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This chapter considers a number of questions and issues central to leadership and organization within new religions. Four key issues are explored: the social and historical context in which new religions have emerged; the distinctiveness of new religious organizations and how they differ from other religious collectivities; the role and fate of charismatic leadership; and the factors that influence the success, failure, and overall development of new religious movements. Attention is given to new religions as oppositional cultures and how the emergence of family life has altered both their pattern of social organization and relationship to mainstream society. A series of class exercises and research-based projects are included to aid teachers and students.

This study of peace and conflict‐resolution organizations (P/CROs) in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel/Palestine faced several methodological challenges: it had to define P/CROs, draw on both social movement and third‐sector theory, develop research tools to obtain data about P/CROs valid for regional and international analyses, and simultaneously understand P/CROs as a class with common attributes and appreciate differences amongst them. P/CROs are a new organizational classification, different from “peace movement organizations,” an existing classification. The study analyzed P/CROs from three perspectives: social movement theory, third‐sector theory, and the institutional theory of organizations. Four main findings emerged: (1) foreign funding was central to all P/CROs; (2) charismatic leadership was crucial; (3) almost all P/CROs became more professional and formal over time; and (4) while P/CROs played no direct role in the resolution of their respective conflicts, they made important indirect contributions. In particular, P/CROs helped to “sell” future settlements and agreements to their populations. Issues for further research include the preconditions for the emergence of P/CROs, and the assimilation of social movement and third‐sector research.

There is certainly no shortage of theories that set out to explain organizational leadership. Trait theories, behavioral theories, situational theories and cognitive theories dominated research prior to 1980. The focus of research changed around that time, with attention given primarily to transformational leadership, charismatic leadership, inspirational leadership, leader-member exchange (LMX), authentic leadership, servant leadership and ethical leadership. Collectively, these theories are referred to as “new-genre” leadership theories, and emphasize the inspirational, relational, and ethical nature of organizational leadership. Bernie Bass’ transformational leadership theory stands out, attracting more research attention than all other leadership theories since the mid-1990’s. The chapter ends with a discussion of how the ideas and values inherent in these seemingly different theories can be translated readily into everyday leadership behaviors.

This chapter situates the twentieth-century cultural complex of black charismatic leadership within the making of post-Reconstruction black political culture. In African American political culture since the Reconstruction, charismatic leadership can be described as a fraught discursive compact—a narrative and performative regime—that has had to contend repeatedly with the contestations of performing artists, writers, social critics, and activists. Charisma, as a political fiction or ideal, forms assumptions about authority and identity that structures how political mobilization is conceived and enacted. This fiction is staged in real time and in media playback: its narrative thread is woven into the fabric of what might be called the charismatic scenario, which has throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries taken form in ways as diverse as the United Negro Improvement Association parades, the Million Man and Millions More marches, and the various scenes that make up the historical imaginary of the civil rights and Black Power movements.

This chapter presents how curiosity, manifested in particular through parody, weds the conceptual work of contesting charisma to the playful questioning embedded in the formal workings of African American humor. At the turn of the twenty-first century, American popular culture witnessed an explosion of millennial refashionings of spectacular black political leadership, even as postmodern black fiction and film contested the scenario of charismatic black political leadership as the primal and primary mode of political belonging and performance in the post-civil rights black cultural repertoire. The chapter examines Paul Beatty’s novel The White Boy Shuffle and the film Barbershop as revisionist counterstories, whose characters embrace an intuitive way of seeing that grapples with those “phantom subjects” of civil rights protest. These subjects are both the leaders they lack and the players in the drama of black political history that the leadership spectacle necessarily pushes out of sight.

This chapter examines the notion of charismatic leadership, coined by Max Weber, which refers to a leader who is respected by his followers beyond the normal limits. According to Weber, charisma is essentially a localized, ethnically based phenomenon, and the emergence of modern bureaucratic society signals its downfall. The dynamic of the hero and the crowd had always been at the center of modern politics; for instance, Michael Manley as a charismatic leader to the people of Jamaica. The chapter demonstrates how Manley's involvement in the political process at critical times greatly affected the future development of Jamaican politics and society; he was highly admired by the people that his longtime rival, Edward Seaga, pales in comparison.

Amrita Basu utilizes the Rudolphs’ analysis of Gandhi to develop a better understanding of Narendra Modi’s political leadership and charismatic leadership more generally. She observes that both Gandhi and Modi possess profound psychological insights into the ethos of their era. Both used strategic reinterpretation of religion to craft scripts that spoke to people’s emotions and daily experience. Basu shows that Gandhi and Modi also exhibit profound differences. For Gandhi, change began with the individual. Modi and the RSS devalue the individual and emphasize the community. Gandhi deeply opposed strong, centralized state institutions, while Modi has concentrated power in the central government’s executive while curtailing institutional checks on it. Basu points out, both Gandhi and Modi ‘are as much the products of their environment as the architects who design it’, a fact that highlights the importance of historical context in enabling the emergence and efficacy of political leaders.

Chapter 3 is largely about the essentials of populism—its nuts and bolts, so to speak, that are absolutely necessary to facilitate its emergence—including notions of the people, political leadership, and symbolic discourse. The chapter introduces a fine distinction of three different subtypes of “the people,” each with their own characteristics and political mindset, going beyond easy generalizations about alleged uniformity. A comparative analysis of populist leaders follows, which, based on an original reconceptualization of political charisma, demonstrates a surprisingly high correlation between extraordinary leadership and populist success. Ordinary people and extraordinary populist leaders forge their relationship through specific narratives that are based largely on individual fears and deeply held social resentment. The last section in the chapter models the causality of populism, which is also presented as a concise diagram.

In the call and response tradition of African American churches, the concluding chapter reflects on ways in which this book responds to calls for serious scholarship in religious ethnography. As part of that response, it highlights several new perspectives and directions for future research suggested by the current findings: (1) the creative ways in which gender and age may be configured in grass roots institution-building; (2) the position of Sanctified churches, not as bastions of anti-intellectualism but as venues of communal intellectual activity where academic achievement is valued and promoted; (3) the twin dimensions of charismatic leadership that also demonstrates bureaucratic acumen; and (4) the workings of a spirit-grounded “Hermeneutics of Suspicion” that promotes social critique and activism.

This chapter focuses on M. Fethullah Gülen's charismatic leadership. It begins with an assessment of how Gülen was influenced by his predecessor, “Bediüzzaman” Said Nursi. It then presents Gülen from the perspective of his students and his influence on the collective consciousness of the cemaat. It also considers the Gülen Movement's (GM) use of ambiguity as a mobilizing strategy in Turkey, along with the GM's relationship to the Nur Movement in Anatolia. It shows how strategic ambiguity allows GM followers to claim that Gülen is at once the reason, motivator, and instigator behind the GM's transnational efforts, and that he leads no one and manages nothing.

Chapter 7 examines populist legacies and asks: How does populism endanger democracy? The first part addresses a set of questions about the lessons that can be learnt from our comparative study of populism. What has happened to the countries that experienced populist rule? Which are the particular paths each of them has followed after populist rule? And, do we find any evidence to support the claim that so often makes the rounds in academic and public debate that populism may serve as a “corrective” to democracy? The second part concerns questions on the future of liberal democracy in the face of growing populism. Can liberal democracy survive the populist surge? How?

This chapter shows how an ideology of service was essential to the success of God’s Love We Deliver, a home meal delivery program founded in 1986 for people with AIDS. Under the charismatic leadership of Executive Director Ganga Stone, God’s Love deployed a rhetoric of service to speak to individuals’ private search for meaning during the AIDS crisis. God’s Love was premised upon the uncontroversial notion that food was love, a tangible offering of nourishment and care. The program offered New Yorkers a means of registering their concern for those suffering with AIDS regardless of their spiritual or political views (or lack thereof). For Stone, God’s Love was not about finding structural solutions, but about helping ordinary people to be of service and thus to bring joy and purpose into their lives. This strategic approach enabled the organization to redefine what it meant to “care” about AIDS and to amass a broad set of supporters and considerable resources. By proffering the image of the suffering, hungry person who needed help in the most immediate way possible, the ideology of service made AIDS more approachable even as it may have obscured other kinds of relationships based on solidarity or empowerment.

This chapter discusses the borders of Hasidism, showing its halt on the Polish–German and Lithuanian–German border and factors responsible for this halt. This was unfavorable to Hasidism professional and social structure, language barrier, and, most importantly, the pressure of the autostereotype of anti-Hasidic, German–Jewish culture. The chapter also analyzes the basis of the popular image of Hasidism’s regional divisions, showing their essential dependence on nineteenth-century political divisions. It also traces patterns of interrelation between Hasidic groups’ types of spatial organization as well as their types of spirituality and leadership, demonstrating a correlation between the type of spatial organization of the group and the type of leadership and spirituality of a given group.

The creation of political sovereignty in ancient Israel arose through alliances of kinship networks under a king, and this was facilitated by tribal elders and by a single charismatic leader, Samuel. The chapter shows how the elders of Israel prevailed in their argument for a king “like all the nations” by entering into social contracts between kinship groups, rather than by invoking a preexisting divine law that provides for the possibility of monarchy. The subsequent history of kingship eventually gave rise to a utopian law that provides for a strangely modern-looking constitutional monarch (Deut 17:14–20), but there is no evidence in the books of Samuel that the legal framework of Deuteronomy helped to shape the origins of political sovereignty in ancient Israel and Judah.