Owain Smolović Jones
Biographic Data
| ID | 282283 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Owain Smolović Jones |
| GIVEN NAMES | Owain Smolović |
| FAMILY NAME | Jones |
| SIGNATURE | JONES O S |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3120-4180 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Situating and progressing resistance leadership research
Resistance leadership is a vital concept that gets to the heart of the power dynamics of organizations and societies. This interview, conducted by one of the special issue editors, Owain Smolović Jones, with two key figures in critical leadership studies, Keith Grint and David L. Collinson, provides readers with an orientation to this area of research. It does so through offering definititional clarity, expanding on the concept’s value and summar…
Re-organizing for public value and reclaiming post-capitalist possibilities
This editorial introduces the Special Issue on public value, urging scholars to ask fundamental questions about what public value organizing entails. It proposes key conceptual dimensions to foster public value thinking, highlighting the contested nature of the concept and the subjective understanding of public value among different publics. Themes emerging from the contributions to the Special Issue include re-imagining the State’s role in post-…
What makes a good article for leadership? Thoughts and views from our associate editors, part 1
This issue of Leadership marks our first full year as Co-Editors-in-Chief. As we highlighted in our introductory editorial (Edwards and Schedlitzki, 2023) we see our role as striving to develop the community of the journal in its endeavour to be a key, critical and contemporary voice for leadership studies. To continue this journey, and to help contributors frame and develop their work for submission to the journal, we have invited some of our As…
Dissensual Leadership
The democratic leadership literature emphasises those leadership practices that involve dialogue and communication within the frame of reference of existing organizational structures, discourses and hierarchies. Our contribution is to problematise this approach to democracy from the perspective of the work of Jacques Rancière, which highlights the importance of dissensus, that is to say a breaking away from organizational structures and hierarchi…
‘I Wanted More Women in, but . . .’
Despite many interventions designed to change the gender demographics of positional leadership roles in organizations and professions, women continue to be under-represented in most arenas. Here we explore gender equality (GE) interventions through the example of positive discrimination quotas in politics to develop an understanding of resistance to them. Our case is the British Labour Party, analysing interviews with the people who designed, imp…
Guerrilla Democracy
Infectious Domination, Contagious Revolutions
The memory of the Vietnam struggle for liberation continues to loom large even into the new millennium. For many, it was the war that gave birth to the US counterculture, the catalyst for a radical energy spurred on by their conviction that their own freedom should not be won by the blood of a repressed people halfway across the world. For others, it remains a testament to the possibility of a heavily outgunned and out-resourced force defeating a…
Infectious Domination, Contagious Revolutions
Exposing and re-placing leadership through workers inquiry
The literature on leadership place and space offers us an understanding of how the built environment, geography of location and socio-economic forces can coalesce to shape (and be shaped) by leadership practices. Missing thus far, however, is an account that constitutes leadership space and place through antagonism and struggle, crucial if we are to acknowledge the agency of workers in leadership practice. We therefore outline a workers inquiry a…
Leadership rebooting
Theorizing dramaturgical resistance leadership from the leadership campaigns of Jeremy Corbyn
What are the practices through which resistance leadership transitions from marginality to power? We present a framework of dramaturgical resistance leadership, paying particular attention to the relational dynamics between leaders, internal factions and external stakeholders. In doing so, we draw on an ‘expanded’ social drama analysis framework informed by the work of social anthropologist Victor Turner, incorporating insights from the resistanc…
Understanding sovereign leadership as a response to terrorism
This study seeks to better understand how notions of sovereign power as a response to terrorism are built and bolstered through use of the signifier ‘leadership’. Through a post-foundational analysis of the speeches, press conferences and writings of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, we theorise ‘sovereign leadership’ as the deployment of the signifier leadership in ways that foreclose language so as to normalise the discourse and acts of sove…
Theorizing gender desegregation as political work
Organization studies offers a detailed understanding of the roots of gender segregation and the obstacles to its dismantling in practice but has not proposed a conceptual framework that can help us understand how radical forms of desegregation may be made sense of and approached, particularly within a hotly contested organizational context. We provide an empirical analysis of the UK's only positive discrimination intervention, in the British Labo…
Being more with less
The paper focuses on the identity work of government ministers, exploring how they experience themselves in relation to contemporary demands and discourses of leadership and democracy. We note a substantial number of studies seeking to develop theories of political and public leadership, particularly in more collaborative directions, but no studies that seek to explore how such demands are experienced by the political leaders who occupy leadershi…
No More Heroes
This paper revisits Meindl et al's (1985) 'romance of leadership' thesis and extends these ideas in a number of inter-related ways. First, it argues that the thesis has sometimes been neglected and/or misinterpreted in subsequent studies. Second, the paper suggests that romanticism is a much broader and more historically rich term with wider implications for leadership studies than originally proposed. Arguing that romanticism stretches beyond le…
No More Heroes
This paper revisits Meindl et al's (1985) 'romance of leadership' thesis and extends these ideas in a number of inter-related ways. First, it argues that the thesis has sometimes been neglected and/or misinterpreted in subsequent studies. Second, the paper suggests that romanticism is a much broader and more historically rich term with wider implications for leadership studies than originally proposed. Arguing that romanticism stretches beyond le…
Being more with less
The paper focuses on the identity work of government ministers, exploring how they experience themselves in relation to contemporary demands and discourses of leadership and democracy. We note a substantial number of studies seeking to develop theories of political and public leadership, particularly in more collaborative directions, but no studies that seek to explore how such demands are experienced by the political leaders who occupy leadershi…
Situating and progressing resistance leadership research
Resistance leadership is a vital concept that gets to the heart of the power dynamics of organizations and societies. This interview, conducted by one of the special issue editors, Owain Smolović Jones, with two key figures in critical leadership studies, Keith Grint and David L. Collinson, provides readers with an orientation to this area of research. It does so through offering definititional clarity, expanding on the concept’s value and summar…
Exposing and re-placing leadership through workers inquiry
The literature on leadership place and space offers us an understanding of how the built environment, geography of location and socio-economic forces can coalesce to shape (and be shaped) by leadership practices. Missing thus far, however, is an account that constitutes leadership space and place through antagonism and struggle, crucial if we are to acknowledge the agency of workers in leadership practice. We therefore outline a workers inquiry a…
Theorizing dramaturgical resistance leadership from the leadership campaigns of Jeremy Corbyn
What are the practices through which resistance leadership transitions from marginality to power? We present a framework of dramaturgical resistance leadership, paying particular attention to the relational dynamics between leaders, internal factions and external stakeholders. In doing so, we draw on an ‘expanded’ social drama analysis framework informed by the work of social anthropologist Victor Turner, incorporating insights from the resistanc…
Theorizing gender desegregation as political work
Organization studies offers a detailed understanding of the roots of gender segregation and the obstacles to its dismantling in practice but has not proposed a conceptual framework that can help us understand how radical forms of desegregation may be made sense of and approached, particularly within a hotly contested organizational context. We provide an empirical analysis of the UK's only positive discrimination intervention, in the British Labo…
No More Heroes
This paper revisits Meindl et al's (1985) 'romance of leadership' thesis and extends these ideas in a number of inter-related ways. First, it argues that the thesis has sometimes been neglected and/or misinterpreted in subsequent studies. Second, the paper suggests that romanticism is a much broader and more historically rich term with wider implications for leadership studies than originally proposed. Arguing that romanticism stretches beyond le…
Being more with less
The paper focuses on the identity work of government ministers, exploring how they experience themselves in relation to contemporary demands and discourses of leadership and democracy. We note a substantial number of studies seeking to develop theories of political and public leadership, particularly in more collaborative directions, but no studies that seek to explore how such demands are experienced by the political leaders who occupy leadershi…
Understanding sovereign leadership as a response to terrorism
This study seeks to better understand how notions of sovereign power as a response to terrorism are built and bolstered through use of the signifier ‘leadership’. Through a post-foundational analysis of the speeches, press conferences and writings of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, we theorise ‘sovereign leadership’ as the deployment of the signifier leadership in ways that foreclose language so as to normalise the discourse and acts of sove…
Theorizing gender desegregation as political work
Organization studies offers a detailed understanding of the roots of gender segregation and the obstacles to its dismantling in practice but has not proposed a conceptual framework that can help us understand how radical forms of desegregation may be made sense of and approached, particularly within a hotly contested organizational context. We provide an empirical analysis of the UK's only positive discrimination intervention, in the British Labo…
‘I Wanted More Women in, but . . .’
Despite many interventions designed to change the gender demographics of positional leadership roles in organizations and professions, women continue to be under-represented in most arenas. Here we explore gender equality (GE) interventions through the example of positive discrimination quotas in politics to develop an understanding of resistance to them. Our case is the British Labour Party, analysing interviews with the people who designed, imp…
Guerrilla Democracy
Infectious Domination, Contagious Revolutions
The memory of the Vietnam struggle for liberation continues to loom large even into the new millennium. For many, it was the war that gave birth to the US counterculture, the catalyst for a radical energy spurred on by their conviction that their own freedom should not be won by the blood of a repressed people halfway across the world. For others, it remains a testament to the possibility of a heavily outgunned and out-resourced force defeating a…
Infectious Domination, Contagious Revolutions
Exposing and re-placing leadership through workers inquiry
The literature on leadership place and space offers us an understanding of how the built environment, geography of location and socio-economic forces can coalesce to shape (and be shaped) by leadership practices. Missing thus far, however, is an account that constitutes leadership space and place through antagonism and struggle, crucial if we are to acknowledge the agency of workers in leadership practice. We therefore outline a workers inquiry a…
Leadership rebooting
Theorizing dramaturgical resistance leadership from the leadership campaigns of Jeremy Corbyn
What are the practices through which resistance leadership transitions from marginality to power? We present a framework of dramaturgical resistance leadership, paying particular attention to the relational dynamics between leaders, internal factions and external stakeholders. In doing so, we draw on an ‘expanded’ social drama analysis framework informed by the work of social anthropologist Victor Turner, incorporating insights from the resistanc…
Dissensual Leadership
The democratic leadership literature emphasises those leadership practices that involve dialogue and communication within the frame of reference of existing organizational structures, discourses and hierarchies. Our contribution is to problematise this approach to democracy from the perspective of the work of Jacques Rancière, which highlights the importance of dissensus, that is to say a breaking away from organizational structures and hierarchi…
Re-organizing for public value and reclaiming post-capitalist possibilities
This editorial introduces the Special Issue on public value, urging scholars to ask fundamental questions about what public value organizing entails. It proposes key conceptual dimensions to foster public value thinking, highlighting the contested nature of the concept and the subjective understanding of public value among different publics. Themes emerging from the contributions to the Special Issue include re-imagining the State’s role in post-…
What makes a good article for leadership? Thoughts and views from our associate editors, part 1
This issue of Leadership marks our first full year as Co-Editors-in-Chief. As we highlighted in our introductory editorial (Edwards and Schedlitzki, 2023) we see our role as striving to develop the community of the journal in its endeavour to be a key, critical and contemporary voice for leadership studies. To continue this journey, and to help contributors frame and develop their work for submission to the journal, we have invited some of our As…
Situating and progressing resistance leadership research
Resistance leadership is a vital concept that gets to the heart of the power dynamics of organizations and societies. This interview, conducted by one of the special issue editors, Owain Smolović Jones, with two key figures in critical leadership studies, Keith Grint and David L. Collinson, provides readers with an orientation to this area of research. It does so through offering definititional clarity, expanding on the concept’s value and summar…
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (8 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Leadership (5 works) · Leadership style (5 works)