated by work and career.
A constructionist approach invites us to question assumptions that youth must be protected and nurtured into functional (normative) social roles (Besley, 2002) and socialised as consumers (Strickland, 2002). Such perspectives do not simply claim that youth is constructed rather than inevitable and demonstrate that youth’s very meaning is ambiguous and even contradictory. We believe that there is a ‘slippage or undecideability’ (Gabriel, 2013: 67) to the constructions of youth that posit ‘an ambiguous boundary or margin’ (p. 2) between childhood and adulthood. This ambiguity or liminality of youth is often mobilised unevenly, such that youth can sometimes be tried in court as adults even as young as 13 (Gabriel, 2013; Gordon, 2009), yet they are also restricted from marrying without parental consent or buying alcohol. The ambiguity of youth is thus deployed in ways that destabilise the agency and power available to youth.
This naturalisation of youth as an immature, risky and unpredictable stage masks the power relations underpinning this categorisation. This is the ‘citizens-in-the-making’ model of youth agency and power (Gordon, 2009: 8). In her detailed ethnography of multiple youth activist organisations, Gordon shows how youth are actively diverted and restrained from political engagement. Despite their strong political consciousness – greater than that of many adults – ‘they are subtly and overtly thwarted by adults, and sometimes even other youth, who read this political action as precocious, transgressive, and out-of-bounds of proper adolescent behavior’ (Gordon, 2009: 10). Drawing on the work of Lesko (1996), Gordon shows how when adolescents are constructed as biologically deficient (socially or cognitively), they are denied genuine voice and allowed only a kind of sanitised power- the right to speak, but only if they say what adults want to hear. They are considered mature only as long as they reproduce adult norms and may be written off as immature when they transgress boundaries.
The ambiguities and paradoxes surrounding the construction of youth acquire even more complexity from sociological thinking on the challenging societal landscape of major technological, cultural, political and economic change that they must navigate (Beck, 1992; Furlong and Cartmel, 1997, 2007; Jeffrey and Mcdowell, 2004). Sociological approaches call us to understood youth as active agents ‘who consciously shape and choose their own destinies’ (Wyn and White, 2000: 165) but do so in new ways that reflect such change. So while youth might exercise will, they are doing so in societies forcing high individualisation, personal responsibility and problematic transitions between education and work (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997; Wyn and White, 2000). They navigate a world where what used to be societal and institutional risks (collective employment contracts, worker rights and employer obligations) are increasingly transferred to individuals (Beck, 1992). Not unsurprisingly as a result, sociologists suggest youth demonstrate a growing prioritisation of personal, family and non-work life (Wyn and White, 2000).
Leadership development for youth
Notwithstanding the huge development industry targeting youth leadership (Heifetz, 2006), it could be considered a fragmented research field, due to a proliferation of overlapping research studies of youth development, engagement, participation and activism, which tend to outstrip research with a leadership focus (Redmond and Dolan, 2016). Rather than covering all these studies, we focus on broad theoretical movements, particularly those concerning relationships between youth, influence and action.
In youth development, positive psychology is important particularly ‘positive youth development where youth are perceived, not as “problems to be managed” but as “resources to be developed”’ (Lerner et al., 2005: 10). This approach prioritises plasticity, the ability of youth to be influenced and grown through ‘mutually beneficial relationships with the people and institutions of their social world’ in pursuit of ‘positive contributions to self, family, community and civil society’ (Lerner et al., 2005: 12). Such assumptions shift youth development towards a ‘citizenship’ approach (as opposed to an activism one) where youth are groomed to be ‘active, considerate, mindful citizens . . . in support of a stable society’ (Redmond and Dolan, 2016: 263). Positive psychology has been accompanied by shifts across youth fields from prevention, to preparation, to participation and power sharing (O’Donoghue et al., 2002). This looks like a commitment to the dimensions that should strengthen leadership and its development, but in practice the difference between prevention and participation in terms of voice and influence may be slender.
Growing engagement with phenomena such as power, voice and participation reveal key tensions in the youth leadership space. Those involved in community or youth activism point to youth’s facility with issues of injustice, oppression and change, with youth ‘well positioned to identify and deconstruct social problems and develop strategies to remedy them’ (Govan et al., 2015: 88). These authors advocate four critical youth leadership development practices: ‘prioritising youth voice, positive relationships, critical social analysis, and active engagement’ (Govan et al., 2015: 88). But Mitra (2008) suggests that ‘change efforts are often about shifting power relations’ (p. 224) and that missing from much leadership development is the ‘questioning of authority, criticism, innovation, and initiation of change’ (p. 223), which she attributes to the centrality and intransigence of adults in leadership development. This is pointing to a need for ‘adults to change their frames, that is, their understanding of youth and how to work with them’ (O’Donoghue et al., 2002: 22). Redmond and Dolan (2016: 266) evoke Hart’s ‘ladder of participation’ ranging from genuine to tokenistic and warn that at lower levels of development youth ‘might be manipulated to make organizations ‘appear’ like they are doing ‘the right thing’’. MacNeil (2006) critiques leadership development as permeated by ageism and adultism whereby adults have constructed what counts both as youth and as leadership and have created structures and discourses that reinforce their own constructions.
Ironically, leadership development stemming from adult-dominated positive psychology and societal compliance models may (unwittingly) silence or defer rather than develop youth leadership. Even the ubiquitous term ‘future leaders’ has a future orientation that assumes present deficit. Gordon (2009) similarly critiques both school leadership development pathways with representative and student council positions that grant the title of leader without power to do more than organising sports days and dances, while school and university clubs are sanitised and administered by the governing authority of adults. Brasof (2015) confirms such that even in contexts that explicitly espouse distributed leadership, the tendency in practice is to produce docile youth ‘leaders’ with little engagement in robust leadership work. Development which offers leadership but no power to youth may thus negate the very thing it seeks to espouse.
In response to this denial of power, O’Donoghue (2006) argues that ‘counterpublics’ (Fraser, 1990) need to be created, which offer a separate, sheltered space in which those without voice seek to develop a sense of agency and become civic actors. This is best seen in community-based youth organisations, which seek to offer a rebalancing of voice and power. Yet, the tendency for such organisations is not to separate entirely from adult movements which can limit what voice is gained (Gordon, 2009; Libby et al., 2006). MacNeil and McClean (2006) advocate dispensing with the discourse of leadership in youth development contexts and replac[ing] it with governance to underscore the emphasis on practice, system change, power sharing and influence.
Of course issues of transition, identity, power and voice are far from unknown in leadership development orientated at adults. Leadership development programmes have been framed as liminal spaces (Ford et al., 2008) and identity workspaces (Petriglieri and Petriglieri, 2010) where often senior managers or professionals work on, not just work-related professional and organisational issues, but in-depth personal development. There is also a growing stream of work for exploring such spaces as sites of identity regulation where such participants are very explicitly moulded to construct idealised leader selves in programmes assuming compliance to pre-fixed organisational technologies and outcomes (Ford and Harding, 2007; Gagnon and Collinson, 2014). Consequently, research is now exploring whether the actual ‘leadership’ in a leadership development programme can more likely be found in the dissent, resistance and struggle (as opposed to accommodation, acquiescence and acceptance) of participants to the explicit selection, shaping and assessment regimes associated with these programmes (Carroll and Nicholson, 2013; Gagnon and Collinson, 2017; Meier and Carroll, 2020). We would argue at the barest minimum that the critical scrutiny being brought to adult-orientated leadership development needs to be paralleled in youth-orientated leadership development. Further to that, we would propose that scrutiny of youth-orientated leadership development, without its reliance and interdependence on organisational performance, sanctioning, hosting and finance, affords a potentially more clear-cut look at how leadership might be manifested from leadership development in general.
In summary, fundamental shifts in the framing of youth development potentially impact the nature of leadership development from both theory and practice perspectives. It is such shifts which guide our inquiry.
Research methodology and design
Our methodology starts from the need to shift discourse and voice from adults to youth; a core consideration for any critical research exploration in youth leadership development (MacNeil, 2006; Mortensen et al., 2014). Accordingly, this inquiry utilises a discourse reading of how participants transitioning out of youth leadership development programmes construct leadership in their new contexts in relation to their leadership development. This is a complex endeavour. Marginalised voices or poles of a binary cannot necessarily escape the logic that marginalised or subordinated them (Gabriel, 2013). Youth therefore cannot construct an identity that does not in some part rely on the more dominant adult leadership identity. Gabriel (2013: 56) reminds us that ‘youth speech is not strictly its own’ and that ‘actual youth voices are still framed by how youth are first spoken about’. Our analysis was guided by our understanding that ‘to speak oneself as a youth is to reflect how one has been spoken to, spoken about or spoken for’ (Gabriel, 2013: 56) and that our youth voices are intersections of multiple discourses on both youth and leadership.
Our research pool of 120 youth had attended one of four, 9-month-long leadership development programmes over 4 years at a major university in Australasia. The university sponsored the programme but it was not part of any curriculum, nor was it assessed. It was presented and accepted as a youth leadership development programme, and participants were mainly undergraduate students aged 18 or 19 years. During the programme, the participants met seven times as a full group in a combination of overnight residential and single-day workshops. Between workshops, they were encouraged to coalesce around ‘wicked’ problems (Grint, 2005) and to engage in leadership around these issues. The problems involved diverse issues such as poor youth participation in university decision-making events, increasing youth volunteering to social causes, international student experiences of isolation and racism and the fostering of community within the university. Participants were supported between workshops through face-to-face meetings and constant online support via a digital community platform. The programme thus attempted to open up space for youth to lead ‘now’, rather than being dubbed ‘future’ leaders.
We sought to go beyond an exploration of experiences within the programme and follow participants as they began to move into post-university lives, typically through career-orientated work in organisations. Our broader pool of data therefore encompasses pre-programme, programme and immediate post-programme phases and interviews with participants up to 2 years after completing the programme. Those participants who had transitioned into post-university or emergent work lives were invited into an interview phase, and 18 of them undertook a 2-year ‘out-of-programme’ interview. While all the data were read and discussed, this particular inquiry focused on this post-programme and interview data.
While we defined youth primarily in terms of economic and cultural semi-dependency, our participants defined themselves predominantly in liminal terms. The interviews had many references to being young, being youth and being adult. Some of these presented in Table 1 discursively represent youth from their perspective. We note there was no straightforward equation of youth or adult with age, but a discourse of youth associated with movement, choice, indecision and fluidity, and one of adults linked to stasis, decisions, significance and fixedness. Participants tended to talk about themselves using the pronoun ‘you’ which we interpret as a distancing from locating themselves fully in either category.
Participant definitions of youth and adult.
When asked to identify with youth or adult, participants often identified themselves as in-between the two (e.g. ‘I think I’m still young and naïve; less so than I used to be but I think I’ll get less and less naïve-well hopefully’), thus discursively embodying the movement they define as central in youth but being aware that decisions that might lessen their freedom are being made or soon will be. They thus represent themselves at the intersection of youth and adulthood.
We note that tertiary students are a relatively privileged group. Our participants, however, had considerable national and ethnic diversity, including many international students from Europe and Asia.
Nor were all participants affluent or middle class: many supported themselves through their studies by means of work, debt and family financial sacrifice and had concerns about the precariousness of their student lives. They had nevertheless been relatively successful at education and sought to achieve the credentials for entry into their chosen fields. They could be understood as representing the transnationalism of youth in general who increasingly move globally to seek out educational and work opportunities across often precarious living and employment contexts. Such a group provides only one lens into leadership development but, might nevertheless be expected, in their transnational identity and aspirations, to embrace leadership in some form (Please see table 2 and 3).
Sex demographics.
Ethnicity demographics.
Participants were interviewed by one of the authors for approximately an hour. The interview was designed to enable participants to use their own discourses to approach the meaning and practice of leadership. The interviewer acted as a reflective partner by asking what participants might mean by terms they used (such as youth), why experiences were associated with leadership and what assumptions might underlie such discussions. When an interviewer asked participants to talk to things that are often treated as self-evident, they would stop and then try and unpack tacit associations or meanings. Given the obvious leadership development relationship existing between interviewers and interviewees (one author had worked as a facilitator on the programmes and the other was a member of the institute responsible for the programmes), participants evidently wanted to reflect evidence of leadership activity and growth, yet they did so in unexpected ways. This makes the analysis of these interviews especially intriguing.
Both authors worked through the larger pool of written reflections and interview transcriptions. Conversations brought us together on what each was noticing and asking. This was critical given that some reflections were completed earlier than some interviews, offering the ability to explore continuity/discontinuity of patterns prior to, during and post the development experience. The authors worked discursively, paying attention to predominantly how participants named, ‘languaged’, framed phenomena, narrated anecdotes, and drew on discourses in their attempts to articulate meaning around age, leadership, and leadership development. We found made-up words (‘bigger-than-myself leadership’), temporal words (‘now’, ‘later’), and signifiers of uncertainty (‘I guess’, ‘I think’) particularly useful.
We adopted a ‘meso-discourse’ approach (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2000) which assumes that because there is a correspondence, albeit complex, between how we talk and the realities of which we talk, we can understand something about macro phenomena such as youth and leadership through direct analysis. Hence, one stretches beyond the immediate structure and selection of language to gain insight into broader tensions and movements that constructs such as youth represent. In this analysis, we worked iteratively between how something is constructed discursively and the meanings that are thereby included/excluded and also between the empirical material and critical literature on youth, social change and postmodernity. These iterative movements helped us to sustain a ‘suspicion’ of too superficial interpretations of discursive phenomena.
Empirical material: five discourses of leadership
We identified five discourses. Apart from two discourses of suspended and separate leading (which we discuss first), these discourses were not evident at the level of development programme design or delivery or in any research used in the programme. In outlining these, we stay deliberately close to participants’ words and then open them up interpretively and analytically. The nomenclature we use to headline them came directly from the participants’ talk. Each is presented in three ways: first through a selection of phrases and passages from the interview data, second through one narrative which can be analysed in a more sustained way and third through an illustration of how this discourse is carried over to an organisational or enterprise context.
Suspended leading is the claiming of a leadership identity whose active practice is deferred. This discourse, which has been identified in earlier research previously (MacNeil, 2006), was common among our groups of participants. However, it has traditionally been considered motivated and indeed imposed by leadership development ‘experts’ – those (usually adults) hosting, facilitating and leading the development. In our empirical material, participants had ‘interiorised’ this discourse, claimed it as their own and demonstrated a convincing anxiety and reluctance to activate their leadership in the present. Given this group tended to have had many leadership development experiences and opportunities to lead, and experienced leadership as ‘an expectation’, the strength of this discourse could be considered surprising. However, participants did not feel they had the pre-requisites to actually do leadership (‘still stuff I need to work on before I can do’), the capacities to succeed in leadership (‘a bit more of an impact or a positive impact on whatever community you are in’), or enough influence (‘making actual visible radical change in the world’). Participants’ ‘ability to shape a future’, to them, appeared compromised by ‘social responsibility’ or sense of readiness (Please see table 4).
Suspended leading.
One participant articulated ‘a logic’ behind the suspension discourse.
Note the distinction between what the participant ‘can control’ and ‘the most random thing’ which appears to be arrival at an entry point into what others have termed previously ‘bigger than myself leadership’ or ‘visible radical change in the world’: in this case, meaningful social action in ‘the Red Cross’ or ‘UN’. This participant registers little agency: ‘opportunity’ comes to you, not you to opportunity. Temporal discursive clues indicate that ‘now’ is to ‘just go through the motions’ until ‘I know I’ve done enough’. Participants appeared to be waiting for a quality of leadership work which would be more real than the ‘now’ (Please see table 5).
Suspended leading narrative.
In a work or enterprise context, this discourse was often tied to achievement of a certain authority or what one participant called ‘mastery’.
It is unclear whether ‘becoming a master’ applies primarily to acquiring expertise or authority, but leadership is clearly seen as an interim step to what this participant really desires: mastery. Being a student is contrasted with ‘adult’ and ‘mature’ and leadership appears the currency that unlocks that state. This participant’s language indicates the connectedness of leadership with adulthood, maturity and mastery (‘I tie leadership at work to become a master’, ‘it’s all very interrelated’, ‘to go from . . . to’, ‘branch off’) and talks not of doing leadership but of ‘understanding’ leadership (Please see table 6).
Suspended leading in an organisational context.
Separate leading refers to leadership opportunities that are separate from the adult-led worlds of work and formal roles. This discourse too is known in the literature (e.g. O’Donoghue, 2006) with mostly ‘practice’ forums and opportunities being created for young people to try out their leadership ‘trainer wheels’ in small, sanctioned and safe places. This is not the context that our participants represented in this empirical material. Overwhelmingly our participants reframed separate leadership as ‘real’ leadership work positioned actively in youth-dominated spaces usually because the need or opportunity was perceived most strongly for youth, the target influence and impact were directed at predominantly youth and/or youth were aware of being well placed to do such work (such leading was often associated with social media or technological innovations). At the same time, the absence of adults from either leading or being led by youth was viewed as a sign that youth were not fully taken seriously, acknowledged for the skills they had and/or not accepted as equal contributors in the leadership space. Hence, while most youth in this sample had done and were doing extensive leading and leadership, the bulk of this work was with youth, for youth, and thus separated out from adult leadership and contexts. At times, such separation was preferred (‘our whole thing is a “for” youth “by” youth approach, and so I think that’s been really critical’), but usually it was because there was no access to leadership in worlds run by adults (‘you have to be this experienced and this committed and that makes you unsuitable’). Much of the discourse seems permeated by a sense of illegitimacy (‘there’s a sense of you have to be this tall to ride, like you have to be this level to join us’). At times, participants would explicitly define themselves and their leadership in opposition to the legitimacy of adult leadership (‘in reaction to that’, ‘I also saw the value of’) or would diminish themselves in the process (‘from my possibly very minimal understanding . . .’.) (Please see table 7).
Separate leading.
The participants’ interviews did contain some passionate and enthusiastic accounts of contexts where youth could not only lead, but also make their youth an advantage in leading.
This narrative is about ‘a youth led project’ and captures the vitality that youth commonly felt they brought to leadership unencumbered by adults. In this account, making ‘a lot of mistakes’ and doing ‘a lot of things wrong’ indicated the edge that youth brought to leading. They could push into an innovative space ‘without restricting ourselves to what we could do’, pursue novelty ‘cause if we had people that are already in the industry trying to make this project happen they would have said, ‘This has worked before, this hasn’t’’, create possibilities (‘we were kind of like, ‘Well let’s just try it, why not, why can’t we do this’’) and be boundary-less in creating collaborative relationships (‘we literally pulled in everyone we knew’). Such leading appears innovative, fearless and collaborative (Please see table 8).
Separate leading narrative.
In a work context, this discourse often involves youth finding a niche role or area requiring a youth voice.
This illustration suggests that being ‘younger’, up with ‘future trends’ and part of ‘the future generation’ is a niche value proposition. This invites an expertise (‘I have a lot of knowledge in that space’), a voice on behalf of others (‘I represent’) and a privileging of experience ( ‘I’m probably more aligned’). This youth brings aspects of their own world ( ‘trends’, ‘technology’ and ‘thinking’) to an adult space. That ‘they take a lot of that quite positively’ implies that adults rarely accept leadership from youth and may do so in this case because of the context: youth explaining youth to adults (Please see table 9).
Separate leading in an organisational context.
Small leading was frequently evoked as contributing in minor ways or being intentionally peripheral. While such leading is not unknown and is recognised in recent theory such as complexity, relational and distributed theories, nevertheless participants apparently embraced the extremes of being among and undifferentiated from others as leadership. Indeed, one participant used a metaphor of youth as sheep with ‘small sheep’ able to detach from the rest and ‘just break away’. Given the definition of youth as having no fixed path and their ability to be flexible, then ‘a small sheep’ may be an unlikely but evocative image. There were frequent references to being part of a team, being active among others and gravitating towards the ‘backseat’ as observers or contributors. Nor did this discourse contain any sense of apology or disappointment: it was represented simply and personally (‘important to me’) and often expressing caring for others (‘just being there’, ‘affecting someone in a positive way’) and sometimes as a conscious alternative to traditional heroism (‘don’t have to be that big person’, ‘rather than someone who stands at the front and calls the shots’). The narrative in the following makes assumptions about small leading clearer (Please see table 10).
Small leading.
As this passage indicates, small leadership requires a mind-set shift where you ‘kind of change the way you see things’. This shift may be a response to young people being or feeling ‘not a leader’ and needing other outlets for their leadership. Someone who ‘can’t lead’ can ‘work in a group’, thus enacting their leadership through giving ‘new directions’ or demonstrating (as opposed to being able to use) ‘leadership skills’. There was preference for, and comfort in, doing small leading by not being ‘THE leader’ (Please see table 11).
Small leading narrative.
In work contexts, this discourse sounded like intentionally and actively supporting others.
Here, the small leadership feel comes from the association of leadership with ‘how you sort of conduct yourself at work’. It is understood that this does not really look like leadership (‘you don’t necessarily have to be the person who is seen to be leading’), but it is claimed as leading because of the striving for ‘positive progress’ in oneself and others. Such leadership appears to be about being something (‘an enabler’) rather than doing things (presumably like change or influence) (Please see table 12).
Small leading in an organisational context.
Self-leading was claimed by all participants. Attention to the self was seen not as a development strategy that would grow leadership but as a form of leadership in itself. This might seem a curious distinction and one about which participants did not appear to be fully clear ( ‘I don’t know if that is self-leadership or what’, So I guess I would call that leadership’): but at the same time they clearly understood the leading of self as real leadership work (‘now I can lead myself’, ‘I try and do that to myself’). Self-leading apparently involves the construction of a self that can make movement in the world: ‘branding of yourself’, or CV preparation (‘the only time where I actually reflect on when I show leadership’). Significantly, it is contrasted with ‘bigger than myself leadership’ and ‘an actual thing in the world’ leaving open the interpretation that self-leading may substitute for leading real things in the world beyond the self. One participant has nothing in the category of ‘bigger than myself leadership’, while others identify a leadership ‘not about what you actually do’ but about honing ‘the ability to change’ and ‘doing it in your own head’ (Please see table 13).
Self-leading.
This narrative indicates the participants’ ambiguity concerning self-leading.
That ambiguity is discursively captured by ‘I guess’, but equally by the seriousness with which participants define themselves as sites of leading (‘I try and rub off as much as I can in terms of me’) with apparent appeals for legitimisation (‘you can actually do that’). Resources encompassing action, reading, tasks and practice (‘do this and this and read this book and do this exercise and practice’) appear to be turned inwards to self. The comment ‘it’s absolutely possible’ seem to suggest that self-leading is either a new discovery or a form of leading that can be genuinely accomplished, presumably unlike others which are impossible (Please see table 14).
Self-leading narrative.
Self-leading in a work context was often evoked as a way of claiming agency within a hierarchical context.
The picture of work here is both dehumanised (‘I was like a monkey’) and routinized (‘do exactly the same thing every day’), inviting compliance (‘what the manager tells me to do and that’s it’) where leadership is solely about receiving directives from positional power (‘I thought leadership was just what your manager told you to do’). But the realisation that ‘now I can lead myself’ suggests some claiming of agency, leadership identity and energy. At the least, leading ‘myself’ seems better to this research participant than being led (Please see table 15).
Self-leading in an organisational context.
Semi-leading is related to either small or self-leading but was evoked directly as leadership that is not really leadership, often through negative characterisations (‘might not be the best examples’, ‘not in a leadership context’, ‘not in a leadership position’, ‘isn’t technically leadership’), perhaps a form of ‘almost-leadership’. It most commonly appeared in participants’ examples of themselves in leadership. Many such stories showed semi-leading as prevalent, easily articulated and evident in the ways participants asserted themselves in conversations, debates and life as people something to say. Thus, it was associated with ‘opinions’, ‘perspectives’, ‘issues’ and ‘dialogues’, most often with peers and ‘mates’. Oddly, semi-leading has an authoritative style where someone tries to ‘make people read more’, ‘make it interesting’, ‘telling them my opinions’, or ‘getting mates together’. It is ‘showing leadership’ (as opposed to doing leadership) and may be akin to ‘thought leadership’ for peers (Please see table 16).
Semi-leading.
A number of participants talked about semi-leading in social media, virtual platforms and blogs.
The word ‘responsible’ was rarely used by participants and here indicated that there was a high degree of intentionality in putting oneself into conversations that matter. The objective appeared to be neither persuasion nor consensus but catalysing diverse perspectives (‘People will read it and go, “oh I agree with that” or “oh no I think you’re horrible and I really disagree with that completely”’). Here, it is the conversation or the range of perspectives that seem most important (Please see table 17).
Semi-leading narrative.
In work contexts, participants applied a similar semi-leadership logic to some of their tasks and roles.
This participant is ‘a minute-taker’, a role which usually includes no speaking or interaction, but takes the opportunity to ‘give a couple of opinions’ after the meeting. She is aware that voicing opinions in this way is ‘not something that’s particularly normal’ but takes the opportunity to do so. Although it might be more normal to say nothing, there is an intentionality here to contribute beyond a role. This captures participants’ perspective on semi or ‘almost’ leadership (Please see table 18).
Semi-leading in an organisational context.
Discussion
We would argue that the five discourses of suspended, separate, small, self and semi-leadership can be understood as congruent with the contemporary neoliberal context. That is a complex statement to make as there are of course real downsides to neoliberalism that we need to be mindful and critical of. At the same time, we must recognise that such a world is the context that youth lead and are led in, hence their need to adapt and create discourses of leadership that enable them to do so. In theoretical terms, these discourses appear to illustrate post-heroic or even anti-leadership approaches and would seem to provide some efficacy in new technological and cultural spaces such as the virtual and youth activity worlds, but only very tentatively and often ironically in the organisational/enterprise world (and then mainly in small niches). We could therefore interpret our data as indicative of both a savviness and deftness in youth reinterpreting leadership in terms of what (and where) youth can control and value but also their awareness and sensitivity to the constraint and limitations around the spheres that foster (or not) youth leadership involvement with the most problematic of those being work and formal organisational contexts.
It is important to explore the connection between such leadership development and neoliberalism, as such a relationship has been comprehensively underexplored in leadership development studies. Previously we associated neo-liberalism with the movement of risk from an institutional to an individual responsibility (Beck, 1992), complex, non-linear and socially unmediated transitions at critical life junctures (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997) and a turning away from institutional and organisational priorities towards personal, leisure and network meanings and relationships (Wyn and White, 2000). The overall effect of such movements can become a pre-occupation – indeed a necessity – to take responsibility for oneself in the face of what can feel like a vacuum of institutional and collective responsibility (Bal and Doci, 2018). This of course translates directly to the workplace where neoliberalism is known to bring a greater instrumentality, individualism and competition into the workplace (Bal and Doci, 2018) thus heightening fears and insecurities around trajectories into and through work, organisations and career for youth particularly.
At the heart of such a neo-liberal ideology is the discourse of enterprise and the enterprising self. To quote Du Gay (2004: 38–39), enterprise refers to the ways in which economic, political, social and personal vitality is considered best achieved by the generalization of a particular conception of the enterprise form to . . . the conduct of organizations . . . to the conduct of government agencies, and to the conduct of individuals.
Rose (1998: 154) characterises enterprise at the level of the social actor as privileged in the ‘self-steering’ capacities of subjects who seek to ‘to maximise its own human capital, project itself a future, and seek to shape itself in order to become what it wishes to be’. Foucault (2008) theorised that neoliberalism would require individuals to navigate multiple intersecting networks ‘sufficiently limited in their scale for the individual’s actions, decisions, and choices to have meaningful and perceptible effects’ (p. 241). The suspended, separate, small, self- and semi-forms of leading of the participants in this study show the seepage of such notions of enterprise, self-steerage and scale into youth leadership. In such a world, slight (small) acts of quasi-leading (semi)-orientated at shaping a personal brand or direction (self) would appear to make intuitive sense.
Equally complicit in neo-liberalism is of course positive psychology (Estrada-Vilalta et al., 2019). The ‘happiness turn’ (Binkly, 2011: 379) reflects positive psychological phenomena such as happiness, self-fulfilment, personal strength and optimism as core to economic activity, well-being and identity. Through education, work, well-being and leisure regimes, individuals are shaped to pursue a life of fulfilment and realised potential through a myriad of therapeutic and developmental technologies, self-help resources and life projects. Binkly (2011) defines the direction of power in such a world as the power of ‘individuals [to] take responsibility for the government of themselves as free, self-interested and enterprising actors’ (p. 383) with the desired outcomes ‘agency, autonomy, freedom from dependence and external constraint’ (p. 391). We need to remind ourselves at this point that positive psychology is well established as a prime driver of leadership development in both its youth (Lerner et al., 2005) and adult (Avolio and Gardner, 2005) manifestations and that the very existence of leadership development in school, university, community and workplace spheres is a testament to how it has become embedded in the fabric of contemporary life. The turning ‘in’ of responsibility for the self has obvious parallels with the self-leadership discourse but we can also see that the separate leadership discourse has a close association with the above emphasis on autonomy and freedom where counterpublics (O’Donoghue, 2006) become ‘for and with youth’ leadership spaces offering real agency.
Discussions of agency, freedom and autonomy point to the essential seductiveness of these five discourses with participants, and at least in their reflections and interviews, an unawareness of any subjectification and regulation at work. While youth tend to be cognisant to the struggles of identity work in leadership development (Carroll and Nicholson, 2013; Nicholson and Carroll, 2013), they appear to be less attentive to the reliance of leadership development on theoretical and conceptual assumptions, frameworks and models and development technologies that shape the leadership development space and agenda constraining language, meaning and interpretation long before any developmental agency is excercised by any participant (Meier and Carroll, 2020). This means the disciplinary and regulatory role of such discourses are effectively invisible to participants and they make developmental choices within a terrain already constrained and defined by purpose, design and delivery choices. This may account for the overall comfort, acceptance and even attraction to these discourses on the part of participants. In the main they articulated a positivity and workability with what could be assessed as minimal and small-scale opportunities for leadership particularly in their early organisational and work experiences. The only exception to this is in the suspended leadership discourse where participants’ reference types of leadership activity that they do not see themselves as having access to currently. In fact, we would argue that the importance of suspended leadership is that it aids an accommodation with the other four discourses as it constructs a deferred narrative of future dreams and fantasies around ‘bigger than myself leadership’ when undisputed adulthood can be claimed.
Such an accommodation suggests that suspended, separate, small, self and semi-leading are indicative of those who have only a tenuous connection with the exercise of power. While this is reminiscent with Redmond and Dolan’s (2016) charge that youth leadership development is more orientated at citizenship and the construction of stable and productive citizens than leaders, we would propose that a closer definitional amalgamation between citizenship and leadership is occurring here. Leadership becomes effectively diluted into a moderate, minimal discourse and set of practices that orientate youth to live within systems, norms and existing practices as opposed to pursue redefinition, change and disruption. In this way, youth can still claim a leadership identity but within a context of constructive and status quo accepting citizenship. In this, it evokes Gordon’s (2009) critique discussed previously that youth ‘are subtly and overtly thwarted by adults’ (p. 10) in being seemingly offered the discourse of leadership but not necessarily the capacity or opportunity to lead in a meaningful way.
Our five discourses of small, self, semi, suspended and separate leading thus reflect a form of contemporary agency and a denial of the power required to effect influence and change beyond existing structures (MacNeil and McClean, 2006). Our empirical work demonstrates that young people coming out of leadership development can bring a strong commitment to a leadership identity paradoxically embedded in a relative comfort with powerlessness and an inability to influence and impact the structures and systems they are in. We therefore propose that leadership development research has not adequately explored the relationship between youth and adult leadership and its development. We previously noted that critical research into corporate and organisational leadership development has found sophisticated regulatory, disciplinary and control narratives and technologies operating at even the most senior levels of development (Ford and Harding, 2007; Gagnon and Collinson, 2014). Because youth-orientated leadership development lacks the explicit strategic drivers and stated organisational expectations imposed on more adult-orientated development and is usually framed in more overt societal good or personal care narratives, it tends to present as a more generative and less instrumental discourse. Our inquiry finds it just as seeped in ideology, permeated by dominant neo-liberal assumptions and shaped by regulatory and disciplinary regimes but more deft and subtle at hiding those from participant scrutiny and awareness and overall programme discourses. Consequently, we would propose that neither youth nor adult-orientated leadership development has engaged enough with structures, systems and the complexities of power. Furthermore, we would ask whether leadership development is so prolific and supported across education, community and workplace contexts precisely because it has not? Our inquiry does show after all that leadership without power, regardless of who it is developed by, becomes a benign force.
Given the programmes researched here were strongly informed by critical leadership studies and (in its own communication and design) orientated at catalysing the difference youth can bring to leadership, then it would appear this inquiry needs to offer a broader challenge to leadership scholarship itself. Some of the discourses identified do connect strongly to contemporary leadership theorising and in fact offer further exploration for research if scholars are willing to work at this intersection of theory and practice. Small and semi-leadership for instance could be interpreted through a process lens as part of relational, collective and adaptive leadership acts. We know that these more post-heroic forms of leadership can be problematic for non-typical leadership actors (women, minorities and, we would submit as part of this inquiry, youth) to receive recognition for precisely because they do not conform to more authoritative, leader-centric expectations (Fletcher, 2004). In turn, self leadership has become associated with entrepreneurial and enterprising leaders with the focus indeed on driving the self to aspirational ends but somewhat inattentive to the contribution of others (Dean and Ford, 2017; D’Intino et al., 2007). Accordingly, we need a greater integrated understanding of leaders, leading and leadership in contexts where collectives, not individuals, distribute leadership in more intentionally participatory ways (Sutherland et al., 2014) or where leaders create and protect the space for different kinds of leadership actors and dynamics as opposed to more typical leader-centric activity (Sinha et al., 2019). It seems overall we know too little about individual agency in post or anti-heroic leadership spaces with the prospect of those attuned (and in fact ‘developed’) to leading within them – potentially these very leadership development youth participants – at risk of being under-recognised, under-utilised and under-valued. A greater ongoing dialogue between leadership development and leadership theory and practice would appear productive for both.
Conclusion
We seek, therefore, to push ‘youth’, ‘leadership’ and ‘development’ away from each other to create a space that invites critical scrutiny and reflexivity. In the gaps between those three concepts lie real research and practice complexities. If we put leadership (as opposed to leader) and development side by side, then by definition multiple actors doing small and semi-activity such as these youth participants become privileged, but attention will need to be paid to developing some integrating or connecting principle (which may or may not be a leader) which brings these together in some form of impact. If we put youth and leadership in relation to each other, then we need to paradoxically explore the role of adults so that youth can contribute to leadership in spaces such as organisations where adults predominate and have authority. This would be akin to placing the concept of power firmly in the middle of these two concepts. In turn in bringing scrutiny to youth and development, we need to connect the personal focus on self with larger structural issues (‘bigger than myself leadership’). In short, we need to disrupt and unsettle our increasingly too easy and quick tendency to put the three concepts together into ‘youth leadership development’ and challenge the ubiquity of focusing on individuals, conventional notions of being young and the emphasis on the personal.
Overall, we have identified and read small, self, semi, suspended and separate leadership discourses as indicative of a contemporary constellation of leadership embedded in neoliberal ideology. This of course can be interpreted as critical and hence negative. However, we propose that the discourses identified in this inquiry could be actioned and combined in ways that do create effective and real leadership impact. One example that springs to mind is perhaps the most high-profile young person in the world today, Greta Thunberg, who responded and worked through depression about the environment (self-leadership alongside the support of her family) with an individual strike from her school (semi-leadership), to a one-person protest in front of the Swedish parliament (small leadership). Mobilisation, largely through social media, of other youth (separate leadership) has lately progressed to her speaking at multiple global forums in direct efforts to call adults to account (in spite of the contestation and even vitriol that has brought her). What is missing from this sequence is of course suspended leadership and any countenancing by her that a young person should wait until some mythical point in time to lead in societal spheres orientate to systems change and challenge the status quo (notably we can find no evidence that Greta ever attended leadership development). Therefore, we do wonder if the above example advocates leadership development taking its lead from youth directly, supporting their own leadership discourses such as these identified here, progressing meaningful pathways from those discourses and challenging adults and organisational structures to engage seriously in the leadership from youth? Such a redefinition of course requires that youth are considered to be, not the recipients, but the core leadership resource for any leadership development.
In asking the above question, we wish to highlight the need to have the voices of youth central in leadership and leadership development. This inquiry indicates that youth have their own language and mind-set on leadership that appears to provide at least some of the resources and strategies for doing leadership differently (nuanced, responsive, experimental, risking failure, networked) in different spaces (non-work and virtual), which adults would be well advised to support and even learn. In so doing, we share Gabriel’s (2013) hope that ‘what happens ‘in between’ child and adulthood . . . signals the future and the shape of society to come . . . [and] the dreams and investments of the wider culture’ (p. 4). Consequently, we understand the discourses of youth leadership and power as potent signals we need to listen to and engage with.
