Leadership in the Age of Social Media

Abstract

This chapter enquires into the “tricky,” and at present somewhat ambiguous, nexus between social media technologies and business leadership by analyzing the roles and influence of social media in shaping leadership processes within the recent “social media uprisings” using the case study of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. It is argued that “social media mobilizations” have inherently taken up the emergent potentialities of social media technologies in redefining the scope of leadership along increasingly constructionist, relational, and solidarity network leadership dimensions, centring on leadership as processes of influence and interaction generation. This represents a decentring of formal leadership structures as informal communication networks are favoured that rely on emergent and organic groupings of actors adept at coming together and dismantling rapidly as required by the movement in autonomous, targeted, and sometimes “one-off,” actions and partnerships. However, rather than relational and solidarity leadership processes becoming “leaderless,” this chapter finds that leaders still matter, albeit in relation to one another and other elements in networks, as multiple actors are capable and able to take on different roles as “leader” at different moments that are less “predictable” and “controllable” from traditional leadership and managerial points of view.