Authentic action: A recipe for success or a minefield?

1 INTRODUCTION
Our academic field of leadership studies is plagued by an unscholarly obsession with fashions and clientelism. We have a pronounced penchant 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 pertains 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 find intellectually unappealing, ideologically loaded, and practically misleading.

Despite our skepticism towards authentic leadership theory (see Alvesson & Einola, 2019, 2022; Einola & Alvesson, 2021), we do think that authenticity should be a topic of inquiry within the field of leadership and organization studies. We want to encourage our colleagues to be what the Enlightenment scholar and poet, Schiller, referred to as philosophical minds (Alvesson et al., 2022a) and use imaginative and novel approaches to conduct research in this area. In this article, we seek to both address some broader questions of what we suggest leadership studies is about—or rather could be about, and to engage directly with Helmuth, Cole and Vendette's article on authentic action (Helmuth et al., 2023).