Introduction: The Motherland’s Postcolonial Constraint

This book is based on the findings of a PhD research project with data collected by the author from across a broad sector of organisations over five years between 2016 and 2020. The book includes primary research data; as such, all research participants’ anonymity has been protected due to the risks of revealing their identities. I have anonymised their data to ensure that the confidentiality of Global Majority Leaders will be protected to minimise any potential harm to them from the impact of publishing this book. I have used pseudonyms instead of actual names, and fictitious place names were also employed so that organisations or areas where Global Majority leaders lived or worked could not be identified. Due to the lack of individuals at such senior levels within organisations, it would be easy to identify these leaders if organisations or place names had been used. Global Majority leaders expressed the importance that they or their specific organisations should not be identifiable due to the social and material consequences they experience. In understanding the career-limiting potential that this may have presented and wanting individuals to trust my integrity to do them no harm, personally or occupationally, I felt comfortable assuring them that their data would be anonymised and that further ethical considerations would be put in place as necessary. These include informed consent of participants to opt in or withdraw from participating in the research and the deletion of any personal data should this be warranted. In addition, this research gained approval from the Open University Ethics Panel (HREC No 2015/2143). The original study explored leadership and identity as socially constructed phenomena within UK society and organisations, as contested spaces for marginalisedMarginalised groups. Extant organisation, leadership and identity literature offer some insight into the barriers to career progression and the lack of homophilous ties to critical leadership networks for marginalised groups. However, it does not account for the lived experience of Global Majority individuals or offer an in-depth explanation as to the occluded reasons underpinning the structural inequalities or social and material consequences. I interrogated the lived experiences of 35 Global Majority leaders in semi-structured interviews from a critical race and postcolonial perspective. The study found that even though Global Majority leaders can thrive by drawing on cultural capital and relational leadership enactments, they still face profound barriers in their experience and practice of leadership. Consistent with Yiannis Gabriel’s work on genres in narratives, rootlessness, unbelonging and dominant genres of tragedy, comedy, and epic drama featured highly in the analysis of Global Majority leaders’ leadership and identity construction. In addition, horror emerges as a prevailing genre, signalling something quite unique to leadership experienced by Global Majority leaders within UK-based organisations. This book contributes to the gap in research by focusing on the ways in which the perspectives of Global Majority leaders in the UK are often downplayed or ignored in the broader organisation, leadership, and identity literature and urges future research that draws out the rich, challenging, and diverse experiences of this group in order to build towards a more emancipatory view of the potential of leadership theory and practice. The significance of this is that very little research delving into life in the UK for Global Majority leaders is visible in the Leadership literature compared to the USA and Australia. Through the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT), an opportunity is given to the reader to engage actively and be immersed in the significance and evocative power of the perspective and performance of the storytellers (Ladson-Billings in International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 11:7–24, 1998) and offers co-presence with the voices of those Global Majority leaders and their lived experiences.