Copenhagen Business School Leadership Initiative/Albert Luthuli Centre for Responsible Leadership (Leadership Initiative INP)

Abstract:

The field of leadership studies has been dominated by quantitative, survey-based research generated primarily by North American scholars and situated most often in a for-profit business context. Promising new research initiatives in such areas as complexity leadership, postcolonial leadership, and discursive leadership have begun to challenge this state of affairs, but have also brought into sharp focus the need to encourage more theoretical and geographical diversity in the field, and the need to connect the concept of leadership more tightly to large-scale social and systems change towards sustainability.In this context, social, political, and environmental issues in developing regions like Africa confront the field of leadership studies with some pressing challenges. How can leadership research inform the UN-led Post-2015 Development Agenda? What kinds of leadership can address issues of poverty, education, gender inequality, health, sustainability and development? And how can the lived experience of these issues in a continent like Africa inform the development of new models of leadership and change, and ultimately contribute to the transformation of the notion of leadership itself? This bi-lateral network seeks to explore such questions by bringing together two culturally and geographically distinct institutions concerned with the interdisciplinary study of responsible leadership, sustainability, and transformational change.