Twitter Mediated Sociopolitical Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis in India

While Twitter has grown popular among political leaders as a means of computer-mediated mass media communication alternative, the COVID-19 pandemic required new strategies for socio-political communication to handle such a crisis. Using the case of India, which was one of the worst-hit countries and is also the world’s largest democracy, this research explicates how political leaders responded to the COVID-19 crisis on Twitter during the first wave as it was the first time such a crisis occurred. Theoretical frameworks of discursive leadership and situational crisis communication theory have been used to analyze interactions based on the usage patterns, the content of communication, the extent of usage in relation to the severity of the crisis, and the possible role of leaders’ position along with the status of their political party. The sample consisted of tweets posted by six prominent political leaders in India across the four consecutive lockdown periods from 25th March to 31st May 2020. A total of 4,158 tweets were scrapped and after filtering for retweets, the final dataset consisted of 2,809 original tweets. Exploratory data analysis, sentiment analysis, and content analysis were conducted. It was found that the tweets had an overall positive sentiment, an important crisis management strategy. Four main themes emerged: crisis management information, strengthening followers’ resilience and trust, reputation management, and leaders’ proactiveness. By focusing on such discursive aspects of crisis management, the study comprehensively highlights how political interactions on twitter integrated with politics and governance to handle COVID-19 in India. The study has implications for the fields of digital media interaction, political communication, public relations, and crisis leadership.

Critical Discourse of Discursive Pluralism and Inclusivism of Islamic Leadership in the Local-National Context

This study aims to find the value of pluralism and inclusivism in the discursive leadership of Islam. The data was collected through the recording of documents from the discursive leader of the Islamic organization Nahdlatul Wathan (abbreviated NW), as well as the governor of West Nusa Tenggara (NTB abbreviated), Indonesia, namely Mr. Guru Bajang (abbreviated as TGB). Data is in the form of thought texts, statements, TGB actions, and other parties' statements as discursive. TGB is positioned as a discursive storyteller as well as a guide in its transformation. Data were analyzed according to the communication function in functional grammar and Critical Discourse Analysis component analysis. Through this study, it was found that the discretion of the TGB was related to optimism, alignment of Islamic values, safeguarding the Unitary Republic of Indonesia, caring for diversity, and building the nation as a discursive common property and needs as a plural society and transformed inclusively. As an ideational communication function, discursive becomes TGB aspirational form of contextual dynamism, as an instrument of accelerating interpersonal development agenda, and textual future historical responsibility. The five discursive TGB in this study belong and jointly guide the dynamics of the future. TGB as a storyteller has a reciprocal relation to the five discourses and has shown results through development progress in the context of NTB and Indonesia.

Discursive leadership

This chapter analyzes discursive leadership in first-time leadership and introduces a scale that was developed to measure discursive leadership abilities based on seven distinct dimensions: overall effectiveness, tools used, guidance, modulating, empowerment, non-verbal cues, and climate and bonding. The scale was developed and pilot-tested at a private business school in Puebla, Mexico, based on followers' perceptions. Theory on discursive leadership was analyzed as a form of organizational communication and as a process between leaders and followers. An overview of the state of research in the field of business and management, specifically basic constructs, fundamental notions, and elements are presented, as well as new lines of research in the area.

Co-liderazgo en interacción: Un análisis del discurso multimodal durante una reunión de un movimiento juvenil

This article builds further on Gail Fairhurst’s influential work on leadership (2007), in which she foregrounds a discursive perspective on leadership and turns away from the ‘great man’ school of thought, which attempted to distinguish discerning characteristics and traits of leaders versus non-leaders. From such a discursive leadership perspective, leadership is conceptualized as a collaborative process that takes place in real life and that revolves around influencing others towards achieving organizationally relevant goals. This implies that all participants are actively involved in this process, thus problematizing the strict distinction between leaders and followers, and that leadership may be shared by two or more people. In this study, we look at the way in which such a shared co-leadership constellation is constructed in interaction and how it is continuously negotiated with the other participants. In order to do so, we adopt a multimodal discourse analytical approach to tease out the micro-processes of ‘doing’ leadership and use the conversation-analytic concepts of epistemics and (proximal and distal) deontics. Overall, we could conclude that our fine-grained multimodal analyses demonstrated the ways in which the (co-)leadership process is constantly negotiated through a complex interplay of participants’ epistemic and deontic statuses as well as the subsequent stances they express in interaction.

Challenging the Discourse of Leadership as Knowledge: Knowing and Not Knowing

Leadership and knowledge are often paired together. Yet, certain forces that operate on businesses and individuals are often unknowable. In this study, we consider leaders’ perceptions of the consequences of not knowing and how leaders discursively cope with a sense of not knowing. Based on interviews with 33 participants working in multinational companies in India, we find that leaders perceive negative consequences of not knowing and engage in discursive tactics such as posing, delaying, clarifying, admitting, being silent, and stating “I don’t know,” that sustain and are sustained by the Discourse of leadership as knowledge. The findings contribute to the discursive leadership literature by demonstrating tactics leaders use as they attempt to balance the discursive construction of leadership as knowledge and lived experiences of not knowing. We discuss how the Discourse of leadership as knowledge will hamper knowledge extension as it undermines not knowing and privileges knowing over not knowing.

A deontic perspective on the collaborative, multimodal accomplishment of leadership

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.

Dis/embodied leadership : intersections of leadership and social class

One weakness with the discursive leadership to date is the failure to explore ways in which material conditions also shape leadership (Fairhurst, 2009). Further, Dougherty (2011) argued that discursive constructionism without a consideration of material conditions is middle class privilege. By privileging the discursive over the material, discursive leadership could be reproducing social inequalities, which relates to issues of social class. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand how leadership and social class become mutually constructed through the interplay between discourse and materiality. The concepts of text work and body work are used to understand how social class is linked with the types of work an individual does. Similar to white-collar/blue-collar distinctions, text work refers to jobs that emphasize the use of communication, and body work refers to jobs that emphasize more physical labor (Dougherty, 2011). A thematic narrative analysis was applied to stories about leadership that were told during interviews with a total of 21 participants (10 body workers and 11 text workers), and observations added context and thick description to participants' narratives about leadership. The theory of Language Convergence/Meaning Divergence provided a lens for understanding how meanings for leadership diverge based on different material experiences in day-to-day work. Findings indicate that discursive and material conditions of work interact to construct different meanings for leadership. Text workers emphasized communication in their constructions of leadership, while body workers constructed leadership more as an embodied practice. Additionally, compared to text workers, body workers demonstrated a more nuanced understanding of leadership that integrated a concern for discursive processes in addition to emphasizing material conditions.

A Pragmatics Explanation for Japanese-English Turn-Taking Contrasts and the Need for Pedagogical Intervention: A Response to Davey Young’s TLT Article

In TLT Volume 42(3), Davey Young presents contrasting models of turn-taking in Japanese and English and argues that this cross-cultural difference is primarily due to linguistic differences across English and Japanese. While rightly noting that proficiency in turn-taking is crucial for overall interactional competence and should be a focus of pedagogical intervention, Young’s rationale for the difference in his models neglects the important factor of pragmatics, particularly the notion of politeness. In this response to Young’s original article, Japanese-English differences in turn-taking behaviours are considered from a pragmatic viewpoint and analysed as part of a larger discursive leadership (Fairhurst, 2007) framework. The implications for teaching turn-taking are also discussed. TLT42巻3号においてDavey Youngは日本語と英語の話者交替の対照モデルを提示し、この異文化間の相違は、主に英語と日本語の言語的相違によるものであると述べている。Youngが指摘している通り、確かに話者交替の能力は相互行為能力全体の中で極めて重要であり、教育的介入の中心的課題の１つとなるべきである。しかしながら、Youngのモデルにおける日本語と英語の話者交替の相違に関する理論は、語用論における重要な要素、特にポライトネスの概念が欠けている。このYoungの論説の補遺は、話者交替における日本語と英語の違いを語用論の見地から考察し、より広い談話管理（Fairhurst, 2007）の枠組みで分析した。また、話者交替指導の点からの考察も加えた。