The Routledge Critical Companion to Leadership Studies

29 Leadership and the tactics of alternative facts

Leah Tomkins

DOI: 10.4324/9781003363125-34

Introduction

The notion of “alternative facts” is associated with post-truth leadership, which tends to be mostly populist leadership (Foroughi et al., 2019; Knight and Tsoukas, 2019). It refers to a world of “truthiness”, in which there is seemingly a divide between those who “think with their head” and those who “know with their heart”.¹ Frequently linked to a denigration of experts, the language of alternative facts suggests that one is entitled to pick and choose the ideas that serve one's purposes best, often because they represent “my truth”. It creates and exploits a sharp divide between “them” (the establishment) and “us” (the people); and ...