Gender

This article examines the emergent leadership of two female gurus in South Asia who have declared their status as S´an˙ kara¯ca¯rya¯s (i.e., heads of monastic institutions) based on revelatory experiences. They have done this in order to change patriarchal monastic (akh¯ar. ¯a) culture and challenge entrenched ideas of women’s inferiority in Hindu society. Their self-declarations …

Everyone Drinks from the Same Well: Charismatic Female Gurus as Religious Feminist Influencers in South Asian Hinduism Read More »

Adopting a cognitive and follower‐centric approach to charismatic leadership, we hypothesized that followers show lower levels of cognitive effort, reflected in superficial processing of factually correct information when listening to and viewing a charismatic leader. Participants recognized fewer messages in the charismatic compared to the neutral leader conditions. Exploratory analyses provided mixed results for an …

The effect of charismatic leaders on followers’ memory, error detection, persuasion and prosocial behavior: A cognitive science approach Read More »

Working beyond the inclination to inaugurate alternative theoretical traditions alongside canonical sociology, this article demonstrates the value of recovering latent gender theory from within classic concepts—in this case, Weber’s “charisma.” Close readings of Weber reveal, (a) tools for theorizing extraordinary, non-masculinist agency, and, (b) clues that account for the conventional wisdom (popular and scholastic) that …

Gender and charismatic power Read More »