Leadership writing occupies a space between theoretical complexity and the human desire for practical insight. While popular leadership books often achieve wide resonance without scholarly rigor, academic journal articles frequently achieve rigor without broader relevance. Our article offers reasons for this bifurcation and suggests the use of the hermeneutic circle as a frame to interpret popular leadership texts not as threats to academic credibility, but as opportunities for reflection and reorientation. Through the hermeneutic circle, the relationship between scholarly and popular texts is conceptualized as recursive interplay between parts (e.g., rigor, audience) and wholes (e.g., influence, disciplinary norms). Rather than dismissing popular leadership books as failed scholarship, their appeal can be treated as a phenomenological encounter, what we describe as resonance. Drawing on the hermeneutic turn, phenomenology, and leadership studies, the article proposes a framework for interpreting resonance with readership as meaningful data about readers’ lived experiences. By taking resonance seriously, popular texts become portals into how leadership is understood and enacted in practice, offering insights that can inform, refine, and expand scholarly leadership research.
Hartman et al. (2026) studied this question.