Voicing Seduction to Silence Leadership

Abstract

Using feminist deconstructive strategies, this paper exposes some of the rhetorical and cultural conditions that have sustained the organizational leadership literature as a seductive game. The juxtaposition of 'leadership' and 'seduction' functions as the focus of analysis for understanding the cultural limits of know ledge at times when innovations in theory and research are expected, but do not seem to be happening. Through various analytical approaches, the paper creates 'reading effects' that may be unsettling for the community of organizational scholars. This opens different spaces for reflecting upon and arguing against the closure imposed by organizational research and theory on what can be said to be organizational knowledge.