Call for Papers: Special Issue: Leading & Managing

Special Issue for Issue 3 2026

Call for Manuscripts: Rethinking Leadership Scholarship: Beyond Labels, Transplants, and Trivialities

Special Issue Theme: Reclaiming Conceptual Integrity in Educational Leadership Research

Educational leadership scholarship has expanded rapidly, yet much of the field remains constrained by conceptual habits that limit theoretical innovation and practical relevance. This special issue invites manuscripts that challenge these patterns and offer more contextually grounded, intellectually rigorous approaches to studying leadership.

1. Moving Beyond “Leadership-by-Adjective”

We seek work that interrogates the proliferation of adjectival leadership labels—transformational, instructional, distributed, servant, adaptive, and others. Papers may critique the conceptual inflation of such categories, examine their empirical indistinctness, or propose alternative ways of theorising leadership practice.

2. Questioning Cross-Cultural Transplants

We welcome manuscripts that critically examine the unreflective transfer of leadership constructs, definitions, and epistemological frameworks across cultural, linguistic, or political contexts. Submissions may explore:

  • how Western-centric assumptions shape global leadership discourse
  • the consequences of applying imported models without attending to local meaning systems
  • culturally grounded or Indigenous conceptualisations of leadership that resist universalising tendencies

3. Recontextualising Leadership Definitions

This issue encourages scholarship that situates leadership within its organisational, historical, and sociopolitical contexts. We particularly invite work that:

  • exposes the limitations of decontextualised definitions
  • demonstrates how leadership is enacted differently across settings
  • theorises leadership as relational, situated, and contingent rather than abstracted or essentialised

4. Escaping the Pull of Granular Debates

Too often, the field becomes fixated on parsing the distinctions among shared, distributed, parallel, or collaborative leadership, for example, at the expense of addressing substantive questions about power, purpose, equity, and outcomes. We invite manuscripts that redirect attention toward the larger conceptual, methodological, and ethical stakes of leadership research.

Types of Submissions

We welcome:

  • empirical studies (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods)
  • theoretical or conceptual analyses
  • critical or philosophical essays
  • methodological innovations
  • cross-cultural or comparative studies
  • practice-based or policy-oriented contributions

This special issue seeks to provoke a field-level reset:

  • clarifying concepts
  • resisting superficial categorisation
  • foregrounding context
  • elevating questions that matter for practice, policy, and justice

All submissions will go through a peer review process in line with L & M special edition processes, with final acceptance conditional on consideration by the editors with respect to the balance of content across the special issue.

Timeline for abstracts and submission:

Forward abstracts of up to 500 words to:
Special Issue Editor: Charlie Webber ([email protected]) and copy to L & M Editor: Professor Dorothy Andrews - [email protected] and [email protected]

Abstracts close: June 16th 2026
Notifications of Abstract outcome: 30th June 2026
Articles due: 30th September, 2026
Length of contribution: 6000–7000 words (excluding references & tables)

See Submission information: Submissions | Leading & Managing