'Zombie Leadership and Psychoanalysis: Time to Get Real?' Leadership, Organisations, Behaviour and Reputation Research Seminar

Dr Stringer has spent more than 40 years working within organisations across several sectors in a wide range of roles, covering financial accountancy, Head of Product Management and Marketing, Head of Organisational Development, the management of learning and development functions and latterly as a Director of both HR and Operations. Along the way, he has won several internal and external facing People related awards.

Within the department of Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck Business School, which Dr Stringer joined in 2014, in his role as Lead for People, Work and Organisational Psychology he both convenes and teaches on several modules. These include Organisations and Change Perspectives, Human Resource Management Professional Development and Learning and Work and Well Being. He also continues to supervise numerous research projects at Masters and PhD levels.

Through teaching, supervision and research, Dr Stringer's consistent aim, hope and focus is to promote the use of interdisciplinary and critical tools to provide new readings, supporting those aiming to change organisational issues for the better. His PhD research looked at interpreting Employee Engagement via a Lacanian psychoanalytic lens and has a research project nearing completion on the stories of women's journeys to reach board level positions. He had a chapter looking at differing academic career journeys published via Routledge in July 2023.

Currently undertaking clinical training as a psychoanalyst, Dr Stringer was recently recognized by HR Magazine as one of the UK's Most Influential Thinkers, both in 2023 and 2024. He was the recipient of the Birkbeck Business School 2024-2025 Gwynne-Vaughan Medal for excellence in doctoral studies.

The topic of this presentation is 'Zombie Leadership and Psychoanalysis: Time to Get Real?' It draws influence from a paper titled 'Zombie Leadership: Dead Ideas that Still Walk Among Us', authored by Professor Alex Haslam, Professor Mats Alvesson and Professor Steve Reicher and published in the Leadership Quarterly.

This seminar will explore the question of what the unconscious and zombies have done for the study of leadership. Haslam et al analysed the approach to the core meta-theory underpinning leadership thinking as a way to help unpack it. Psychoanalysis itself is seen as a meta-theory, for the same reasons: to unpack human behaviour in different ways.

To follow this idea and its meta-theoretical roots further, Dr Stringer proposes beginning to consider how working with the unconscious through a psychoanalytic lens can help us to look awry. For this work, specifically a use of Lacanian theory, Dr Stringer theorises that we can perhaps problematise praxis and practice surrounding leadership discourse.

Supplementary to this is a hope that we can begin to help with both a different reading and a destabilising of what have been coined here as 'zombie leadership' narratives. By attempting to undertake this task, the goal is to provide differing and practical ways in which to navigate organisational practice, research and speech into more ethical and creative spaces when approaching the notion of leadership.

After the seminar has concluded, Dr Stringer will lead an expert session workshop, titled 'Research with Impact: Engaging with Practice'. This workshop is targeted at early career researchers and PhD students.

The seminar is for an internal audience and will be held on 7 May 2026, 1:00pm, in room LG01 of the Henley Business School building, Whiteknights campus. For those unable to attend in person there is also the option to dial in remotely via Microsoft Teams. If you are interested in joining, please contact Alex Baker on a.j.baker@henley.ac.uk

LOBR research seminars are co-ordinated by Professor Bernd Vogel and Dr Anastasiya Saraeva.