Responsible Leadership in a Post-Truth World

Session Submission Type: Panel Discussion

Short Description

This panel of scholars from different countries and disciplinary backgrounds will grapple with the implications of a post-truth society for leadership research and practice, democratic institutions, and progressive social movements. Panelists will consider how dominant leadership concepts and political and intellectual movements may have helped lay the ground work for the rise of “fake news” discourse and post-truth postures, and will explore what leadership scholars can do to help counteract the chaotic and often-authoritarian consequences of the post-truth moment. The session will prioritize debate, exchange, and questions amongst the panel and with the audience regarding key perspectives and topics to be included in an upcoming edited volume that panel members are writing on leadership in a post-truth society.

Detailed Abstract

If cultural, political, and ideological currents over the past several years weren’t enough to make the point crystal clear, the ascendancy of Trumpism has confirmed that we are in an era of “post-truth” in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2016). Popular author Ralph Keyes first coined this term in his 2004 book The Post-Truth Era to describe a new historical landscape in which all certainties had become debateable, relative, and contested. In 2005 Stephen Colbert further popularized the idea on his popular television show when he satirically coined and embraced “truthiness,” which the Oxford Dictionary has since defined as “The quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.”

It is important to understand how closely these notions of post-truth and truthiness are tied up with leaders and leadership. Keyes used the idea to describe a situation in which leaders were no longer vilified as liars when they betrayed the truth— they were merely reinterpreting facts, providing alternative explanations, or just misspeaking, often with the implication that the listener was somehow at fault. Colbert also mobilized truthiness to call out blatantly false statements made by political leaders and ideologues—hence the joke. When out of character, he has decried this rhetorical trend as an abhorrently selfish and nihilistic. This is because both Colbert’s and Keyes’ critique of post-truth postures rested on an underlying faith that there is a set of verifiable facts that can govern civic debate and democratic deliberation.

Fast forward a decade, and none of this is that funny anymore, because the post-truth moment appears to have stretched out into an epoch, and certainties now appear ever less certain and more contested than ever—often belligerently and violently so, and to drastic effect. Our brave new world is flooded with alternative facts and rapid-fire falsehoods from the mouth of the president of the United States, and with the kinds of misrepresentations and suspicion of “experts” that animated the Brexit campaign.

But this reality did not emerge overnight, or even in the last decade. In a very positive sense the civil rights movements, feminist movements, and anti-war movements of the 1960s owed their success to a newfound and widespread willingness to question, to criticize, and to destabilize official truths and established institutions of hierarchy and authority. This same willingness to question hierarchy and authority has inspired leadership scholars to critique conventional great-man theories, and to develop new approaches to relational, complexity, and social change leadership that seek to mobilize the questioning of established truths in order to develop more collective and equitable approaches to leadership.

In the current climate, the questioning of blind authority is no doubt more important than ever. But the politics of post-truth put both leaders and leadership scholars in a delicate and even treacherous position. On this panel, therefore, we discuss the roots of the post-truth moment, the complex representational and rhetorical politics of nihilism and denial, and the deep connections between post-truth ideologies and the leadership dynamics of populism and authoritarianism. We discuss the implications of the post-truth moment for how we approach key leadership concepts such as authenticity, responsibility, followership, and for how we approach leadership research, teaching and engagement.

The contributors to this panel are all currently collaborating on an edited volume on Responsible Leadership in a Post-Truth World. While our chapters for this project will be largely completed by the time of the conference, we will not make formal paper presentations. Instead, we will build on the perspectives we have developed in the book project to prioritize debate, exchange, and further questioning, both amongst the panel and with the audience.

References:

Oxford English Dictionary (2016) “Word of the Year 2016: Post-Truth,” (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016 .

Ralph Keyes (2004) The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. St. Martin’s Press.

Sub Unit

• Leadership Scholarship

Commentator

• Robyn V. Remke, University of Lancaster

Presenters

• Eric R. Guthey, Copenhagen Business School

• Kevin B. Lowe, University of Sydney

• Mary Uhl-Bien, Texas Christian University

• Nicole Capriel Ferry, Washington State University

• Steve Kempster, Lancaster University