Responsible Rebellion

Abstract

This conceptual paper offers a gender-equitable alternative to leadership discourse centered on productivity, resilience, hierarchy, and transformation. Its starting point is a systemic problem it names “workplace theater,” where organizations operate as figured worlds in which people secure legibility and advancement by performing recognized roles, and in which each fluent performance re-anchors the structures that favor the dominant category. Read systemically, this is a reinforcing feedback loop, and mainstream reform intervenes only at its weakest leverage points, including representation targets, procedural rules, and behavioral training. The framework introduced here instead targets the paradigm, the tacit and largely unstated definition of what a competent leader is, from which a system’s goals, structure, and rules arise. Gender performance is treated as the sharpest instance of this dynamic. Drawing on theories of performance and power, the paper shows how the compulsion to perform a masculine-coded ideal of authority reproduces inequity at the level of the leader’s own self-constitution. Responsible Rebellion, developed through critical-theoretical synthesis and reflective practitioner inquiry, comprises four pillars (Responsibility, Response, Reflection, and Rebellion) grounded in embodied wholeness. It moves leaders from scripted performance toward self-authored agency, replacing power-over with power-with and power-within, and reframes reinvention as a homecoming rather than a repair. The paper illustrates the pillars through two composite practice vignettes, specifies a logic model linking them to hypothesized individual, relational, and system outcomes, and states eleven testable propositions with candidate indicators and disconfirming conditions. It grounds its embodied claims in the sociology of bodily disposition and the epistemology of bodily knowing developed within leadership and organization studies, not in clinical neurophysiology, and specifies the scope conditions under which the framework is expected to hold beyond Western and Anglophone settings.