The Language of Leadership Narratives

A Social Practice Perspective

Jonathan Clifton, Stephanie Schnurr, Dorien Van De Mieroop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351041805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Fascination with leadership and its relation to world events seems to be ever growing, and leadership narratives are a key element through which leader identities are constructed. Contemporary research into leadership tends to recycle the same old myths of the heroic white male leader. By looking at stories told by leaders in Australasia, Asia, North America, the Middle East, and Africa, this book explores different aspects of leadership narratives.

The Language of Leadership Narratives brings linguistics and leadership research together, showcasing different analytical and methodological approaches and enabling a more critical approach. Each chapter focuses on a specific area of leadership research, from dark leadership to gendered leadership. This book introduces the advantages of analysing leadership narratives as social practice and discusses some of the main themes in contemporary leadership research.

This volume is key reading for scholars and students of linguistics, communication studies, and business studies, and for those working in business and intercultural communication in the workplace.

1
INTRODUCING LEADERSHIP NARRATIVES

Introduction

This book explores different kinds of stories and unpacks their relevance for leadership. We will look at long and short, small and big, full-fledged and fragmented, funny and troubling, entertaining and boring, dark and good, as well as sad and perhaps even shocking, stories and anecdotes that people tell in different situations and to different audiences. All the stories in this book establish more or less direct links to leadership – sometimes reinforcing but sometimes also challenging widely spread assumptions and beliefs about leadership and leaders. Throughout the book we view stories as social practice and explore what these stories do and how this doing is related to leadership. More specifically, in some of the stories that we look at, this doing comes in the form of constructing and literally talking into being specific notions of leadership, while other stories challenge these notions and propose concrete alternatives. Some of the stories make claims about what good and successful leaders should look like, thereby creating specific leader (and other) identities, while other stories assist their tellers in actually doing leadership.

Through analysing a wide range of different leadership stories that occurred in very different professional contexts, this book aims to contribute to the growing research on leadership narratives and, more specifically, to bridge the gap between leadership researchers who are interested in discursive approaches to leadership and linguists interested in studying leadership. We thereby directly address calls for a more systematic and engaging dialogue among leadership researchers from different disciplines in an attempt to break down disciplinary boundaries (e.g. Schnurr & Schroeder, 2019) and to make new and relevant contributions to a field of research that has been lamented to be “dead as a scholarly discipline” and in urgent need of “radical rethinking” (Alvesson, 1996). This book is an exercise in this radical rethinking, and we show that leadership research that crosses disciplinary boundaries has much to offer and does indeed provide a fruitful way out of the current dilemma in which leadership research finds itself, which Tourish (2015, p. 137) – perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek – describes as one in which “researchers seem content to ask smaller and smaller questions about fewer and fewer issues of genuine significance, producing statements of the blindingly obvious, the completely irrelevant or the palpably absurd”.

Before we outline in more detail some of the theoretical and conceptual pillars that the subsequent chapters are built on, we have chosen just one, relatively short story here to provide a sense of what we will be doing throughout this book. This story comes from a celebrity leader interview that is publicly available on YouTube. The extract has been selected from a longer story during which the leader-interviewee talks about the tough path to the top.

FRAGMENT 1.1 Context: This extract from the story focuses on how this interviewee used to work in the Ford Dagenham factory as an 18 year old to save money in order to later afford to go to university and study engineering IE: interviewee; IR: interviewer.

In the introduction to this celebrity leader interview, which appears on YouTube, the interviewee is explicitly framed as a “global business leader extraordinaire”. In this extract the teller is portrayed as a leader, as someone who had the vision and stamina to become an engineer and who had to fight against the odds to eventually make it to the top in this profession. In particular, the story revolves around the financial challenges this interviewee encountered and the steadfast character that was needed to overcome these circumstances, in spite of the dismissive and discouraging comments from colleagues at the factory (line 7: “you’re never gonna leave here”) or the young age of this leader-to-be (line 14: “this tiny little school leaver”, which is rhetorically contrasted with the factory’s “hu:ge machines” (line 13)). Yet, in spite of this situation, the interviewee claims to have had “that hunger to do and be and and create more” (line 2), and emphasises in particular the ambitious and visionary thoughts passing through their mind, i.e. not to remain on the production lines but to become an engineer. The phrases “that should be me” (lines 18, 21, and 23) and “every (single) time” (lines 18, 20, and 22), each repeated three times, almost become a mantra, and thus really demonstrate what the conclusion of the story is, namely that the interviewee “was unflinching” in terms of their ambition to move up in life, instead of “just accept[ing] that this is life and this is how life is going to be” as other people did (line 9). This story is thus about someone who stands out from the crowd and who is characterised by an unrelenting determination to have success in life, in spite of the odds. This story is thus a good example of a stereotypical heroic leader story (Clifton, 2018).

When reading through this story and our brief analysis of it, many readers may automatically have assumed that the leader who is telling this story about their way to the top is a white man. This may be because of the job that the interviewee aspires to (i.e. engineer); the location of the story at Ford Dagenham, which may conjure up the image of a huge amount of men working on the assembly lines; the heroic theme in the story; or simply the fact that ambition may be more readily associated with men in our modern-day Western societies. However, when we know that the storyteller is in fact a London-born Ghanaian woman – namely Lucy Quist, who, at the time of the interview, was the CEO and Managing Director of Airtel in Ghana, West Africa – the way we read and make sense of this story changes dramatically.¹ Suddenly the story is not a typically male heroic leadership story anymore, but rather challenges many of the gendered assumptions underlying hegemonic notions of leadership. We explore both these themes in more detail in the subsequent chapters.

Yet, it is not primarily the fact that the teller is not a stereotypical white male leader which makes this story so interesting, but rather what this teller is doing with this story in its particular context. In order to better understand what Quist is doing with this story, we need to consider what happened before the story in the interview, and try and tease out how the preceding interaction triggered it. For example, it is relevant that in the introduction of the interview, the interviewer characterised Quist as “one of the most inspirational woman business leaders [to] come out of Ghana”, and the fragment is part of the answer to a general question about Quist’s professional journey, which the interviewer formulated as follows: “you are the first Ghanaian female CEO of a telecom communication I mean company like how does that happen”. Thus, both the introduction and this question project certain identities upon the interviewee, highlighting her gender (“woman business leaders”, “female CEO”) and African origins (“come out of Ghana”, “Ghanaian”), as well as her role as a “business leader”/“CEO”.

Against this background, then, it is interesting to observe that the fragment is presenting a heroic leader story often associated with stereotypical “tall, handsome, white, alpha males (of) privilege” leaders (Grint, 2010, p. 69). This story thus actually downplays the identity categories of gender and nationality that were capitalised on by the interviewer in her formulation of the introduction and question, and thereby – at least in this part of the interviewee’s answer² – the story counters the projection of “difference” that is present in the interviewer’s question. By telling a heroic leadership story that is typically associated with white male leaders, Quist is implicitly denying the relevance of her gender and nationality in this part of her “becoming a leader” story. This tension between the identities projected upon the interviewee and the identities she herself constructs shows that this story is doing something in its local discursive context, namely constructing and negotiating leader identities. At the same time, it demonstrates that by telling a story in which Quist portrays herself in a similar way to how heroic (and by default) male white leaders are portrayed, she also challenges the stereotypes that female leaders, or African leaders, would do things “differently”, as suggested by the interviewer’s introduction and question.

Our analysis and discussion of this relatively short story thus illustrate the crucial importance of analysing stories not only in terms of their content but also in terms of what they do in the local context in which they are produced, as well as in the global context in which they appear. In line with this approach, which we will take throughout the subsequent chapters in this book, we conceptualise stories as social practice, as elaborated in more detail in the rest of this chapter and in the next chapter.

In our analyses and discussions of leadership narratives as social practice, we will bridge disciplinary boundaries, combining approaches and conceptualisations from mainstream leadership research and linguistic research. That is, as with mainstream leadership research, we will also focus on the content of these stories, but we will go beyond this by examining the structure and the pragmatic effects of these stories in line with linguistic leadership research. In doing so, we will bring these two interests and analytical and conceptual approaches together. Consequently, each chapter explores a current topic in leadership research, such as transformational and visionary leadership (Chapter 2), ethical leadership (Chapter 3), questions of what exactly leadership is (Chapter 4), dark leadership (Chapters 3 and 5), authentic leadership (Chapters 3 and 6), and gendered leadership (Chapter 7), while also showcasing different linguistically informed approaches to analysing this topic through focusing on narratives, including positioning analysis (Chapter 2), discourse analysis (Chapter 3), conversation analysis (Chapter 4), membership categorisation analysis (Chapter 5), interactional sociolinguistics (Chapter 6), and critical discourse analysis (Chapter 7). Whilst these linguistic approaches imply diverse, and perhaps even contradictory, methodologies which may privilege either emic or etic understandings of what is “going on”, they nevertheless all use the fine-grained analyses of naturally occurring talk (although to different extents) and broadly align with discursive approaches to leadership as we outline in the following. In drawing from diverse research traditions, our aim is to showcase how these different approaches work and what each has to offer to leadership research.

Such a combination of topics and approaches will, we hope, be of interest to our readers and will entice them to find something interesting in this book, which they may apply to their own research into leadership. For mainstream leadership researchers, the book introduces some of the advantages of analysing leadership narratives as in situ social practice, rather than treating them as asocial pre-discursive products. For (critical) leadership researchers who are looking for alternative ways of (methodologically as well as conceptually) approaching leadership, we showcase a panoply of techniques for doing discursive leadership, an approach which we explain in more detail later on. For linguists, we demonstrate some of the main themes in contemporary leadership research and indicate how these themes can be drawn on to better frame and inform their own discursive analyses of leadership. And last, for scholars working in the field of narrative research, we illustrate the practicalities of tapping into more global, societal Discourses as they are mobilised in a variety of narrative genres, and also explore the mutual influence between these big-D Discourses and the little-d discourses (i.e. the actual narratives).

In the remainder of this chapter we start unpacking notions of leadership and highlighting the crucial role of narratives in leadership (research and practice), before providing a brief outline of the remaining chapters.

What is leadership?

This question is, of course, as old as thinking and talking about leadership itself. Not only is it central to leadership research across different disciplines (Jackson & Parry, 2011; Kort, 2009), but it is also a question that has generated rather different answers reflecting specific trends in scholarships. One of the aspects that makes defining leadership such a challenging undertaking is that people have different views on what counts as (good) leadership. As Bass (1990, p. 11) once famously noted, there are “almost as many different definitions of leadership as there are people who have attempted to define the concept”. And researchers’ conceptualisations of leadership may of course not necessarily concur with lay people’s understanding. Given this diversity, it is perhaps not surprising that questions about the meaning and nature of leadership have caused and are still causing heated debates among academics as well as practitioners.

Whilst it is beyond the scope of this introductory chapter to provide a full review of the literature which seeks to answer the question of what leadership is, suffice to say that Grint (2010) outlines four different ways of conceptualising leadership. According to Grint (2010, p. 3, emphasis in original), many definitions of leadership are based on “the person regarded as the leader”, while others conceptualise leadership as a process (focusing on the practices that leaders engage in). Others take a positional approach and “define leadership by simply considering what those in authority do”, or follow a results approach and “lock leadership into mobilising a group or community to achieve a purpose” (Grint, 2010, p. 8). These different approaches, however, are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and some overlap exists.

Moreover, Parry and Bryman (2013) in their review of trends within leadership argue that, broadly speaking, the past 75 years of leadership research can be summed up in five broad movements: trait theory, the style approach, contingency theory, new leadership, and post-charismatic and post-transformative approaches. Trait theory, also known as the Great Man theory, which dominated leadership research until the late 1940s, attempted to locate and define key character traits of leaders, which were then classified under headings such as personality, abilities, and physical attributes. The style approach, which was popular from the late 1940s until the late 1960s, moved away from what leaders are to what leaders do. The contingency approach, in fashion until the early 1980s, began to pay more attention to the situated nature of leadership. The contingency approach was replaced by what Parry and Bryman (2013) define as “new leadership”, which has been used to categorise and describe a number of approaches to leadership (e.g. transformational, charismatic, visionary) which revolved around the notion of the management of meaning. Finally, since the late 1990s, post-charismatic and post-transformational approaches to leadership have been in vogue. These approaches to leadership point to the fact that charisma, inherent to transformational leadership models, could lead to narcissism and dark leadership, and so new approaches emerged which concentrated more on the spirituality of leadership.

Who are leaders?

Because who a leader is is intrinsically bound to what a leader does, leader identities are necessarily inextricably intertwined with leadership. For example, the sine qua non of authentic leadership is that leaders do authentic leadership when they are true to themselves (Gardner, Avolio, Luthans, May, & Walumbwa, 2005). This approach to leadership therefore assumes that there is something called an identity, or a self, that is “in there somewhere” to which one can be true or which one can betray. The interwoven nature of leadership and leader identities is perhaps best illustrated by the Great Man (sic) theory of leadership in which leadership is defined as a function of character traits – thus, who one is, as defined by one’s character traits, becomes an essential way of considering how leadership is achieved. In the late 1940s, the Great Man theory of leadership, which was implicitly underpinned by eugenics, lost in popularity and was replaced by notions of leadership which took more account of context. However, as Antonakis, Day, and Schyns (2012) point out, the Great Man theory is now making a comeback. For example, Cohen (2013) sings the praises of great men (sic) and explains their success in terms of their character traits. Moreover, outside of the academic world, trait theories were never really abandoned and have always enjoyed popularity, and as Clifton (2018) illustrates, stories of leadership often reflect the notion that the leader is an exceptional being who is superior on account of his/her innate character traits.

However, the trait theory – whilst being perhaps the most popular and persistent way of considering leader identities, at least outside academic circles – is not the only way. Ibarra, Wittman, Petriglieri, and Day (2014) point out that there are three main distinct, but interrelated, ways of considering leader identities: identity theory, in which leader identities are enacted through fulfilling a social role; social identity theory, in which leader identities are attributed to someone who personifies the group; and social constructionist concepts of leader identities, which focus on the way in which leader identities are constructed in interaction. We briefly outline each of them in turn.

First, identity theory considers leader identities to be social roles that a social actor takes on. The social actor has to be aware of the attributes, qualities, styles, behaviours, and so on that are required of that role, and he/she fulfils these expectations and requirements to the best of his/her abilities. As the social actor moves from being a non-leader to a leader, he/she is socialised into this leadership role and takes on, and increasingly identifies with, the role of leader and so becomes the leader. Second, social identity theory, as put forward by,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing leadership narratives
• 2 A social practice approach to narratives: showcasing a positioning analysis of a canonical leadership story
• 3 Beyond the canonical narrative: exploring different genres of leadership narratives from a discourse analytical perspective
• 4 Filling the empty signifier of leadership through framing vignettes of workplace interaction as stories of leadership
• 5 Exploring the dark side of leadership stories
• 6 Constructing authentic leader identities through humorous anecdotes in everyday workplace encounters
• 7 Challenging hegemonic notions of leadership through stories about leadership and gender
• 8. Conclusions: leadership narratives as social practice. A different way of approaching leadership
• Appendix: transcription conventions
• Glossary
• References
• Index