Oral Presentation by Thomas Kühn¹
¹ IPU Berlin, Germany
TIME: Thursday, 16 July, 14:30 – 16:00
Location: Room 3
Session: 23
Abstract
Recent decades have seen an expanding body of research documenting persistent and, in many contexts, intensifying social inequalities and power asymmetries. Within leadership research, Critical Leadership Studies and Critical Management Studies have offered sustained critiques of individualized, depoliticized, and managerialist conceptions of leadership, foregrounding questions of power, ideology, and domination. In parallel, critical social inequality research has developed sophisticated analyses of authoritarianism, elite power, and destructive forms of leadership. However, leadership has rarely been conceptualized within this field as a transformative social process. Drawing on Erich Fromm’s radical humanist social psychology, this paper proposes transformative leadership as normative identity work as a conceptual bridge between social inequality research and leadership studies. Building on Fromm’s critique of capitalism and his analysis of social character, leadership is conceptualized as a moral and social practice through which power relations are interpreted, stabilized, and potentially reoriented through ongoing processes of identity work. Rather than treating leadership as an individual attribute or managerial function, leadership is understood as a situated social process in which agency, belonging, and coherence are worked on under conditions structured by inequality, contested citizenship, and experiences of misrecognition. Building on critical social psychology, social identity research, insights from Critical Leadership Studies, and qualitative empirical studies on leadership and identity work, the paper advances the normative ABC model—agency, belonging, and coherence—as an analytical heuristic for examining how leadership processes mediate between structural inequalities and processes of orientation, positioning, and responsibility. The model specifies how power relations shape the possibilities and limits of identity work, thereby enabling a systematic dialogue between social inequality research and leadership theory. Following Fromm, the paper does not present leadership as a solution to social inequality. Instead, it conceptualizes leadership as a critical site in which the social, moral, and political implications of inequality become visible and subject to reflection through identity work.