ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some issues around contemporary organizational writings on charismatic leadership. Using a textual strategy based on Derridean deconstruction, the analysis locates this literature within a particular strand of Max Weber's work. It shows how the organizational literature creates "suspicion of charisma" by omitting important aspects of the Weberian text regarding charismatic routinization, while upholding as charismatic the "wildest" aspects of the phenomena. The chapter also shows how the literature defines as charismatic only certain understandings of the phenomena, which might then become negatively attached to particular groups of people. It performs a reading over some organizational literature on charismatic leadership. The chapter considers how focusing on either side of the Weberian text, and on the exclusions/inclusions so produced, would be equally dangerous. It presents "the excluded other" in the organizational literature by bringing into the discussion some contemporary interpretations of Weber's charismatic routinization.
