Leadership as emotional labour Authentic leadership Leadership identities and identity work Stewardship

Dr Marian Iszatt-White is a Senior Lecturer in the area of authentic leadership and leadership-as-stewardship.

After a successful career in financial risk management, latterly as Group Treasurer of Top 100 plc Enterprise Oil, Marian built a business as a freelance training consultant before completing an MSc in Organizational Behaviour at Birkbeck, including a dissertation on ‘what makes employees feel valued at work’.

She undertook her PhD research at Lancaster University, within the Centre for Excellence in Leadership, conducting an ethnomethodologically-informed ethnography of leadership in the learning and skills sector. Within this thesis, special areas of interest included leadership as ‘emotional labour’ and the idea of strategy as a ‘perennially unfinished project’.

As a Senior Teaching Fellow in the School's Management Development Division, she was Director of the Executive MBA on which she also taught leadership and organisational behavour. She is now a Senior Lecturer in Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy and has recently stepped down after six years as LUMS Doctoral Director. During her tenure, she also served on the Doctoral Academy Oversight Group, and chaired one of its strategic working groups. She retains her interest in doctoral capacity building in the role of Dapartmental Doctoral Director for ENST.

Her research interests derive from the practice turn within leadership, and she has built an international profile within this movement, including being co founder of the Leadership-as-Practice Learning Academy. Work around the need re-ground authentic leadership from a practice perspective in order to establish it as ‘fit for purpose’ for practicing leaders has led to a wider interest in problematizing all forms of 'aspirational' leadership (such as responsible, sustainable and ethical leadership) and the problem of inquiry versus advocacy in the field leadership scholarship. The resultant shift in her research focus towards stewardship-as-leadership has received new significance in the context of her membership of the Pentland Centre for Sustainable Business and the role of leadership in the resolution of the Global Challenges with which they are concerned. 

Senior Fellow, Higher Education Academy (ATLAS) (2017)

PG Certificate in Academic Practice - Lancaster University (2020)

PG Certificate of acheivement in Coaching and Mentoring - Lancaster University (2009)

PhD Management: Lancaster University Management School (2006). Thesis Topic: Leadership in Further Education

MSc Organisational Behaviour: Birkbeck College, University of London (2002). Dissertation Topic: What makes employees feel valued at work?

CIPD Certificate in Training Practice (1997)

PG Diploma, Association of Corporate Treasurers (1993)

MA (Oxon) Philosophy, Politics and Economics: St Hilda's College, Oxford (1983)

My research interests focus on the practice turn in leadership, and its daily accomplishment through discourse. Specific areas of interest include problematizing 'aspirational' forms of leadership - and in particular, authentic leadership -  and the notion of leadership-as-stewardship as a radical response to global challenges.