It could be argued that most leadership domains, whether political, commercial, educational, environmental, moral, are currently in degrees of crisis. What do leadership studies have to say about such episodes of risk and opportunity? How do accounts of leadership help us understand/reconstruct the landscape within which leaders operate? What insights do academic commentators bring, and fail to bring, to the process of leading in and through periods of crisis?

It might also be argued that leadership theory is in the midst of its own crisis: a time of self-critique and re-evaluation. The conference will encourage a critical perspective by re-imagining normative leadership theory, an opportunity to question monolithic and managerialist constructions of leadership and provoke alternative and context-rich conceptions. In the empirical domain, we invite analyses of crisis leadership in a variety of contexts, from the dramatic (natural disasters, terrorism, public health scares, and NGO work in developing countries) to the more mundane crises besetting contemporary organisations and leaders (multi-agency place-shaping, workplace bullying, tensions in regulating the labour process, being generous with knowledge when conditions are mean).

Methodologically, the conference will welcome accounts that respect and establish the essentially contested and constructed nature of leadership - especially when exercised in times of perceived or actual crisis.  Methodological avenues might include interpretivist approaches (narrative/discourse; anthropology and ethnography), post-modern and dialogic approaches, as well as analyses guided by critical ontologies. However, this is not to the exclusion of quantitative approaches which deservedly remain extremely influential.