Between Bosses and Boosters:

The study of leadership has become a serious industry in America in the past decade. It shows activities on commercial and academic levels resulting in the publication of hundreds of how-to-become-a-leader guides per year and more than 1,000 degree programs. A four-volume Encyclopedia of Leadership seeks to mark the transition of the study of leadership from a specialist hobby to a mature academic discipline. The boom in the interest of leadership is a combination of scholarly specialization and a popular curiosity about celebrities. Many products of this business promise to unravel secrets of success and resemble the popular heroworship stories of the late nineteenth century in their recasting of faded forms of self-realization. A telling example of this revival is the 1993 reprint of Dale Carnegie’s 1937 classic The Leader in You: How to Win Friends and Influence People. 1 While it might strike the critical customer as old platitudes dressed in fresh colors, the current boom in the attention for leadership has also a more serious cause. The increasing complexity of international relations in today’s globalized world puts high demands on its leaders. The fates of many people depend on the degree of their success in managing the world’s affairs. In the late 1970s pioneer historian James MacGregor Burns issued his call for improvements in leadership and advocated fundamental research in leadership. His guidelines for leadership studies prescribe interdisciplinarity, a focus on the relationship between leaders and followers, a normative definition of good leadership (advancing freedom, justice, and equality), and a distinction between transactional and transformational leadership. This combination of public interest and scholarly aspirations opens up career perspectives for new categories of professionals. While Burns himself made a significant contribution to the field, he could not prevent commercial interests from making inroads into leadership studies. The encyclopedia offers a list of 250 scholarly programs in each of its four volumes, which smacks of a promotional campaign catering for university interests. Leadership sells everywhere. Airport newsstands offer (auto-) biographical books by or on acclaimed business leaders under the motto “you can not argue with success.” The serious practitioners have organized the discipline by launching new journals, such as The Leadership Quarterly (1990), and new professional organizations such as the International Leadership Association (founded in 1999). Through these institutions, which are