Considering context in discursive leadership research

2009 ◽  
Vol 62 (11) ◽  
pp. 1607-1633 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail T. Fairhurst
Keyword(s):  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Discursive Leadership ◽  
Leadership Research ◽  
Organizational Sciences

In addition to leadership psychology, there is another journey to understand the context of leadership that takes as its starting point the linguistic turn in the social and the organizational sciences. Those impacted by the linguistic turn are broadly social constructionist, discursive, and more qualitative than mainstream leadership scholars. In varying degrees, these scholars view context as multi-layered, co-created, contestable, and locally achieved. This article explores a constellation of perspectives united by these themes, introduces the qualitative special issue articles, and suggests directions for future research on the context of leadership.

Editorial: Refashioning stories for celebrity counterpublics

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Moro ◽  
Samita Nandy ◽  
Kiera Obbard ◽  
Andrew Zolides
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Ted Talks

Using celebrity narratives as a starting point, this Special Issue explores the social significance of storytelling for social change. It builds on the 8th Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies conference, which brought together scholars and media practitioners to explore how narratives inspired by the lives of celebrities, public intellectuals, critics and activists offer useful rhetorical tools to better understand dominant ideologies. This editorial further problematizes what it means to be a popular ‘storyteller’ using the critical lens of celebrity activism and life-writing. Throughout the issue, contributors analyse the politics of representation at play within a wide range of glamourous narratives, including documentaries, memoirs, TED talks, stand-up performances and award acceptance speeches in Hollywood and beyond. The studies show how we can strategically use aesthetic communication to shape identity politics in public personas and bring urgent social change in an image-driven celebrity culture.

(Re)constructing Leadership

2022 ◽  
pp. 22-56
Author(s):  
Seong-Yuen Toh
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Wicked Problems ◽  
Organisational Culture ◽  
Integrated Model ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Complex World ◽  
Integrative Framework ◽  
The Social ◽  
Leadership Research

This chapter elucidates Keith Grint's model of leadership as a viable dynamic option in our complex world. By locating the model within a social constructionist frame, this chapter demonstrates how far we have come in the evolving stream of leadership research. Seven main characteristics of the Grint's model of leadership are discussed to demonstrate how the model can help us to understand wicked problems, such as the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia. The author also identifies two weaknesses of Grint's model: (1) organisational culture and (2) followership. Lastly, to address the two weaknesses, the author proposes an integrated model of leadership that combines the understanding of an adhocracy culture based on the competing value framework and Kelly's effective followership model. In conclusion, the integrative framework of leadership offers leadership researchers a model with more explanatory power in understanding the leadership phenomenon within the social constructionist supposition.

scholarly journals Social Theory after Strathern: An Introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 7-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Street ◽  
Jacob Copeman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Subject And Object

Taking its cue from the articles in this special issue, this introduction explores what value a critical engagement with Strathern’s work might have for the social sciences by setting such an engagement in motion. It argues that Strathern’s writings are a particularly fruitful starting point for reflecting on our assumptions about what exactly theory might be and how and where it may be made to travel. Through the juxtaposition of articles published in this special issue and Strathern’s writings on Melanesia it explores the theorization of power in the social sciences as one arena in which Strathernian strategies might be harnessed in order to reflect on and extend Euro-American concepts. It also takes Strathern’s own interest in gardening as a metaphoric base for generating novel topologies of subject and object, the particular and the general, and the concrete and the abstract. This introduction does not provide a primer for ‘Strathernian theory’. Instead it reviews some of the original strategies and techniques – differentiation, staging of analogy, surprise, bifurcation, the echo, and an unremitting focus on how we make our familiar categories of analysis known to ourselves – that Strathern has used to ‘garden’ her theory: it can be used, if you like, as a conceptual toolkit.

scholarly journals Protest communication ecologies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Mercea
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Information Communication ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
Growth Area ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Communication Practices ◽  
Media And Communication

The flurry of protests since the turn of the decade has sustained a growth area in the social sciences. The diversity of approaches to the various facets and concerns raised by the collective action of aggrieved groups the world over impresses through multidisciplinarity and the wealth of insights it has generated. This introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communication and Society is an invitation to recover conceptual instruments—such as the ecological trope—that have fallen out of fashion in media and communication studies. We account for their fall from grace and explicate the rationale for seeking to reinsert them into the empirical terrain of interlocking media, communication practices and protest which we aim to both capture with theory and adopt as a starting point for further analytical innovation.

Romanian Gypsies in Spain. A Migratory Phenomenon, Its Causes and Repercussions

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-169
Author(s):  
Silviu Costachie
Keyword(s):  
Research Program ◽  
Social Acceptance ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Employment Education

AbstractIn the following paper we will discuss about the situation of the Romanian gypsies living in Spain and the main problems involved by their presence in this country. We will analyze the causes that made them emigrate to Spain, together with a historical analysis of this process, the living conditions they have (housing, employment, education...). Also, we will present the social problems they suffer because of their particular culture, other than Spanish, the main settlements where they chosen to live in Spain and social acceptance from the point of view of the Spanish population. The present article is the direct result of a research program that was developed almost two years ago by the Research Center for Regional Development and European Integration of the University of Bucharest, part of a larger research program regarding the ethnic minorities of Romania. The main important aspect of this research is the fact that we used two target groups interviewed both in Romania and Spain and also, we used official information regarding Romanian gypsy located actually on Spanish territory, according with the official Spanish census. This way we managed to gather a large quantity of information and to provide to the reader a closer to reality image of the status of Romanian gypsy presently living inside Spanish border. Also, the novelty brought by this research is the fact that we tried to present the social and integration problems encountered by the Romanian gypsies located in the cities or villages of Spain. The article might be considered a starting point for future research upon this subject.

scholarly journals New spatialities of work in the city

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110091
Author(s):  
Darja Reuschke ◽  
Carol Ekinsmyth
Keyword(s):  
Job Quality ◽  
Industrial Restructuring ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Urban Structure ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The City

This introduction discusses the objectives and concepts underlying the Special Issue on the new spatialities of work in the city. It highlights the urban impact of both the changing spatiotemporal working patterns and the increased diversity of workspaces that have resulted from post-industrial restructuring, globalisation, labour market flexibilisation and digitisation. Even pre-COVID-19, when the research in this Special Issue was undertaken, this impact on the urban structure and the social fabric of cities was significant, but it had remained underexplored. Here, therefore, we question models of work and commuting that continue to assume the spatially ‘fixed’ workplace, and explore how new understandings of workspace and multi-locality, developed in this Special Issue, can inform future research. This, we argue, is more important than ever as we come to understand the medium- and long-term impacts of pandemic-altered work practices in cities. We further argue that the spatialities of work need to be connected with research on health, job quality and wellbeing in cities – such as, for example, on the risks that COVID-19 has exposed for driving and mobile work.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
Constructionist Approach

The Introduction critiques the methodological frameworks available to the historian of medieval emotions, arguing for the enduring value of the social constructionist approach and the need to simultaneously respond to the theoretical principles associated with the linguistic turn. Relevant crusades scholarship is then surveyed, including the long historiographical tradition of seeking to reconstruct participants’ beliefs and ideologies from historical narratives, before outlining the book’s structure and arguments. An overview of the core sources which form the backbone of this study follows, with the intention of introducing uninitiated readers to the breadth and diversity of sources available to historians of the crusades.

Critical political economy and the critique of comparative capitalisms scholarship on capitalist diversity

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Bruff ◽  
Matthias Ebenau
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The Self ◽  
German Language ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Significant Potential ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Comparative Capitalisms

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the rise to dominance in debates on capitalist diversity of approaches which take institutions as their starting point, rather than the wider social relations in which institutions sit and are constituted by. However, although this is part of broader trends across the social sciences over the last three decades, the self-marginalisation of critical political economy perspectives from these debates was also a factor, as was the declining dialogue between critical political economy researchers rooted in different geographical and philosophical traditions. Echoing the influence on the emergent Conference of Socialist Economists of German-language debates on the state in the 1970s, we call for renewed dialogue between researchers from different linguistic and intellectual backgrounds in the name of a renewed critique of dominant comparative capitalisms (CC) approaches. In so doing, we emphasise the range of alternative perspectives that can be offered through such dialogues and critiques, and thus the significant potential for further collaboration and advances in our understanding of capitalist diversity.

Hybrid Avatar-Agent Technology – A Conceptual Step Towards Mediated “Social” Virtual Reality and its Respective Challenges

i-com ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Roth ◽  
Marc Erich Latoschik ◽  
Kai Vogeley ◽  
Gary Bente
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social

AbstractDriven by large industry investments, developments of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies including unobtrusive sensors, actuators and novel display devices are rapidly progressing. Realism and interactivity have been postulated as crucial aspects of immersive VR since the naissance of the concept. However, today’s VR still falls short from creating real life-like experiences in many regards. This holds particularly true when introducing the “social dimension” into the virtual worlds. Apparently, creating convincing virtual selves and virtual others and conveying meaningful and appropriate social behavior still is an open challenge for future VR. This challenge implies both, technical aspects, such as the real-time capacities of the systems, but also psychological aspects, such as the dynamics of human communication. Our knowledge of VR systems is still fragmented with regard to social cognition, although the social dimension is crucial when aiming at autonomous agents with a certain social background intelligence. It can be questioned though whether a perfect copy of real life interactions is a realistic or even meaningful goal of social VR development at this stage. Taking into consideration the specific strengths and weaknesses of humans and machines, we propose a conceptual turn in social VR which focuses on what we call “hybrid avatar-agent systems”. Such systems are required to generate i) avatar mediated interactions between real humans, taking advantage of their social intuitions and flexible communicative skills and ii) an artificial social intelligence (AIS) which monitors, and potentially moderates or transforms ongoing virtual interactions based on social signals, such as performing adaptive manipulations of behavior in intercultural conversations. The current article sketches a respective base architecture and discusses necessary research prospects and challenges as a starting point for future research and development.

scholarly journals A deontic perspective on the collaborative, multimodal accomplishment of leadership

Leadership ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 592-619
Author(s):  
Dorien Van De Mieroop
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
The Other ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Perspective Drawing ◽  
Discursive Leadership ◽  
The Status ◽  
Interactional Perspective ◽  
Leadership Research

This article makes a case for investigating leadership from a micro-interactional perspective which integrates discursive, sequential and multimodal analytical layers. It thus builds on existing discursive leadership research by demonstrating that leadership is not achieved only through talk, but by means of a complex interplay between verbal and non-verbal resources. Focusing on video-recordings of authentic meetings, I investigate the interactional interplay between the superior, the meeting chair and the other participants by means of a deontic perspective. Drawing on the status–stance distinction and teasing out how proximal and distal deontic rights are enacted and how these relate to leader and follower identities when conceptualized from a social constructionist perspective, I demonstrate that leadership is an essentially collaborative accomplishment in which all participants play a crucial role. Finally, I argue that this can only be uncovered fully when attention is paid to the variety of means – verbal as well as non-verbal – that interlocutors have at their disposal when attempting to influence each other towards achieving organizationally relevant goals.

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