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ABSTRACT
This article examines the role of leadership in mobilizing collective resistance in the workplace. Given the scarcity of dialogue between critical scholars and leadership studies, relatively little consideration is given to the role of leadership in resisting and potentially transforming structures of domination. The article describes some of the reasons why these areas of research have produced so little mutual work. We then make the argument that theories of leadership can be useful to the study of resistance by providing a grounded approach to theorizing agency, highlighting the role of mobilization and influence in change, and emphasizing participant attributions. In doing so, leadership studies gain important insights about the influence of deep structure power issues on perceptions of leaders, as well as material and symbolic limits on mobilization. The article adopts a dialectical perspective as a way of understanding issues of resistance leadership, and then discusses how existing literatures, read with this dialectical approach, can be brought to bear on significant questions concerning the practices of resistance leadership.
KEYWORDS communication * critical studies * discourse * leadership * resistance
When examining relationships between resistance and leadership, scholars generally understand leadership in terms of the management of dissent. Writers in the managerial tradition often address how leaders can deal effectively with employee dissent, from shutting down 'illegitimate' forms of dissent to encouraging employee voice in the interest of improved decisionmaking (Hamilton & Sanders, 1992; Wicks, 2002). Leadership is usually equated with management in this writing. However, an interesting alternative emerges when we conceptualize resistance as a potential form of leadership.
On one level, this is hardly news given that in social movement research the quintessential dissenter is often an opinion leader (Stewart et al., 2001). Yet, in the organizational literature, relatively little consideration is given to the role of leadership in resisting and potentially transforming structures of domination. In this article, we discuss why so little dialogue has taken place between critical and leadership scholars. We argue that theories of leadership can illuminate the study of resistance by providing a grounded approach to theorizing agency, highlighting the role of mobilization and influence in change, and emphasizing participant attributions. In turn, leadership studies gain important insights about the influence of deep structure power issues on...