The Routledge Critical Companion to Leadership Studies

5 Leadership and posthuman ethics

Nik Winchester

DOI: 10.4324/9781003363125-6

Introduction

In this chapter, we shall explore posthuman ethics as a way to understand and conceptualize leadership practice in a normative vein. Critical leadership scholars (alongside critical management studies and others that deploy the term “critical”) are either implicitly or explicitly concerned with normative questions in terms of leadership practice. It is this questioning attitude toward leadership in both theory and practice that makes critical leadership distinctive. Leadership is not studied simply as a phenomenon that either functions effectively or otherwise, but as a space in which to question its foundations and deployment. Critical scholars are ...