How should we interpret the figure of Greta Thunberg and the leadership constituted through and around her? This question drives an inquiry that enhances knowledge of the materializing of leadership through a spatial analysis rooted conceptually in critical geography and the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO). Building from the insights of geographer Doreen Massey and CCO scholar Consuelo V & aacute;squez, the inquiry contributes by surfacing the spatial relations and communicative practices that co-constitutively knit together bodies and their objects in leadership, enabling a rich inquiry that illuminates mobilizations around the most complex issue of the day - climate change. Building multimodally with data derived from media and speeches, we posit four communicated 'stories-so-far' of Thunberg, decentred and communicated figures who merge and co-exist to constitute a composite Thunberg-the-Leader: the Child, Traveller, Activist and Learner. We then offer a model theorizing the underlying spacing leadership practices that act across and between figured stories-so-far, drawing them together, making certain constitutions of leadership (im)possible: shrinking, naturalizing, struggling and clearing. Concluding, we assert that this approach holds the possibility of making abstracted aspects of leadership materially present, while drawing together conceptual resources that have to date not been placed in productive dialogue.

This practice paper reflects on the experience of delivering leadership development for the voluntary sector through open-access online learning. We outline key elements of learning design and explore the potential and challenges of widening access to leadership development through this form of learning. We note the importance of aligning the conceptualisation of the leadership approach to learning and the principles of open access. The paper ends by offering insights for leadership development practitioners.

This editorial introduces the Special Issue on public value, urging scholars to ask fundamental questions about what public value organizing entails. It proposes key conceptual dimensions to foster public value thinking, highlighting the contested nature of the concept and the subjective understanding of public value among different publics. Themes emerging from the contributions to the Special Issue include re-imagining the State’s role in post-capitalistic regimes, re-designing approaches to economic planning, and re-experiencing public value through transforming relationships between planners and the planned, practicing active citizenship endeavors, and integrating environmental concerns into processes and systems of valuation. Problematizing the neoliberal misrecognition of the State as a legitimate institution for wealth creation, this special issue showcases its key role in fostering post-capitalist possibilities. The articles offer evidence and inspiration regarding innovating the ways we plan, design, produce and account for public value by leveraging what we conceptualize as new collaborative governance possibilities. Overall, we call for establishing stronger connections between existing studies on alternative economic, political, and democratic organizing with scholarship on public policy, strategic public management, transformative social innovation and social movements. Four areas for future research on post-capitalist governance are also proposed: State-businesses relationships beyond capitalism; changing conceptions of value including the value of care; municipal approaches toward community wealth building; re-imagining new public institutions for more participatory democracy.

This paper explores practices of citizen bat conservation in the city through the lens of becoming-with animal. It draws on insights gained from practices related to bat conservation efforts through interviews and participant observation with bat advocates in the city of Groningen, Netherlands. We show how becoming-with happens and why it is significant to humans and bats. We argue that becoming-with is dynamic and contingent on the elements present in different human-bat networks, which comprise bodies, technologies, practices, forms of knowledge, and urban spaces and places and result in varied relations that bats and bat conservationists enter into. Also, we observed the various outcomes of local bat conservation efforts. We argue that each of these ways of becoming-with must be considered valid, and is needed, in the big picture of bat conservation efforts in the city.

This paper investigates the way in which first-line managers in Belarusian chemical companies used environmental framings of the notion of homeland and linked these to Soviet-legacy organisational practices in order to encourage members of staff to engage in proenvironmental behaviour at work. Participants presented three different framings of homeland: Rodina (the motherland), small Rodina (one's more immediate surroundings), and Katorga ("a country with forced labour") to show how a sense of environmental responsibility could (or could not) be linked to them. Different Soviet-legacy motivational and mobilisation techniques could be used by front-line managers to encourage and reward proenvironmental engagement in employees who were amenable to different framings of homeland. The paper contributes to the limited literature on patriotism as a conduit to environmental virtue and engagement, and to the equally scarce literature on proenvironmental attitudes and behaviours in post-Soviet economies in transition. Through rich, qualitative descriptions of emotionally coloured framings of homeland as constitutive of environmental responsibility, we show how notions of patriotism linked to specific organisational practices provide front-line managers with a language and motivational techniques to address employees' environmental engagement-or lack thereof.

The democratic leadership literature emphasises those leadership practices that involve dialogue and communication within the frame of reference of existing organizational structures, discourses and hierarchies. Our contribution is to problematise this approach to democracy from the perspective of the work of Jacques Rancière, which highlights the importance of dissensus, that is to say a breaking away from organizational structures and hierarchies. We argue that this allows us to conceptualise collective leadership in a postfoundational way that connects a critique of individual and organization-bound leadership to a democratic logic, in particular through Rancière’s analysis of the myth of the murder of the shepherd. This also enables us to study radically disruptive, non-hierarchical and pre-dialogic dimensions of leadership that may destruct as well as construct. Two democratic leadership practices are outlined: contingent acts of leadership and the practice of radical contestation. Our argument is that both practices of democratic leadership can be deployed as radical ruptures and disruptions of organizational orders, beyond dialogue.

This article sets out the authors' attachments to, and memories of, two tidal river/channel landscapes and how these are being folded into collaborative work, which brings these places to attention through art practice and shared reflection. The rivers/channels in question are given voice in the introduction and ideas of the ecologies of mouths and river mouths, particularly those tidal, are explored in the following sections. Aspects of polyvocality and deep mapping are employed to reveal the unique characteristics of these places—particularly their tidal patterns and rhythms and our concerns for them. An art project, Tidal Timespace , lies at the heart of this article with the role of memories, shared memories, and our relationships to place as key themes. The descriptive accounts of the authors' respective place memories are set in the margins of the article in two columns. We conclude with considerations of expanded notions of ecology, and we add that loss of place, the passing of time, and wider senses of ecocide and extinction run like shadows through this narrative.

The literature on leadership place and space offers us an understanding of how the built environment, geography of location and socio-economic forces can coalesce to shape (and be shaped) by leadership practices. Missing thus far, however, is an account that constitutes leadership space and place through antagonism and struggle, crucial if we are to acknowledge the agency of workers in leadership practice. We therefore outline a workers inquiry approach that seeks to learn directly from the struggles of workers as they enact place and space through their particular, geographically situated practices. We do so through reading leadership studies, Marxist accounts of space and place, and workers’ inquiries dialectically to draw out two practices that can offer a framework for both understanding the contribution of workers inquiry approaches to leadership but also to inform future studies. Our first practice of exposing is the drawing to the surface by workers inquiry of the oppressiveness, contradictions and absurdities of leadership discourse and practices of capital as they shape the places and spaces within which workers are exploited. Re-placing, on the other hand, offers workers’ movements potentially emancipatory alternative forms of leadership, which re-shape and re-appropriate place and space.

Organization studies offers a detailed understanding of the roots of gender segregation and the obstacles to its dismantling in practice but has not proposed a conceptual framework that can help us understand how radical forms of desegregation may be made sense of and approached, particularly within a hotly contested organizational context. We provide an empirical analysis of the UK's only positive discrimination intervention, in the British Labour Party, and offer a conceptual framework of desegregation as political work, contributing by expanding knowledge of the contestations and possibilities inherent in desegregating organizations. We argue that successful radical desegregation is based on disrupting and contesting the foundational ontological values and identifications of a profession or organization, as gender is intimately enmeshed in these. From this basis we propose two political practices of desegregation: 'standing up' and 'walking with'.

This chapter explored the (im)material dimensions of mobile power, viral hegemony, and guerrilla democracy. To do so it drew upon theories of “new materialism” but ultimately expanded upon them so as to better account the immaterial and political aspects of social ordering. It introduced, for this reason, a novel concept of “(im)materialism” which highlighted the immaterial necessity to continually and dynamically “materialize” and “rematerialize” the social. Significantly, this is not to assume in the slightest that humans are “in control” or the complete “shapers” of their material realities – whether in the virtual or physical realms. Rather, it stresses how these material encounters are manifestations of mobile power and viral hegemony, whereby they must constantly adapt existing materials and their various concrete affordances to meet the demands of infectious discourses. Likewise, this dynamic process of (im)material socialisation can also lend itself to political interventions whereby an existent order is not just “rematerialised” but “resituated”. A core theme of this book is that this radical (im)materialism can be best expressed through a democratic guerrilla politics.

This chapter has introduced into this analysis the concepts of viral innovations” and “disruptive contagions”. Building on the insights which have preceded it, it eschews conventional conceptions of the social as “stable” and the political as “dynamic”. Fundamentally, it takes seriously the fact that power is always necessarily mobile and therefore any and all social orderings will be in a constant state of flux and reconstitution. Moreover, it understands hegemony as a viral discursive that is marked primarily by its contextual adaptability as opposed to ideological uniformity or “actually existing homogeneity”. To be clear, these postulations are a far cry from asserting the total randomness of the social or its complete variability. By contrast, it is to show how a relatively coherent set of logics can be flexibly customised and “infect” otherwise contrasting “host contexts”. Its strength, hence, is found its infectious qualities not necessarily or even primarily its orthodoxy. Practically, this mobility of power and virality of hegemony translated into dominant cultures of constant innovation rooted in the social production of “cultural environments” which must be creatively and continuously improved upon by its populace (and if necessary outside actors). These innovative “cultural environments” extend from physical spaces, digital networks, to internal subjectivities.

This introductory chapter reveals highlights the need to reveal new mobile technologies as dynamic forces profoundly influencing contemporary power and the possibility of present day revolution.. It combines, in this respect, cutting edge theories of power and post-human theory with in-depth empirical explorations of actually existing examples of guerrilla democracy. A key aspect of its originality, in this regard, is linking economic and political movements, revealing their productive tensions and potential points of solidarity. Emerging from this investigation we hope is a new theory of 21st century “guerrilla democracy”, which will help extend understanding of contemporary politics and movements across disciplinary and practice lines. Concretely, it reflects the creative and disruptive ways these mobile technologies and newly politicised subjects merge to create a novel subjectivity, a post-human counter-hegemony to challenge entrenched power regimes both politically and economically. In this respect, it seeks to refocus radicalism into a revolutionary guerrilla politics that can resist infectious dominant discourses and foster contagious revolutionary alternatives for reimagining, reordering, reconnecting, resituating, rematerialising, and resolidifying the world according to viral and perpetually expanding “commons” based values and practices.

This book explores the potential of digital technologies to revolutionise political and economic organizing. To do so, it introduces the new concepts of mobile power and viral hegemony, revealing a new type of domination centred on flexibility, adaptability, and managed innovation. It reveals how neoliberalism draws its strength from the (im)material labour of contemporary subjects to adapt their diverse material and digital contexts to best reflect its capitalist ideologies. Required to counter these “infectious” hegemonic discourses is a radical guerrilla democratic politics which creatively disrupts the status quo in order to concretely reimagine the social and radically reconnect those within it. Emerging is a technologically sophisticated guerrilla democracy in which people can create the conditions for large scale progressive insurrections from the bottom up, opening up previously closed spaces and topics, while fostering a new “commons sense” for reordering and rematerialising our contemporary existence.

The paper offers loss as a framework for identifying resources of hope in insider studies of left-wing political parties. It interrogates and builds on insights from our paper on the resistance leadership of Corbynism in the UK (Sinha et al., 2021), in conversation with Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams, proposing political parties as perhaps unique resources of hope in times of loss. Three threads of hope are offered. The first is a consideration of the ambivalence of factions and the potential for intra and cross-factional learning and leadership. The second is the notion of leaders and leadership within political parties as an ongoing and live area of contention and possibility. The third is an examination of political parties as resources of care and hope. The paper concludes by making the case that insider research of political parties can engage with the contingency of history through recovering and composing potent narratives that can act as guides for future research and practice. Introduction: Everything goes heavy... Our insider study of resistance leadership from the left wing of the UK Labour Party was published online on 25 November 2019, two and a half weeks before the party was soundly defeated by a surging Conservative Party in the general election. Reams of seats previously regarded as bastions of the labour movement fell. As the exit poll was announced at the close of voting, a nation ephemera: theory & politics in organization 21(2) 200 | note of Labour activists and supporters gasped. As one (losing) parliamentary candidate, who saw the poll announced on television in a busy pub, surrounded by her volunteers and campaign team told us in an interview recently: ‘The world fell through me. Everything went heavy’. The paper we co-authored is based on interviews with a range of Labour left insiders – MPs, senior strategists, organisers, councillors, member representatives, trade unionists and ordinary activists. In it we try to make sense of how a group previously marginal, indeed almost extinct people – Labour Party socialists – transitioned to power through a series of practices we theorise as ‘dramaturgical resistance leadership’. We thought we had made a useful contribution in better understanding moments of dramatic change through resistance but confess that for some weeks after the election defeat thought it was possible our paper would be notable for a single reason, being relevant for less than three weeks. A media consensus was taking root that Labour’s defeat was not the result of a new divide in British society over Brexit; rather, it was due to the party being too left wing, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn viewed by voters as too radical, its hundreds of thousands of new members being too idealistic, demanding too much change, which resulted in an overly ambitious manifesto lacking credibility amongst conservative voters. Was it possible that our study, which tried to understand how a resisting mass movement formed and transitioned to power, was in reality a study of folly and hubris? Having somewhat processed the loss, we argue not. We write this paper in our isolated academic spaces as the Covid-19 virus circulates outside, its destruction amplified by the very structures of neoliberal social and economic relations which, only a few months ago, were assumed as political common sense – untouchable and the only show in town. In the present moment, when so much seems in flux, when social democratic solutions to contemporary problems are suddenly relevant again, developing knowledge of how the left can re-mobilise, re-assemble and re-engage through political parties seems like essential work. Yet before we do so we need to come to terms with loss – preferably sooner rather than later, and to do so in a political and sociological way that helps us Owain Smolović Jones et al. Resources of history and hope note | 201 see the potential for hope. Addressing fellow left-wing activists growing accustomed to routine defeats, the Marxist theorist Raymond Williams stated that our challenge lay in ‘making hope practical, rather than despair convincing’ (Williams, 2016: 209). Dwelling in something akin to melancholy for too long (where ‘too long’ in chrono-time now compresses to hours and days rather than years), we accept Williams’ call – in general – but also as the guiding principle of the remainder of the paper. Our task here is a modest one, to interrogate our study and some of its implications in the present, but to do so in the knowledge that others are doing likewise and that together we may build resources of hope that can inform the practice and research of movements and struggles in these perilous but pregnant times. Perhaps paradoxically, Williams was writing from a position of loss, that of the anti-nuclear movement and it is loss that also offers us a potent frame through which to take stock of the implications of our 2019 Human Relations paper for the organisational study of political parties. In what follows we explain and justify the conceptual basis for a focus on loss. From here, we expand on three threads we think relevant for future study of political parties. Threads dangle from the dominant body of fabric; they also come loose and float between unexpected surfaces. They can be stubborn, resisting attempts at disposal, but they can also unravel large knots and stitches if one pulls too much. In the spirit of unravelling and loosening dominant narrative, we posit our first thread as the study of political parties at the intersection with social movements; our second thread is the relationship between leaders and leadership in political parties; our third and final thread is that of the organisational ethics of political parties, which we position as resources of loss, care and hope. Before proceeding, however, we need to make clear our respective positions with regards to our chosen object of study, the UK Labour Party. Owain has been a member of the party for over 20 years, used to work for it professionally and during the 2019 election volunteered to manage the campaign in an important target seat. Brigid and Paresha live in New Zealand and consider themselves critical friends of social democratic and left wing parties and movements in general, who became fascinated by the dynamics of the Corbyn insurgency; although they wanted it to succeed they were less close to the ephemera: theory & politics in organization 21(2) 202 | note action and more able to gain some critical perspective through distance. Owain, on the other hand, was in the thick of the action, both in terms of the election and the party’s socialist faction. We will return to the issues generated by this research dynamic, but first we need to make sense of loss. Salvaging hope through loss We have spent quite some time since the defeat of December 2019 processing and reflecting on loss. Left-wing activists and supporters become accustomed to it, of course, although some blows fall harder than others. We therefore feel a sense of responsibility to our research participants, to academic colleagues and to ourselves to offer a framework for interpreting political loss and know that, in a time of unprecedented global economic, social and personal loss, that this is one lesson that the study of political parties could indeed offer the organisational world. Mining the resources of hope available through historical materialism has helped us situate loss and to further clarify the task for those of us engaged in insider research within progressive parties. We are mindful of Eagleton’s (2015) differentiation between hope and optimism, where optimism is a naïve and blind disregard to the miserable realities of tragedy and loss but hope is a commitment to persevering despite foreknowledge that radical change is unlikely but possible. At the heart of Eagleton’s formula is faith in contingency and the unsettled nature of history: ‘As long as there is contingency there is hope...There is hope as long as history lacks closure. If the past was different from the present, so may the future be’ (Eagleton, 2015: Loc 3084). Because things need not have developed as they did in the past, we know that the terrain of present and future struggles can buck past outcomes of loss and oppression and we therefore need to revisit the past to discover traces of possibility for how things could have been otherwise. Like Eagleton, we have been mining the work of Walter Benjamin, who penned his great theses on history (Benjamin, 2015) under the gravest circumstances of personal loss while on the run from the Nazis. Benjamin had every reason to concede to despair and yet managed to craft a methodology for Owain Smolović Jones et al. Resources of history and hope note | 203 interrogating (and rescuing) history. Consider his Thesis IX, a fabulation of a Paul Klee painting of the Angelus Novus that he had acquired: A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin, 2015: Loc 4092-4098) In this narrative Benjamin offers an account of history where the agent can be identified as the ‘storm’ of ‘progress’ rather than the angel itself. Progress in this articulation is the historicist accounts of t

Despite many interventions designed to change the gender demographics of positional leadership roles in organizations and professions, women continue to be under-represented in most arenas. Here we explore gender equality (GE) interventions through the example of positive discrimination quotas in politics to develop an understanding of resistance to them. Our case is the British Labour Party, analysing interviews with the people who designed, implemented and resisted the system of all-women shortlists. We develop the notion of ‘oblique resistance’ to describe an indirect form of resistance to the erosion of patriarchal power, which never directly confronts the issue of GE, yet actively undermines it. Oblique resistance is practised in three key ways: through appeals to ethics, by marking territory and in appeals to convention. We conclude by considering the conceptual and practical implications of oblique resistance, when direct and more overt resistance to GE is increasingly socially unacceptable.