Leadership ‘to save the world’?
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Wed 20 May 26
12:00 - 13:00
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Online
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Event speaker
Professor Owain Smolovic-Jones
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Event type
Lectures, talks and seminars
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Event organiser
Essex Business School
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Contact details
Melissa Tyler mjtyler@essex.ac.uk
We are hurtling towards apocalypse through a lethal convergence of violence, climate catastrophe and multiple inequalities. Leadership is often seen as the remedy, yet it also produced many of the problems it is now asked to solve. Therefore, if leadership is going to help ‘save the world’, it needs to be radically re-envisaged.
Such is the task considered in a new book by Owain Smolović Jones discussed in this seminar, which revisits the essentials of leadership – its relationship to resistance, time, space and feeling. Drawing on organisation and political studies, geography and social theory, as well as insights from global practitioners, the book assembles a survival kit of practices for communities, workplaces, nations and beyond, providing a framework for leading differently in a world that urgently needs it.
The seminar will particularly focus on the spatial and temporal, drawing on primary research with a government leading for a future that cannot yet speak and Palestinians on the ground in Gaza offering leadership in spaces near and far.
Speaker
Owain Smolovic-Jones research focuses on power and resistance in practices of leadership, particularly in relation to global, social issues. His current work draws from critical geography and leadership studies to explore housing crises, and to consider future alternatives. Another strand of his research examines how to improve working terms and conditions for hospitality and service workers via consuming, resisting and practicing leadership. His previous research focused on party political leadership and the identity work performed by government ministers.
Owain is an Associate Editor of the journal, Leadership. His work has been published in a wide range of journals and edited collections, including Human Relations, Work, Employment and Society, Management Learning and Organization. Owain’s latest book, Leadership to Save The World, is published by Bristol University Press in 2026.
