Abstract
A key to understanding leadership is to recognise that leadership is itself a conceptualisation drawing on a number of positions, experiences, practices and ideologies. Although many studies present conceptualisations of leadership, they fail to offer accounts of the conceptualisation process itself. In this chapter, I do not identify leadership a priori but offer an account of the leadership conceptualisation process. In doing so, I explore how leadership is conceptualised primarily by U.S. leaders in semi-structured interviews . In my exploration, I investigate the narratives concerning the leadership beliefs and communication experiences of four self-identified male leaders drawn from business, law, non-profit, and academia. These narratives were collected through a process of semi-structured interviews (Grindsted, Journal of Pragmatics 37:1015–1035, 2005) by Skype (audio only), by telephone and face to face. Viewing such research interviews in terms of a social practice generating data co-constructed by the interviewer and interviewee (Talmy Applied Linguistics 32:25–42, 2011), the narratives were then investigated by means of an innovative mixed methods approach involving (U.S. culture influenced) content, narrative and metaphor analyses that included the strategic use of NVivo . The findings include stereotypical notions of leadership, and I conclude that conceptualisations of leadership need to be viewed in the light of their various inputs and from multiple perspectives .
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Notes
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This chapter draws upon and replicates material from Knight (2015) and focuses on 4 of the leaders in that doctoral thesis.
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In Knight (2015), 20 leaders were selected for the semi-structured interviews, but the leadership definitions and the extracts of the leadership communication narratives of 11 of those 20 leaders (including the four leaders in this chapter) were used in a leadership development programme with the undergraduate students in a Japanese university.
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Topic and Vehicle are terms associated with the Discourse Dynamics Framework, whereas Target or Source are terms associated with CMT.
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“The standards or authority relevant in a situation” Accessed at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/book.
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“The troops were committed to the general’s charge”. Accessed at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/commit.
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“The troops showed great esprit de corps”. Accessed at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/esprit%20de%20corps.
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Fairly can be defined as “in a way that is right or proper: in a fair way”. See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fairly?show=0&t=1394321719.
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Knight, K. (2017). Exploring Leadership Conceptualisations in Semi-structured Interviews from Multiple Perspectives. In: Ilie, C., Schnurr, S. (eds) Challenging Leadership Stereotypes through Discourse. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4319-2_6
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