ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that leadership is a myth generated by, and sustaining of, the managerialist project. The centrality of leadership in the social world creates an ontological complicity in researchers that makes it difficult to epistemologically break from ordinary language. Leadership has reached a point of dominance and came to be the field once known as educational administration. Social structures are central to leadership, management and administration discourses. The chapter considers two major assumptions embedded in the leadership literatures: leadership is the difference between organisational outcomes, therefore, leadership is present in organisations achieving above norm outcomes. Leadership is at once a product and a producer of the contemporary social condition. This imperialism is constructed rather than material. The rise of leadership was during the 1960s that organisational theorists thought of leadership as worthy of serious study. The leadership worldview has influenced the ways in which problems are constituted but, surprisingly, been decoupled from broader sociological and organisational analysis.
