Summary An investigation of mutiny in the military must first begin by examining the definition of mutiny to understand both why everyday subordinate dissent is often interpreted by superiors as mutiny and why mutiny is not something faced by organizations outside the military. The nature, proliferation, and trajectory of mutiny in the military, including why mutinies break out—or do not—could be viewed in terms of several common themes, or refrains, that many mutinies embody: the contested nature or concept of the dispute; the role of space and time; response of the authorities; the use of scapegoating; the quotidian nature of mutinies; the heroic intervention of the formal leaders; the leadership of the mutineers; the strength of the relationships between leaders and followers; and enthrallment to power (the sense powerlessness). Additionally, it is instructive to look at mutiny through the lens of the “moral economy” as a way of exploring the varieties of mutinies that illustrate the significance of the different causes of subordinate discontent and the variety of ways that superordinates respond to that discontent.

Political leaders are often associated with violence. There does not seem to be a century when political leaders have not unleashed violence on their external or internal enemies or have themselves been attacked. But is there an affinity between political leadership and violence, and if so what kind of relationship is that affinity? Are all political leaders prone to violence all the time or just some of them some of the time? This article poses that relationship in terms of an 'elective affinity' between the two: some political leaders choose violence, and some choose to avoid it; some give their followers permission to inflict violence, and some prohibit it; some look the other way when violence is deployed, and some stop it. I conclude that there is a strong relationship with violence, but it lies more with 'command' rather than 'leadership' and is increasingly visible when the situation is either a crisis or infused with elements of the sacred. There are lots of potential examples to draw on, but we can learn more from an extreme case and there are few more extreme than the English Civil Wars. In this case violence was used by a king against some of his own subjects, and those followers responded first with violence and then, most unusually, put the king on trial and executed (sacrificed) him. Desacralizing violence was subsequently inflicted upon the regicides by the new king to resacralize the monarchy. I conclude with some reflections about the contemporary political situation.

This paper concerns an early whole system approach to change. Between 1647 and 1649 a series of civil wars across England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland eventually led to the execution of the king, Charles I, and the only period of republican government under Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector. That military and political maelstrom turned the world upside down and produced an attempt by parliament's New Model Army to generate an alternative constitutional structure to the status quo through an array of whole system meetings that saw the senior leadership of the army join junior officers, enlisted soldiers, and civilian Levellers, to negotiate as equals. Ultimately these General Council meetings failed but their influence can still be seen in the contemporary constitution of the UK. Why the meetings started, what happened within them, and why they failed, are all discussed within the context of system leadership. The conclusions have implications for the contemporary leadership of whole system change.

Resistance leadership is a vital concept that gets to the heart of the power dynamics of organizations and societies. This interview, conducted by one of the special issue editors, Owain Smolović Jones, with two key figures in critical leadership studies, Keith Grint and David L. Collinson, provides readers with an orientation to this area of research. It does so through offering definititional clarity, expanding on the concept’s value and summarising key ideas. From this basis, the value of resistance leadership is explored in relation to the climate crisis, inequalities and other key contemporary issues. The interview concludes through offering readers advice on how to pursue compelling and impactful research on resistance leadership.

This media review piece considers the climate change emergency as an example of a Wicked Problem, a problem type which has no clear solution but requires the collective to address, if we are to save the planet. It also provides a mechanism to link the media debates about climate change to leadership. It first sets out a typology of problems and decision styles, and then explores the cultural theory of Mary Douglas as a way of understanding why we have such difficulties addressing Wicked Problems, but what we might do about them. It then proposes we need to focus beyond Leadership as a decision-making category and to consider the role of Management and Command. Finally, it focuses on several elements of the issue to understand where the blocks to action lie, and they include the nature of language, the role of time, and the recognition that ultimately no consensus is likely to emerge.

This article features a leaked WhatsApp message to the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. It was written by Mark E Avelli, a political consultant who sets out what has happened recently in the UK and how he suggests Sunak should act if he wants to remain unsuccessful. That sounds counter-intuitive but not when framed by the revolutionary political theory embraced by the consultant: success is rooted in understanding that victory is not to be acquired by saying and doing the right thing, but the opposite. Only when we understand that nobody actually wants political power and the responsibility that inevitably comes with it, do the actions of politicians make any kind of sense. Or for those keen on a short consulting takeaway to use in teaching political leadership: 'fail fast and keep failing'. The focus here is obviously on the UK, but for readers in other countries that are led or used to be led by similar leaders, this article provides an explanation for why we keep electing people who appear to have no idea what they're doing.

Using examples from military history, this paper takes Alvesson and Sveningsson’s ‘Extraordinarizaton of the Mundane’ article and inverts it. They suggested that what counted as ‘leadership’ was not the acts of formal leaders but the interpretive work of subordinates, who rendered mundane actions by leaders – such as chatting to employees – as extraordinary. Here, I suggest that the reverse process also occurs – the mundanization of the extraordinary. In this case subaltern groups are given mundane tasks to inhibit their achievement of extraordinary tasks, or, when extraordinary tasks are achieved, those same tasks are rendered mundane by their superordinates and thus devalued. Even when successful challenges to this hierarchy of value are made the superordinate culture tends to close ranks against the upstarts and reaffirm the status quo ante, or simply deny the possibility of subaltern groups achieving something so extraordinary.

Abstract This chapter follows the attempt by women in the Second World War to fly for the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), the organization that ferried Royal Air Force (RAF) aircraft from factories to maintenance units and to RAF stations. It reveals how the conjunction of a group of dedicated women pilots, with an increasingly dire military situation in the UK, forced the patriarchal and misogynist establishment to change its policies, and how women went from ferrying simple training aircraft to the most complex four-engined bombers in the space of the war. At every step there were political roadblocks thrown in their way, but each was dismantled, and, in turn, that led to the acquisition of equal pay for women pilots—a trailblazing achievement that set the post-war equality movement on its way. Despite this the post-war era saw the dismantling of ATA and with it the return of patriarchal control over British skies, at least in the short run.

Abstract This final theoretical chapter explores the mechanics of resistance through the lens of problems and decision-making. It starts with delineating the difference between Wicked, Tame, and Critical Problems and their associated decision styles: Leadership, Management, and Command. The model has several implications: first, resistance movements need to be adept at all three decision modes, and not just the leadership approach beloved by more traditional approaches. Second, a particular problem facing resistance movements is the management of logistics—can they sustain their members for long periods of strike activity, or can they supply guerrillas in the field for the long years often required to topple a dictatorship? Third, this does not mean the book offers a conventional contingency theory in which resisters should do what the context ‘demands’, because oftentimes it is the resisters or their opponents that actively construct the context, rather than just respond to it. As we will see in the Iraq War, the debate about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was a trigger point in the Allied invasion, but the arguments of the Western civilian resistance that there were no WMD did not prevent the war. Instead, Bush and Blair managed to construct the situation so that sufficient individuals and groups were persuaded to support the invasion. Finally, the chapter concludes with an examination of the strategy of reticulation, the netting of supporters to become active followers in the resistance, or its suppression.

This letter sets out to provide helpful advice to President Putin following the recent mutiny of the Wagner Group. It suggests he has made a catastrophic mistake in invading Ukraine and needs to read the history of previous Russian mutinies to understand how they happen and what is likely to happen next. This is a story that starts in Ukraine and ends in chaos.

This paper is about the relationship between leadership, organisational morals, and temporality. We argue that engaging with questions of time and temporality may help us overcome the overly agentic view of organisational morals and leadership ethics that dominates extant literature. Our analysis of the role of time in organizational morals and leadership ethics starts from a virtue-based approach to leading large-scale moral endeavours. We ask: how can we account for organizational morality across generations and independently of the leader? To address this question, we studied the leadership model of the Jesuits, a Catholic Religious Order. Our case reveals that a virtue-based model of leadership does not necessarily imply that those who are selected to lead the organization are themselves virtuous, but that the processes underpinning the exercise of leadership are cyclical and repeated as truthfully as possible. Virtuous leadership, for the Jesuits, is therefore about the construction of an ideal type of leadership against which the processes which sustain it were designed. Our theoretical contribution is twofold. First, we propose an habitual understanding of moral forms of leadership, in which the procedural is constitutive of moral forms of organising; second, we explain how “timelessness”, understood as the quality of not changing as years go by, allowed the Jesuits to centre the processes which sustain their ethical model on the repetition, across space and time, of said processes, rather than on their outcome. We conclude that the search for virtue might be more relevant for large-scale moral endeavours than virtue itself.

We are, apparently, living in unprecedented times, an Age of Uncertainty, when wicked problems whirl all around as we struggle to cope with Covid-19, environmental catastrophe and the right-wing populism that threatens to unravel all kinds of international agreements. In this personal reflection, 15 years after I wrote an article on wicked problems and the social construction of leadership, I take a look back, and forward, to see whether there ever was an Age of Certainty when only tame problems temporarily troubled us, or whether our understanding of the world is itself a social construction, open to dispute and thus we have always lived in uncertain times. In the process of this evaluation, I consider whether collaborative leadership, often associated with wicked problems, is as ubiquitous and effective as some proponents make out, and if it isn't, what this says about our ability to address such problems.

Leadership is often associated with a particular form of decision-making: being decisive. This paper reflects on the limits of decisiveness and the role of incrementalism in the Russian decision to invade Ukraine and the role of the West and NATO’s decision-making over the prior 10 years. It suggests that incrementalism is both a legitimate mode and a significant problem in such scenarios, and focuses on the historical context to explain the decision to invade and the subsequent military failures.

This chapter begins with defining mutiny and exploring its origins. It considers the nature of military relationships across time before focusing upon the British Army Act (1955) and the American Uniform Code of Military Justice. The issues of mutiny as a collective act, and the active or passive role of those involved in mutinies, are used to illustrate the intricacies of the legal framework which then flows into using cases of mutiny on slave ships to highlight the importance of the historical context. The nature of sovereign power is then used to illustrate both the coercive control over military subordinates and the fragility of that very same coercion. This leads into the way the act of mutiny is socially constructed—in other words, what counts as ‘mutiny’ is a subjective not an objective construction. The chapter concludes with two sections, the first of which lists the ‘Refrains of Mutiny’: the patterns that recur across space and time, from the social construction of mutiny to the importance of establishing who the enemy is, the role of antecedence, the default response of the authorities, the importance of scapegoating, the omnipresence of the phenomena, the role of the heroic leader, the impact of serendipity, the relational nature of leadership, and finally the role of enthralment. The final section focuses on various explanations of mutiny, using material drawn from political revolutions and industrial relations to highlight the similarities and differences between these and mutinies, and relates such disputes to the difference between agonism and antagonism.

This chapter covers mutinies which occur during the most dangerous times for the establishment: under conditions of war. Theoretically, any collective dissent from a legal order in a military organization is mutiny, and the events over Christmas 1914 along the Western Front in France and Belgium precisely capture this tension, with some calling it a ‘truce’ and others categorically calling it a mutiny—thus ensuring it is not repeated the following Christmas. Next we consider the Russian mutiny of 1917 that, unlike the Potemkin mutiny, occurs in a febrile national context with significant support from the political left. Some of the reverberations of Russia end up in France in 1917, straight after the failed Nivelle offensive, and this also reveals the significance of dashed expectations, as well as the dire consequences of the French state’s response. Within a year the German Navy is convulsed by similar issues, the first time it is crushed because the conditions are inadequate, but the second time, in 1918, against the backdrop of a military catastrophe and political turmoil, it is the mutiny of the German sailors that leads to the toppling of the German state. For the British and Commonwealth armies in France, post 1914, mutinies are rare, but they do occur, and it is serendipity that lends at hand. However, the largest of all British mutinies in wartime occurs in Salerno in 1943, and ironically it is stimulated by loyalty to the regiment, rather than disloyalty to the state.

The last empirical chapter considers mutinies under times of austerity, starting with the Chilean Navy and ending with the Invergordon mutiny of the British Royal Navy; both occurred in 1931. The first mutiny, called in response to drastic cuts in wages, terminates with Chilean attacks upon their own fleet, and there were calls to follow that lead in Invergordon. In the event the latter mutiny, also generated by wage cuts, is defused by reducing the cuts to wages and by dividing up the fleet—a classic tactic of the establishment that effectively separated the problems into individual ship’s cases that were much easier to discipline. And whatever the promises made to the various crews in Invergordon, the reality was that many ‘marked men’ were singled out and removed from the navy to prevent the spread of the political ‘contagion’.

If mutinies are significant threats to those military parties facing defeat during wars, they are still more dangerous to the victors after the war is ended, when those conscripted for the duration of the war are desperate to return home. This chapter covers three such mutinies: those affecting British forces in 1918 and 1919; those facing Canadian forces in 1919; and finally the mutiny that literally grounded the RAF in 1946 in India and the Far East. The first cases occur in the south of England and France as the First World War is ending, but Churchill in particular was keen to retain both naval and army units to continue the fight against the fledgling Bolshevik regime. What is intriguing about these is just how militant the mutineers were and how the British government treated them with kid gloves, unlike those in the British Foreign Labour units who we meet in chapter 6. For the Canadian army the problem starts in Russia but end up in Wales, as the troops kick their heels waiting to return home and frustrations boil over into gunfights near Rhyl in 1919. Finally, we consider the similar issues prevailing over the RAF in India and the Far East as it becomes clear to the subordinates that they are a long way from home and have little immediate prospect of going home—unless they mutiny.

If mutinies during wartime are amongst the most dangerous to the establishment, mutinies during civil wars generate the most angst, for one-time comrades now become enemies and neither side celebrates success, even if there is a recognition that the day of reckoning has arrived. This chapter begins with the mutinies in the English Civil Wars that saw the Parliamentary side rent between its conservative side, led by Cromwell amongst others, and its radical side, who supported the Levellers. The mutinies also reveal the complexity of the rebels’ cause: some saw the mutiny as a way of securing a more democratic polity, while others were simply intent on securing their backpay before embarking for Ireland to eliminate Irish and Royalist dissent. Nearly 300 years later a similar situation in Russia saw the sailors of Krondstadt rebel against their erstwhile comrades in the Bolshevik Government in a failed attempt to pull the revolution back to its original roots.

The complexity of the causes of mutinies are captured in this chapter that focuses upon the role of ethnicity. Starting with the British West India Regiment in 1801, we examine the importance of the slave trade in supporting the recruitment to the British Army in the West Indies and consider how the ‘alternatives’ of slavery or forced recruitment are not regarded as alternatives by many ex-slaves. The chapter then moves on to the largest event to rock the early British Empire, the ‘mutiny’ or ‘1st War of Independence’ in India between 1857 and 1858. The nomenclature is a signal of the meaning of the events for different actors involved, and this ambiguity runs into the Curragh ‘Incident’ that has all the hallmarks of a mutiny, except it is staged by the military establishment not by the military subordinates. And if the British thought 1858 was the last time they would see Indian soldiers or sailors mutinying against them, they were wrong: in Singapore in 1915 and then in the Royal India Navy in 1946, the British Empire is forced to look at itself—but chooses not to. Finally, we consider the way British Foreign Labour Battalions were treated in France, compared to the treatment meted out to domestic units, and then consider the role of racism in the Port Chicago mutiny of 1944 which has echoes of the contemporary situation in the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.