The materiality of leadership

‘In the era of uncertainty, the body re-emerges as the place where we may begin to know again.’ (Bhattacharyya, 2001: 38)

There is a growing body of research that has advanced knowledge of the embodied nature of leadership, and its relationship between aesthetics and affect (Hansen et al., 2007; Ladkin, 2008; Ropo and Sauer, 2008; Sinclair, 2005). The relationship between the surface or exterior of the body and embodiment have developed rich insights, yet we suggest that the ways in which affect, materiality and leadership connect requires space to change the ways in which we think about ‘leadership’. Acknowledging the sea of literature on embodied organisation (see for example, Dale, 2001; Lennie, 2000), this special issue creates a space for the basic assumption that leadership is embodied – leadership is practised through and between bodies, where matter matters, and body challenges leadership as an over-cognitivised phenomena.

Despite extensive research on ‘emotion-based’ or ‘instinctual’ forms (Harung, 1993) of leadership such as transformational leadership and charismatic leadership, we suggest that the body becomes the carrier of emotion, desire or motivation. In such cases, the body is subordinated to an overarching regime of instrumentality and commodified in the pursuit of organisational effectiveness. Moreover, when the body is considered it is done so superficially, for example by associating leadership effectiveness with physical characteristics such as height, weight, and body type, and/or assuming that the leader is able bodied and ostensibly Western. Popular managerialist concepts such as emotional intelligence, while bearing a loose acknowledgement of the body, are also deeply entwined and understood as being deferent to organisational effectiveness (Goleman, 2006).

Whilst not wanting to labour ‘the body’s neglect’, we claim that more often than not the body is enrolled in the process of organising, often in impoverished ways which do not consider the inter-connections and inseparability of mind/body and subject/object – a relation that Merleau-Ponty (1968; see also Crossley, 1995) refers to as ‘chiasm’. As a result of these separations and subordinations the potential for a corporeal imagination in leadership studies remains under explored – or at best assigned to the margins of leadership studies. This suggests that by considering the ontology of the flesh (Merleau-Ponty, 1968) we can explore dimensions of materiality in relation to leadership subjectivity. And in different ways our contributors trouble the Cartesian view which treats mind and body as distinctly separate entities: ‘taking the embodiment of its practitioners as well as its subjects seriously through a commitment to the lived body and its being in the world, including the manner in which it both shapes and is shaped by society’ (Williams and Bendelow, 1998: 23).

In this special issue we are both concerned with the surface and exterior of the leader, what has often been termed leadership aesthetics (see Hansen et al., 2007), and how it relates to, disavows or enrols the interiority of the body. This interiority is the flesh and its fluids (cf. Grosz, 1994). There is a common assumption that gendered leadership stereotypes such as feminised, embodied leadership are held in parallel with masculinised, disembodied, rational and highly disciplined leadership. In our call for papers we invited contributions that addressed corporeality and leadership in ways that do not privilege the surface or exteriority of the leader, such as involving issues of image or dress, but rather addressed the interrelationships between embodiment and leadership. These divisions are debated and contested in various ways in the contributions to this special issue. Therefore, the aim of this special issue is to problematise the troublesome reproduction of the binary division between the inside/outside of leaders’ experience and address the absence of sensory approaches to leadership to explore the embodied inter-relations between leaders and followers from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Addressing corporeality and leadership studies holds the potential for different bodies to be read as present, absent or abject in the processes, practices and theories of leadership. In the issue that follows, bodies lie at the heart of theorising leadership.

Donna Ladkin, a leader in the field of leadership, embodiment and aesthetics, opens the special issue with ‘From Perception to Flesh: A Phenomenological Account of the Felt Experience of Leadership’. This paper draws on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to address felt experience within the leadership dynamic. Ladkin problematises the relations between leaders and followers by asking the question: how do we know, at a bodily level, when we are being led, or when we are leading? The paper explores the perceptual processes central to leadership relations. By focusing on felt and bodily based experience, Ladkin argues that the surface of leadership bodies needs to be explored in relation to the material notion of ‘flesh’, or as Ladkin puts it, the ‘stuff’ of materiality, that which cannot always be verbalised or articulated easily. This has important implications for the creation and maintenance of leadership relations and, as we can witness, Merleau-Ponty gives us rich resources for rendering the invisible intersubjective relations at the heart of leadership more visible.

In the second article, Wendelin Kupers, another leading contributor on critical leadership, offers an insightful reading of Merleau-Ponty in ‘Embodied Inter-Practices of Leadership: Phenomenological Perspectives on Relational and Responsive Leading and Following’. Taking his earlier work on inter-practices, Kupers takes up relational leadership as embodied, and leadership is interpreted as an emergent and creative process of inter-practice of leading and following. Using the context of improvisation Kupers analyses the practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications of the notion of embodied inter-practice thus opening the space for future research on processual organising and leadership.

Taking relational leadership to the heart of the paper, our third contribution ‘Embodied Leadership: The Aesthetics of Gesture’ departs from the previous papers by exploring leadership in relation to musical performance. Taking Richard Strauss’ Morgen! Ralph Bathurst and Trudie Cain emphasise the idea that leadership is an embodied process which occurs in relation to those in community. The dualities of the leader and the follower are questioned, and the authors show how leaders and followers morph into relationships where bodies move and gesture to one another. This occurs in open co-creative spaces as a way of demonstrating how such co-creative spaces can manifest in leadership relations. The notion of relational leadership is central to their analysis and highlights the manner in which gestures, materiality and effective leadership draw on the abilities of organisational members to offer and respond to gestures as they occur.

Developing the importance of space/place, our fourth article ‘Embodiment of leadership through material place’ by Arja Ropo (a foundational thinker in the field), and creative scholars Erika Sauer and Perttu Salovaara show how space and place are central in constructing and performing leadership. In their paper they question the distinction between leaders and leadership. By taking a social constructionist approach that emphasises meaning making they consider leadership as aesthetic, embodied and sensuous. The article makes an interesting contribution to the special issue by locating materiality and embodiment ‘in space and place’ and connecting this to emerging debates on the epistemology of embodied experience and leadership. For the authors, the embodiment of leadership refers to social, relational constructionism as ontology of leadership and to aesthetic epistemology that legitimises sense-based data, such as emotions, bodily sensations, intuitions, and mental representations as a basis for knowledge development. To elaborate on the relationship between leadership and material place Ropo, Sauer and Salovaara discuss embodied ways of knowing and point out specific aspects of embodied experience with examples from the art field.

In the fifth article, Torkild Thanem’s ‘More Passion Than the Job Requires? Monstrously Transgressive Leadership in the Promotion of Health at Work’ takes the empirical site of workplace health promotion as a context for leadership. Thanem’s ground-breaking book on monstrosity is developed in the context of this Swedish public organisation to offer a provocative contribution to address how, since Weber, passionate emotions have been central to charismatic leadership. Yet Thanem contends that we still know relatively little about how passions are embodied in leadership. Given that the monstrous relates to the disruption of moral, magnitudinal, morphological and social boundaries, this paper highlights how leaders may passionately and corporeally – with their bodies but without charisma – disrupt and exceed the formally and socially defined limits of their leadership role. Thanem shows how leaders’ pursuit of health was driven by their own embodied passions as well as by organisational rationales. Perhaps surprisingly given existing literature, these passions were expressed in largely non-charismatic ways that resulted in demotivating rather than motivating employees.

Our penultimate paper is ‘None so Queer as Folk’: Gendered Expectations and Transgressive Bodies in Leadership’ by Sara Louise Muhr and Katie Sullivan. They take up the theme of transgression again with their empirical piece which investigates the relationship between the body and leadership. Recognising an extremely under-researched area, that of transgender in organisations, Muhr and Sullivan discuss the case of a transgender leader. Their analysis shows that the leader’s body, presumed gender and gendered appearance are ‘markers’ that employees use to make sense of leaders and leadership. But, by questioning gender dichotomies and the heterosexual matrix, Muhr and Sullivan call for the need to queer leadership emphasising the centrality of leadership and performativity, particularly the relationships between bodies, gender, sexuality, and leadership. By engaging in theory development and employing often abject bodies, Muhr and Sullivan quite rightly remind us that difference continues to be neglected, but when employed strategically in writing, it has the political potential to ask questions of leadership.

Following suit, our special issue concludes with ‘A Material Dean’ by Amanda Sinclair a scholar who has explored the embodied, gendered nature of leadership extensively. Putting into practice some of the ideas surrounding embodiment and felt experience of leadership that appear throughout the issue, Sinclair offers a narrative that explores the experiences of a new business school dean including the visceral and embodied reactions to things she encounters. We note that the dean in question is not the author, and the colleagues and institution that appear are fictional. Sinclair deliberately disrupts academic writing practices, and engages closely with and questions how leadership is written. Sinclair demonstrates the tensions between writing leadership and experiencing its embodied, material and mundane aspects that may more often get written out of leadership literature. We witness how the emergence of this creative approach ‘presences’ materiality with all its bodily responses, such as bodily hungers. Sinclair, drawing on Judith Butler, questions the linguistic and discursive norms that confound or mask materiality to unfold what is lurking just under the surface, waiting to be expressed if given the discursive means. Sinclair invites the reader to register their own bodily experiences thus re-embodying leadership and exploring different, perhaps more embodied, ways of knowing for the reader and author.

So as our introduction to this special issue on Corporeal Leadership comes to a close, this issue has travelled through different themes, sites and conceptual approaches in order to embody leadership. What this issue has showed is that embodied research on leadership and materiality is breaking new theoretical and empirical ground. All of our contributors have questioned the taken-for-granted assumptions that underpin the relationships between materiality and leadership where the ‘body re-emerges as the place where we may begin to know again’ (Bhattacharyya, 2001: 38). It is our hope that future research focuses on ways in which bodies and embodiment have, in part, been silenced but emerge in the performance, expression and enactment of leadership. Furthermore, materiality may disrupt, restrict but also enable the taken-for-granted leadership function in organisations. Whilst it would be over-simplistic to suggest divisions between mainstream and marginal leadership research, future work needs to critically engage with these hitherto neglected dimensions of leadership such as the cross-cultural differences and the problematic of materiality as it is expressed through language, bodies, discourses, technology, space and place which need to take centre stage in relation to power and resistance in the workplace.

In closing this editorial we would like to thank David Collinson and Keith Grint for creating space for these debates in a field that has so easily written over the importance of embodiment and materiality as we conceive it here. We also extend our thanks to the reviewers whose close attention and engagement with each paper was invaluable. By progressing debates around materiality, embodiment, corporeal leadership relations and how these themes affect, trouble and even subvert leadership, we hope to have challenged the focus on disembodied, over-cognitivised and pseudo-rational approaches to the study of leadership.