The Theory of Being: Practices for Transforming Self and Communities Across Difference is a book based on a 20‐year research study conducted by the Being Research Collaborative team, which researches process‐oriented approaches for disrupting dehumanizing practices in organizations, helping communities to thrive. The theory teaches ways to be with Differences and offers liberating strategies for engaging in constructive dialogue. Skillfully integrate existing literature, research, and reflections to take readers on a profound journey that centers on difficult dialogues among individuals with diverse perspectives. The book's primary audience is intended for higher education professionals, staff, business leaders, managers, and undergraduate and graduate students. The current book, with its emphasis on dialogue, signifies a commitment to actionable practices that have the potential to benefit organizations and educational institutions across the United States and worldwide. The current review begins with a summary of the book, outlining its contributions to higher education and highlighting its limitations.
While robust scholarship and lengthy, often complex explanations are the norm when it comes to publishing in the academic world, everyday readers as well as other academics often just want to know, "What does this mean, and what can I do with this information?" But, unless content is more accessible in lay terms, some excellent scholarly research may go left unread, driving potential readers to publications that showcase more consumable and practical ideas, like trendy leadership books with scant credible research. However, there is a third space between heavy empirical academic publications and trendy books. This space is the "pracademic" world, one marked by the intersection of research and practical interpretation and application. This article will highlight the third space of "pracademia" in leadership studies, its importance in advancing the field, and tools to help academics navigate this space effectively.
Popular leadership ideas gain influence through clarity and certainty, often at the expense of nuance and theoretical depth. This paper examines the tension between popular leadership discourse and scholarly research, drawing on Bourdieu's field theory to explain why visibility and charisma tend to outweigh rigor in the marketplace of ideas. We argue that the business case study offers a productive alternative as a form of translational scholarship. Using examples from Ivey Business School, we show how cases engage leaders with context, ambiguity, and judgment rather than simplified prescriptions. In contrast to formulaic leadership narratives, the case method develops the capacity to think critically about complex, real-world dilemmas.
From a Bourdieuian perspective, scholarly publishing operates as a field where legitimacy is produced through editorial gate keeping and symbolic capital. This article proposes an AI-augmented editorial infrastructure designed to harmonize rigor and reach by foregrounding authorized, structured data, auditable epistemological filters, and participatory validation loops. It argues that editorial governance must accompany conceptual shifts to redistribute symbolic capital while preserving academic legitimacy. The framework rests on three commitments: (1) Authorized, structured data enabling passage-level traceability, persistent identifiers, and rich metadata; (2) Auditable epistemological filters that require precise citation of the exact passage, section, and DOI, explicit articulation of evidence strength, and scope-limiting warnings; and (3) Participatory validation that logs corrections and invites input from diverse audiences, producing versioned, citable artifacts. Generative AI capabilities; contextual translation, citation-aware summarization, semantic search over structured corpora, guided reading assistants, and claim-comparison tools; are reimagined as editorial augments rather than substitutes for human judgment. Potential risks include hallucination, bias amplification, privacy concerns, and decontextualization; safeguards emphasize transparent logs, human-in-the-loop review, redaction policies, and performance metrics. The analysis concludes that, with robust infrastructure and governance, journals may become dynamic platforms for dialogic engagement, broadening access to scholarship while sustaining rigorous standards and a legitimate redistribution of symbolic capital among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.
As popular leadership books gain significant influence across organizations, educators and policymakers, their credibility and scholarly rigor often remain unexamined. This paper argues that scholars have a duty to evaluate such texts critically rather than dismiss them outright and to illuminate their contributions and limitations using transparent standards. A conceptual framework is proposed for assessing scholarly quality across four dimensions: evidence base, citation practices, conceptual coherence, and methodological transparency. Drawing on knowledge translation and publishing theory, this paper introduces the Reach-Rigor Matrix, a typology classifying leadership books as Exemplars, Influential Heuristics, Scholarly Marginalia, or Pop Advice. The model challenges the notion that rigor and popularity are mutually exclusive and offers theoretical propositions to explain when they align or diverge. This paper outlines a research agenda, including audits, bibliometric mapping, and perception experiments, to guide future inquiries. By providing a shared vocabulary and evaluative lens, this study encourages scholars, editors, and leadership educators to engage critically and constructively with leadership works shaping public discourse.
This article interrogates the role of academic writing in organizational leadership research through a psychoanalytic lens, proposing "writing as testimony" as a transformative approach. Traditional academic writing often strives for objectivity and detachment, but this paper argues for the inclusion of emotional and subjective elements that reflect the researcher's active role in knowledge creation. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, complexity theory, and critical social theory, the study challenges the notion of scholarly writing as neutral and advocates for an epistemology of authorship grounded in transference, affectivity, and uncertainty. The author contends that writing, when approached as a form of testimony, becomes a medium for ethical engagement with leadership practice, allowing scholars to embody the complexities of organizational life. This approach opens up a dialogical space where the scholar is both a participant and a witness, blurring the lines between objectivity and subjectivity. The paper calls for a reevaluation of how academic texts are produced, emphasizing the ethical responsibility of scholars to engage with complexity and contradiction, rather than seeking to resolve them. The implications for leadership research are profound, advocating for a more reflective and responsive scholarship that embraces the ambiguities inherent in organizational systems.
Scholars can write for two different audiences, both specialists and the general public, yet the relationship between the two ways of writing raises concerns this symposium was designed to address.
No scholar is an Island: we are all networks and write for our networks. These networks, sometimes call research programs are scholarly communities kept together by a common interest. The work of these communities constitutes a polyphony, which constitutes the conversation we are joining. These communities are composed by different types of members with diverse types of interests. Some members constitute the hard core of the theory, the big names. This inner circle is complemented by the participants in the paradigm, people whose research conceptually and empirically tests and advances the theory, through confirmation and disconfirmation. Other participants are critics, who challenge the ideas. Without critics, the program will lose vitality, regardless of its "goodness". Another, more external circle, is composed by those who conduct applied research, translating the theory to wider, managerial audiences. This circle exists only if the theory gained sufficient attention to "deserve" to be translated. Finally, some theories get the attention of some diffusers who popularize it to the general public. A vital ecosystem is composed by all these providers that target different audiences but that, as a collective, play important roles in the market for ideas.
AI generated leadership advise is increasing eclipsing scholarly work by offering fast and accessible guidance. This paper argues that this shift comples leadership scholars to rethink who they write for and how to engage practitioners without losing academic rigor.
Leadership debates often frame academic rigor and popular appeal as opposing poles, a tension largely shaped by Western, text-centered traditions. In Indonesia and much of the Global South, this framing is poorly aligned with how leadership knowledge is actually formed and circulated. Leadership learning rarely emerges from academic journals or popular management books; instead, it is shaped through lived experience, oral traditions, cultural symbols, everyday practices, and digital platforms. This paper argues that leadership scholarship must reconsider not only what it studies but also how leadership knowledge is communicated. Drawing on case studies of two Indonesian regional leaders, Suyoto of Bojonegoro and Hasto Wardoyo of Kulon Progo, the paper shows how leadership legitimacy was built through tangible outcomes, symbolic action, and narrative presence rather than written doctrine. Their leadership lessons were transmitted through personal stories, public engagement, and online visibility, reaching nonreading publics. The paper proposes a multichannel model of leadership scholarship that preserves academic rigor while translating insights into culturally resonant, non-textual forms that reflect where leadership learning actually takes place.
Scholarship can be viewed as a space for teaching and learning. In the Arab Gulf, this space is inhabited by several modes of communication. A traditional one is Majlis (also named Diwaniya), which gives people opportunities to exchange knowledge and engage in critical thinking to solve problems. Exchanges may range from quotidian events to scholarly matters of interest to the community. They can give rise to genuine dialogue, thereby transforming the acquisition of knowledge and the decision-making process that follows into participatory activities. The format gives rise to the emergence of instances of servant leaders whose thoughts and actions are meaningful to the community. In this sense, Majalis (plural form) embody both the traditional form of scholarship (acquiring specialized knowledge and circulating it among the few) and a more popular form in which the goal is to involve a broad array of people. In the digital age, some Majalis have moved online, broadening their reach. In this manuscript, the Majlis phenomenon is explained as a form of impactful and transparent scholarship for people from different walks of life. This type of knowledge exchange invites us to rethink the notion of audience and the privileging of text over speech.
Leadership writing occupies a space between theoretical complexity and the human desire for practical insight. While popular leadership books often achieve wide resonance without scholarly rigor, academic journal articles frequently achieve rigor without broader relevance. Our article offers reasons for this bifurcation and suggests the use of the hermeneutic circle as a frame to interpret popular leadership texts not as threats to academic credibility, but as opportunities for reflection and reorientation. Through the hermeneutic circle, the relationship between scholarly and popular texts is conceptualized as recursive interplay between parts (e.g., rigor, audience) and wholes (e.g., influence, disciplinary norms). Rather than dismissing popular leadership books as failed scholarship, their appeal can be treated as a phenomenological encounter, what we describe as resonance. Drawing on the hermeneutic turn, phenomenology, and leadership studies, the article proposes a framework for interpreting resonance with readership as meaningful data about readers' lived experiences. By taking resonance seriously, popular texts become portals into how leadership is understood and enacted in practice, offering insights that can inform, refine, and expand scholarly leadership research.
This article examines contemporary academic writing and leadership through Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of field capital habitus and illusio to explain how power recognition and identity are organized within higher education. Drawing on a wide body of interdisciplinary scholarship the analysis shows how managerial reforms evaluation regimes linguistic expectations and bibliometric systems reshape scholarly dispositions by converting intellectual contribution into measurable performance. These conditions encourage conformity and strategic compliance while presenting themselves as merit based processes. The article argues that academic writing is not a neutral activity but a form of identity work that reflects and reproduces the logic of the field including beliefs about what audiences matter and what forms of knowledge count. Habitus guides scholars toward accepted genres and evaluative targets while illusio sustains commitment to systems that often marginalize public engagement collegial governance and epistemic diversity. While reflexivity is frequently proposed as a response to these pressures the literature demonstrates that individual awareness alone rarely disrupts entrenched hierarchies unless accompanied by institutional change. By reassessing Bourdieu’s framework in light of neoliberal governance digitalization and global inequality the article shows both its continued relevance and the risks of its rhetorical appropriation as academic currency. The analysis concludes by advancing an ethical orientation to writing and leadership that treats audience selection evaluation and collaboration as moral decisions tied to scholarly purpose. Writing with purpose is framed as an act of leadership that resists managed conformity and reclaims scholarship as a practice oriented toward inquiry community and shared understanding rather than status and metrics.
The idea that academic rigor and popular appeal in leadership and followership literature are fundamentally at odds is discredited by hybrid works that integrate scholarly depth with practitioner accessibility. This study argues that these often-overlooked works demonstrate how rigorous frameworks, even if not directly empirical at first, can inspire impactful research and resonate with both academics and practitioners. Mainstream books like Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, and Start with Why by Simon Sinek engage readers with captivating narratives but lack robust empirical foundations. In contrast, hybrid works like Robert E. Kelley’s The Power of Followership and Ira Chaleff’s The Courageous Follower offer frameworks that have spurred extensive research into active followership. Barbara Kellerman’s Followership: How Followers are Creating Change and Changing Leaders and Marc and Samantha Hurwitz’s Leadership is Half the Story, similarly, have inspired empirical studies on follower dynamics. By examining citation patterns in academic databases and practitioner feedback from various digital platforms, this study highlights the potential of hybrid scholarship which is often overlooked in followership. It sparks discussions on reimagining scholarly communication and interdisciplinary collaboration, with outcomes encouraging scalable models that amplify followership scholarship’s societal impact while upholding academic integrity, a result of overcoming a stronger focus on leadership over followership.
This introduction to the symposium explains in part the burden of conducting responsible scholarship from an overwhelming literature, not all of which is to be trusted. Nevertheless, this journal invited authors to offer possible remedies to the ongoing tension between quality scholarship and popular consumption of their findings.
Methodological rigor in leadership research enhances the reliability and credibility of scholarly findings, yet it may also constrain their practical relevance beyond academic audiences. Achieving a balance between rigorous methodological standards and theoretical richness with practical significance remains a critical challenge in leadership studies. This article examines the increasing publication demands of high-impact journals that prompt scholars to align their research designs with stringent methodological expectations, while not necessarily addressing persistent shortcomings in leadership research. The article offers a critical reflection on current publication practices in leadership studies and encourages continued scholarly discussion on this issue.
The study examined demographic predictors of the established relationship between Charismatic/Transformational Leadership and a willingness in followers to engage in unethical pro-organizational behavior, finding that certain demographic characteristics in followers mediate this relationship, with implications for organizations to employ mitigation techniques. Six variables were analyzed in the study, including Participant Gender, Participant Age, Participant Job Tenure, Participant Income Level, Participant Job Enjoyment, & Strong Religious Belief. Two of these variables were found to be statistically significant predictors in the relationship between Charismatic/Transformational Leadership and Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior (UPB), namely: (1) Participant Job Tenure and (2) Participant Income Level. The implications of this study are substantial in the ethical leadership discussion and broad across industries. While the tenets of Charismatic/Transformational Leadership include a high measure of ethical conduct, certain demographic predictors are shown to propel followers toward a willingness to act unethically. The results demonstrate that where transformational leadership is practiced, organizations should acknowledge these predictors of UPB and prepare measures to proactively mitigate the risk.
Research on CEOs’ social media communication as a leadership instrument remains scarce. The current study addresses this gap by exploring the relationship between CEOs’ leadership‐oriented language and user engagement (i.e., sharing behavior). Based on an automated text analysis of 24,719 posts from 172 CEOs of Global Fortune 500 companies on X, one of the largest social media platforms previously known as Twitter, this research examines how CEOs’ leadership‐oriented language influences users’ sharing behavior. In particular, it focuses on transformational leadership (TFL), a crucial approach in social media contexts. Utilizing hierarchical linear modeling, the findings revealed that CEOs’ use of linguistic indicators reflecting TFL affects users’ sharing behavior in partially unexpected and contradictory ways. Specifically, using positive emotional language and exclusive words in social media posts can diminish users’ sharing behavior. Conversely, content‐rich posts, replies that open a dialogic loop, and posts reflecting psychological closeness all positively influence users’ sharing behavior. These findings underscore the complex nature of leadership‐oriented language and provide novel insights into its effectiveness on social media. The current study offers specific guidelines for how CEOs can effectively utilize TFL‐oriented language to engage their audiences while minimizing the risk of unintended negative consequences.
