UWE makes no representation or warranties of commercial utility, title, or fitness for a particular purpose or any other warranty, express or implied in respect of any material deposited. UWE makes no representation that the use of the materials will not infringe any patent, copyright, trademark or other property or proprietary rights. UWE accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual property rights in any material deposited but will remove such material from public view pending investigation in the event of an allegation of any such infringement. PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR TEXT. Management Learning44 (1) Critical and alternative approaches to leadership learning and development Gareth EdwardsUniversity of the West of England, UK Carole ElliottDurham University, UK Marian Iszatt-WhiteLancaster University, UK Doris SchedlitzkiUniversity of the West of England, UK AbstractThis article is the introduction to the special issue on 'Critical and Alternative Approaches to Leadership Learning and Development'. This article reviews the past approaches to researching and theorising about leadership learning and development and proposes a shift towards critical and alternative approaches. This article then describes the various articles in the special issue and how they contribute towards this paradigm shift.

This article explores how storytelling and Greek mythology within classroom-based leadership development may facilitate learning to deal with ambiguity and social construction in leadership practice. We aim to show how using narratives and making explicit tacit plotlines can disrupt thinking and enable participants to experience the emergent process of re-storying. We argue that the projective focus of the re-storying process encourages critical self-reflection and discussion of the socially constructed nature of organisational roles, relationships and leadership. The use of Greek mythology archetypes in combination with re-storying helps participants to question taken-for-granted assumptions of leadership practice, explore emotions and reflect on the past, present and future of a story. Drawing on reflections from practice, we propose a re-storying leadership development workshop and highlight complexities of working within the realm of re-storying and critical self-reflection. This article concludes with an outline of avenues for future research and leadership development practice.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore opportunities for delivering sustainable leadership education through critical reflection embedded in the framework of higher and degree apprenticeships. Design/methodology/approach This paper contributes to leadership development research that focusses on “leader becoming” as an ongoing process of situated learning (in the classroom and everyday work life). The approach to leadership development adopted in this paper proposes that sustainable leadership practices and decision making are developed when leadership learning is firmly embedded in work-based practices and critical self-reflection. Findings The discussion of critical reflection methods focusses on utilising the learning portfolio as a core aspect of all leadership and management apprenticeships to embed sustainable and reflective practice and facilitate situated leadership learning. The paper explores the role of training providers in actively connecting higher and degree apprenticeships to embed this model of leadership development and seeing leadership as a lifelong apprenticeship. It also highlights the potential for resistance by managers and senior leaders in seeing themselves as apprentices rather than accomplished leaders. By paying attention to issues of language and identity in this discussion, it will surface practical implications for the delivery of sustainable leadership education through the framework of apprenticeships. Originality/value This paper adds to the theoretical and practical understanding of sustainable leadership education by exploring opportunities for re-framing leadership development as a lifelong apprenticeship focussed on personal and professional development. Recognising the resistance that often exists to reflective practice within leadership development contexts, this paper further explores ways of dealing with such resistance.

This article seeks to add to our understanding of processes of identity construction within organizationally assigned leader-follower relations through an exploration of the role of the absent, feminised follower. We situate our work within critical and psychoanalytic contributions to leader/ship and follower/ship and use Lacan's writings on identification and lack to illuminate the imaginary, failing nature of identity construction. This aims to challenge the social realist foundations of writing on leader-follower constellations in organizational life. We examine our philosophical discussion through a reflective reading of a workplace example and question the possibility of a subject's identity construction as a follower. If a subject is unable to identify him/herself as follower, he/she cannot validate others as leaders, rendering the leader-follower relationship not only fragile but phantasmic.We highlight implications of our exploration of the absence of follower/ship and endless, unfulfilled desire for leader/ship for future research and practice.

The Problem This article considers concepts of toxic and bad leadership from a critical, post-structuralist perspective and illustrates how this can be conveyed to management students through the use of film analysis. In response to the paucity of critical approaches within toxic and bad leadership studies, we suggest that film is a useful way of developing in-depth discussion in student and management groups to uncover underlying subtleties and complexity in leadership theory and practice. The Solution We connect to film clips from Batman: The Dark Knight, and explain how this film is used with students and managers to illustrate the ambiguous nature of “good” and “bad” leadership and explore the fluid, shifting, and relational nature of these two concepts. We conclude that students and managers can recognize this more readily through viewing, discussing, and analyzing film clips such as the ones discussed herein. The Stakeholders University lecturers and students, executive educators and managers, general human resource development (HRD) professionals