ABSTRACT
How do you kill a concept that will not die? Killing a zombie is relatively easy … simply cut off its head. However, a dubious concept such as ‘leadership’, which has been constructed via numerous intersecting discourses, is not so easy (or even desirable to many scholars in the field of educational leadership, management and administration). In thinking about the problems associated with the term leadership – for example, its requisite instrumentalism, exceptional individualism, selling of best practice models, incestuous repetitive adjectival approaches, performative standards-based discourses – these discourses of leadership refuse to die. They are the ‘living dead’ of educational leadership and continue to spread quicker than the plague of zombies on The Walking Dead1! The metaphor of the zombie seems appropriate for these relentless, uncritical, unreflective and often mindless movements of scholarship, a leadership industry that cannot – nor, it often seems, desires to – transition away from particularly narrow modes of thinking. The field of cultural studies, for example, has frequently used the metaphor of the zombie to highlight the anxieties and malaise of our current cultural and social troubles (see Dendle, 2007; Stratton, 2011). Of course, this may seem like an overly playful and extravagant analogy to which to compare leadership; however, there is also a serious point to be made concerning the problematic nature of the field.
