Reviving the moral meaning of leading and following: The lost metaphysics of leadership

Leadership and its study could look and feel very different: clearly defined, strongly contextualised, culturally specific and morally rooted. This is a challenge, but it could be relatively easily done, by returning to what MacIntyre calls the ‘lost metaphysics’ of philosophically informed critical thinking. Hopes and aspirations are recovered because a metaphysical way of thinking provides a very different narrative and vocabulary. The grand narratives and claims to generalisable law-like knowledge that scientism promotes are strangely attractive in a messy, complex subject area like leadership studies. Many of us seem to fall back on the ‘usual suspects’, those theories that are generally accepted as forming the ‘canon’ - the theories that most of us accept have some conceptual validity or empirical support. These canonical theories of leading and following tend to emphasise the functions of practice, causal links between present or absent variables, and performance outcomes.