Mapping the Leadership Industries

Critical research on the leadership industries can help extend the key insight that leadership is socially and discursively constructed by exploring how leadership gets industrially and commercially produced and consumed. Because the leadership industries revolve around the production of symbolic goods, discourses, and beliefs, we draw on sociological research on the cultural industries to analyze two representative sectors of the leadership industries: leadership coaching and leadership assessment. These two sectors exemplify how the leadership industries structure themselves around the insistence that leadership is a matter of individual behavior, and that the proper function of leadership development is to produce more and better individual leaders. While coaching and assessment fashion themselves on established models of clinical therapy and quantitative science, we argue that they are quasi-therapeutic and quasi-scientific at best, because they function primarily to promote a culture of leader development and a widespread faith in the science of leadership development itself. By constantly reaffirming the necessity of coaching and assessing individual leaders, the leadership industries reinforce the neoliberal dynamics of production, consumption, and identity construction under contemporary forms of capitalist organization.