Anchoring Leadership [keynote introduction]

In this Introduction, I examine what accumulating research evidence appears to be telling us about leadership and about flatter organisational structures and the restructuring of leadership into more distributed patterns. Whilst positive associations have been found with learning, challenging questions are also raised about the educational values underlying ideas of ʻeffectiveʼ leadership and the increased controls and enduring power and cultural disparities that accompany forms of distributed leadership. As an alternative, restructuring anchored in ideals of democratic leadership is compared and contrasted with distributed leadership. The paper concludes with brief observations on the role of co-operativism in providing a form of democratic anchoring.