Leadership has always been a loaded concept, one that has embedded political messages related to power, gender, race, wealth, and authority. Images of leadership are almost always white, male, and represented in visual cues of heteronormative value systems. Yet, we now live in an era where leadership is highly prized, sought after as a way of mitigating what appear to be structural injustices affecting an ever-growing number of people. The typical response to failed leadership is not a critical reflection on the concept itself, but instead a rearticulation of what a leader might look like and sound like. In the arena of high-stakes politics, we now face absurd prospects of a different kind of leadership in the United States, and we will likely abandon the nonmale, nonexcluding leadership of the likes of Angela Merkel, who is seen to have breached the boundaries of effective leadership by inviting marginalized people into her country en masse.
In the professional fields that directly and daily affect the well-being of young people facing adversity, a search for leadership is on. Discussions abound about what we might need to advance the cause of this profession or that one. Who will lead social work, youth work, psychology, and mental health into the next phase of child and youth engagement? How might such leadership appear? Will it be an influential researcher, a dynamic public speaker, someone who has successfully procured funding for a charitable or social innovation initiative aimed at young people? Or will it be more of a grassroots approach to leadership, perhaps at micro levels, allowing for a more complex network of leaders changing the every day reality of young people facing adversity? Does leadership reflect superior skills, knowledge, and capacity? Or does it reflect excellent facilitation skills, the capacity to develop or mentor others, and a focus on mission, values, or social justice instead of hard skills and competencies? Does leadership have to be representative of those to be led, be that by demographics, generation, gender, social location, race, or some other criteria? Is leadership assumed or conferred? Is it the result of ambition and aspiration, or accepted with humility?
Aside from contemplations about the nature of leadership, there are unanswered questions about the role of leadership, its purpose, or even its necessity. Is leadership itself an antiquated concept, one that reflects the hierarchal norms of modernism, perhaps even of oligarchy, feudalism, or religious movements of the past? Is leadership in the context of youth work, chid and youth services or social justice movements more generally really about resistance to leadership, to structures and cultures that create dichotomous ways of defining the roles of people along a hierarchical spectrum of power and authority, or influence and value?
While these questions are still awaiting answers, we are struck by the strong movements toward the status quo, risk mitigation and avoidance of radical action within global service structures and organizational forms that seek to address the needs of children and youth facing adversity. We continue to observe public and private systems that are institutionally constituted, that incorporate strong features of inclusion and exclusion, and that continue to place judgment on identities that do not quite fit. We also continue to observe the rush to categorize young people on the basis of their service settings, geographies, and social locations. Many of our service responses continue to unfold in silos, such as, for example, the refugee camps, the homeless shelters, the treatment setting, or the foster home. In the process, we continue to categorize young people as refugees, homeless, in need of protection, mentally ill, or simply as at-risk youth. We have learned to live with service contexts that pit organizations against one another in competitive pursuit of limited public funding, and we work hard to elevate the misery associated with the particular context of our service provision to win the hearts and minds (and the financial contributions) of the public.
There has not been a great deal of change in this structure of service provision for children and youth; over the years, policies have been adjusted, and transformations have unfolded in particular sectors in specific geographies in order to generate greater efficiencies, more transparency, or simply to ensure that there has been a policy response to a perceived ineffectiveness of services. The variables we use to improve services are, however, surprisingly consistent, limited and static. Over the past 15 years, in almost every geographic region, we have played with variables such as outcomes, evidence, efficiency, and innovation; from the perspective of young people, these games have not had much of an effect, and they certainly have not transformed, or reinvented, the social relations that affect the life space of children and youth.
The research community seeks to be responsive to the practice community. As researchers, we produce program and service evaluations of specific initiatives, and we produce evidence of highly contextual interventions that may work better than others. As editors of this journal, we read a great deal of new research, and while we celebrate the high calibre of authors and research writing that we receive, we also are conscious of the repetitive, perhaps even chronic, impulse to change as little as possible. There has been change here and there, but there most certainly has not been a revolution!
We clearly need new leadership, capable of entertaining and galvanizing support for a new vision (perhaps a chorus of new visions) of how we can respond to the needs of children, youth, families, and communities across the globe. Our old ideas, although useful in getting us to this point, have not so far proven effective in moving us further. Here, we do not suggest that “old” leaders in our fields must at once cede their positions to a new generation—although that certainly may happen—or that their leadership has been ineffective. As one of our doctoral advisors, Michael Baizerman, has said, “perfect cannot be the enemy of better;” simply because our historical leadership has not resulted in the ideal responses to the crises we face in youth services does not suggest that we're not better for the gains we have enjoyed. But to complete the sentiment, “better can never be good enough.” It is time for us to do better, and in order for that to happen, we must engage conversations about leadership in new ways, with new definitions, and new players at the table.
Perhaps we would do well in our professional meetings, our collegial relationships, our program team meetings, to start speculating at answers to the questions about leadership that opened this editorial. What could our new leadership look like, how could its inherently categorizing effect be mitigated, and to what extent can our concepts of leadership take account of massive identity transformations that range from rapidly growing transnational identities to gender and race disorienting or resistant identities? As we move forward with our journal, we invite you, the authors, researchers, thinkers and yes, the leaders in child and youth services from around the world to contemplate with us what leadership might mean in a global context of shifting identities, processes and complex communication structures, and how such leadership might impact, and hopefully improve, child and youth services in a postmodern, or some might argue absurd, world.