Toward 'socially constructive' social constructions of leadership

In their introductory editorial essay for this special issue, David Grant and Gail Fairhurst have done us a great service by valiantly producing a "Sailing Guide" to the Social Construction of Leadership (Fairhurst & Grant, 2010). As with rounding the Capes, this is not a task for the faint of heart. A sailing guide is designed to provide vital knowledge about a particular sea or coast, providing us with charts, warnings about potential hazards and an indication where we might find safe havens in a storm. Their sailing guide does this to great effect as it skilfully "boxes the compass" by revealing all of the potential directions that one might set one‟s sail by if one was sufficiently foolhardy to embark on a cruise of the social construction of leadership

The celebrity entrepreneur on television: profile, politics and power

This article examines the rise of the ‘celebrity entrepreneur’ on television through the emergence of the ‘business entertainment format’ and considers the ways in which regular television exposure can be converted into political influence. Within television studies there has been a preoccupation in recent years with how lifestyle and reality formats work to transform ‘ordinary’ people into celebrities. As a result, the contribution of vocationally skilled business professionals to factual entertainment programming has gone almost unnoticed. This article draws on interviews with key media industry professionals and begins by looking at the construction of entrepreneurs as different types of television personalities and how discourses of work, skill and knowledge function in business shows. It then outlines how entrepreneurs can utilize their newly acquired televisual skills to cultivate a wider media profile and secure various forms of political access and influence. Integral to this is the centrality of public relations and media management agencies in shaping media discourses and developing the individual as a ‘brand identity’ that can be used to endorse a range of products or ideas. This has led to policy makers and politicians attempting to mobilize the media profile of celebrity entrepreneurs to reach out and connect with the public on business and enterprise-related issues

‘Remembering as Forgetting’: Organizational commemoration as a politics of recognition

This paper considers the politics of how organizations remember their past through commemorative settings and artefacts. Although these may be seen as ‘merely’ a backdrop to organizational activity, they form part of the lived experience of organizational spaces that its members enact on a daily basis as part of their routes and routines. The main concern of the paper is with how commemoration is bound up in the reflection and reproduction of hierarchies of organizational recognition. Illustrated with reference to two commemorative settings, the paper explores how organizations perpetuate a narrow set of symbolic ideals attributing value to particular forms of organizational membership while appearing to devalue others. In doing so, they communicate values that undermine attempts to achieve equality and inclusion. Developing a recognition-based critique of this process, the discussion emphasizes how commemorative settings and practices work to reproduce established patterns of exclusion and marginalization. To this end, traditional forms of commemorative portraiture that tend to close off difference are contrasted with a memorial garden, in order to explore the potential for an alternative, recognition-based ethics of organizational commemoration that is more open to the Other

Profaning the sacred in leadership studies: A reading of Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase

The leadership literature is full of stories of heroic self-sacrifice. Sacrificial leadership behaviour, some scholars conclude, is to be recommended. In this article we follow Keith Grint's conceptualization of leadership as necessarily pertaining to the sacred, but-drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notion of profanation-we highlight the need for organization scholars to profane the sacralizations embedded in leadership thinking. One example of this, which guides us throughout the article, is the novel A Wild Sheep Chase, by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami. By means of a thematic reading of the novel, we discuss how it contributes to profaning particular notions of sacrifice and the sacred in leadership thinking. In the novel, self-sacrifice does not function as a way of establishing a leadership position, but as a way to avoid the dangers associated with leadership, and possibly redeem humans from their current collective urge to become leaders. Inspired by Murakami's fictional example, we call organization scholars to engage in profanation of leadership studies and, in doing so, open new vistas for leadership theory and practice. © The Author(s) 2012

The words leader/líder and their resonances in an Italo-Latin American multinational corporation

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. The problems of ‘lost in translation’ are well known. Yet some terms of English managerial vocabulary, which are perfectly translatable in other languages, remain untranslated. One explanation of this phenomenon is what Linguistic anthropology call negative semantic resonances. Semantic resonances focused on the issue of which meanings can or cannot be expressed by a single word in different cultures. In this paper, based on an organisational ethnography of Latin American expatriates working for an Italo-Latin-American multinational corporation (Tubworld), we analyse the resonances of the word leader/líder and director, direttore, capo, guida, coordinador, caudillo among a group of expatriates; all Italian, Spanish or multilingual speakers who use English as a second language in their everyday interactions. The paper explains how the different uses contribute to create a meaning of what a leader should and should not be; someone who leads without leading, sometimes a manager. The authors, an Italian native speaker who learnt Spanish during childhood and use English as his everyday language and a Spanish native speaker, argue that Italian or Spanish speakers not only avoid the words duce and caudillo (the vernacular vocabulary for leader, not in use due to the political and cultural meaning) but also the word leader/líder itself, as it resonate to the other two (violent, authoritarian, autocratic, antidemocratic leadership) but furthermore because the word, a lexical loan from English, failed to encapsulate the complexity of leading multilingual organisations like Tubworld

Understanding management gurus and historical narratives: The benefits of a historic turn in management and organization studies

A historic turn in organization studies requires a basic theoretical understanding of ‘doing history’ and an appreciation of the centrality of narrative in history. Following the cultural turn in history, narrativist historians and philosophers of history such as Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit and Paul Ricoeur have made the case that narrative is an essential and unavoidable component in history. We demonstrate the persuasive capacity of narrative through a narrativist critique of three best-selling ‘management gurus’. This analysis illustrates the following: (1) the narrative features of popular organizational theories; (2) the basis of the success of guru literature; and (3) why gurus and organizational scientists themselves do not understand the narratological mechanisms behind their success. Finally, we maintain that historical narrativism offers the possibility for positioning organizational history as a highly relevant field for management academics, gurus and even managers, providing support for a historic turn