Enacting emotional labour in consultancy work:playing with liminality and navigating power dynamics

While theoretical understanding of professional emotional labour has developed in recent years, methodological issues with capturing its practice mean that understanding of how professional emotional labour is enacted remains relatively limited. The current study utilises memory work to surface potentially unacknowledged meanings associated with the remembered performance of professional emotional labour as a proxy for the psychological access required to demonstrate dissonance between felt and displayed emotions. The article uses an emotionally charged feedback meeting between a management consultant and their client as an opportune context for surfacing the enactment of professional emotional labour. The combined memory work data - consisting of original meeting recordings and a parallel commentary developed in discussion with the consultant - are analysed through a Goffmanian lens in order to theorise role positioning as a tool of enacting professional emotional labour. A model is proposed that maps the roles adopted against the dimensions of playing with liminality and navigating power dynamics. We suggest the potential transferability of these findings to other situations of liminality and their relevance for management learning interventions

Methodological Crises and Contextual Solutions:an ethnomethodologically-informed approach to understanding leadership

The view of context as something which restricts the range of research but is not an integral part of that which is being researched is implicit in many traditional approaches to leadership theory development. Some recent approaches have sought to address this by taking a more directly situated approach to the understanding of leadership, and by paying close attention to the practical accomplishment of leadership work within a given context. It is the premise of this paper, however, that there is still much work to be done in this important aspect of leadership research, and that considering this from a specifically methodological perspective may have a contribution to make. In support of this argument, the paper adopts the ethnomethodological notion of ‘mutual elaboration’ to explore leadership practices as irreducibly events in a social order. By placing context centre stage, and explicating the practice of leadership as an inherently contextual performance, it offers a relatively untapped approach to the understanding of leadership work and suggests the value of this approach in providing a rich resource of data for the development of innovative theory

An educators’ perspective on reflexive pedagogy:identity undoing and issues of power

This article looks at reflexive pedagogical practice and the ‘identity undoing’ that such practice demands from educators. Such identity undoing is found to have strong connections to the impact on identity of power relations, resistance and struggle. A dialogic ‘testimonio’ approach is adopted tracing two of the authors’ experiences of attempting to introduce a reflexive pedagogy within a structured, accredited learning intervention. This approach analyses educators’ own reflexive dialogue to make visible the assumptions and tensions that are provoked between educators and students in a reflexively orientated learning process. In undertaking this analysis, we problematize the pursuit of a reflexive pedagogical practice within executive and postgraduate education and offer a paradox: the desire to engage students in reflexive learning interventions - and in particular to disrupt the power asymmetries and hierarchical dependencies of more traditional educator-student relationships - can in practice have the effect of highlighting those very asymmetries and dependencies. Successful resolution of such a paradox becomes dependent on the capacity of educators to undo their own reliance on and even desire for authority underpinned by a sense of theory-based expertise

Rationalizing violation:ordered accounts of intentionality in the making and breaking of safety rules

Regulative rules are central to the efforts made in organizations to ensure orderliness in the presence of physical danger. The reportedly routine violation of safety rules in organizations therefore brings into question the longstanding association of rules with organizational order, and the literature is sharply divided on whether rule violation represents a dangerous disorder or a reasonable way of getting by. This study is an attempt to carry out a more interpretive analysis, looking at how organizational members construct a sense of order in the presence of rule violation – and in particular how they do so by using a concept of intentionality to maintain accountability yet avoid rules becoming taboos. We find that the way people explain intentions attests to several senses of order that otherwise appear to be lost when rules are violated, such as predictability, purposefulness and progressiveness. This indicates that rules do not maintain, symbolize and constitute order simply because they are normative restraints on behaviour – but act as nuclei for discourses that can repair order even when they are violated. The order that is repaired in this way is both a mechanistic and a moral one

Authenticity in leadership:Reframing relational transparency through the lens of emotional labour

In this paper we problematize relational transparency as an element of authentic leadership when viewed through the lens of emotional labour. Using the method of analytic co-constructed auto-ethnography we examine a senior hospital manager’s experience of seeking to be authentic during a period of intense challenge as he pursues the closure of a hospital ward. A first-person account is developed that speaks to the necessity of hiding felt emotions and displaying his perceptions of desired emotions warranted in the context in which he seeks to lead. That this is not experienced as inauthentic is seen as deriving from two dimensions of experienced authenticity: strength of identification with leadership role and fidelity to leadership purpose. The veracity of this reframing of authenticity in leadership practice is explored through a second study, of practising leaders required to balance the demands of performing emotional labour and appearing and feeling authentic. We suggest that reframing relational transparency as ‘fidelity to purpose’ may be a valuable counter-weight to the goal of relational transparency promulgated by the leadership industry and a practical advance for those seeking to practise authentic leadership

The ‘Corbyn phenomenon’:Media representations of authentic leadership and the discourse of ethics versus effectiveness

Whilst the academic literature on leadership has identified authenticity as an important leadership attribute few studies have examined how authentic leadership is evaluated in naturally occurring discourse. This article explores how authentic leadership was characterised and evaluated in the discourse of the British press during the 2015 Labour Party leadership election - won, against the odds, by veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn. Using membership categorisation analysis, we show that the media discourse about authentic leadership was both ambiguous and ambivalent. In their representation of authentic leadership, we found that a discourse of ‘ethical’ leadership was played out in tension with a discourse of ‘effective’ leadership. We propose that this complex and contradictory discursive landscape is also relevant in business contexts where ‘ethical’ leaders are subjected to praise for their virtues but also criticism for their ineffectiveness. Future research could usefully study how ‘ethical’ leaders in different settings can be subject to competing evaluations when their ethical values are discursively contrasted to expectations concerning what it takes to be an ‘effective’ leader