Abstract
Our academic field of leadership studies is plagued by an unscholarly obsession with fashions and clientelism. We have a pronounced pen-chant to tell our audiences what they like to hear and what makes us popular rather than what they need to know. Moreover, much of our work suffers from a chronic illusion that the study of leadership per-tains to natural sciences and is governed by what to us at least appear to be highly elusive laws of causality. These two afflictions together skew the study of the fuzzy social phenomenon we have come to know as leadership, towards understandings of a world that many findintellectually unappealing, ideologically loaded, and practically misleading