Deconstructing Age, Youth and Adults in Leadership and its Development

Abstract

This inquiry seeks to examine leadership and its development through the lens of age and aging, understanding age as a construction and youth as a particularly ambiguous, dynamic and contradictory construct in the age and aging lexicon. While leadership development for youth is a large and growing global business, research into age, aging and leadership development is hugely underdeveloped. This inquiry focuses on one phase of a longitudinal research project into youth and leadership examining their discourse on age, youth and adults and in particular how they are talking leadership into existence. A strong characterisation of youth as movement, fluidity, exploration and experimentation is uncovered and four types of leadership discourse: small, self, semi and suspended leadership. This paper argues that leadership development needs to rethink its relationship with power to create more possibilities for youth, leadership and the social world.