Epistemological stance

As stated in the Chapter 2, I apply the concept of Husserl’s lifeworld to this project (Husserl, 1970). Accordingly, my approach is explorative and qualitative. As Schütz (1970) stated, the lifeworld concept is an invitation to investigate how people make meaning out of their experiences; how they take a stand in regard to social and cultural circumstances in their lives;

and how they embrace fundamental assumptions about these circumstances and experiences as

‘real’.

Therefore, I use the lifeworld concept to facilitate a framing of the leaders’ stories, how they themselves organise and ascribe meaning to their experiences, and how they validate and their own legitimacy as well as explain their ability to ‘act upon the world and within the world’ (in German: vermöglichkeit) (Schütz, 1970, p.116) as leaders based on their own sensemaking.

Moreover, I take an interest in how leaders make sense of their own leadership projects.

Here, the focus is not on the actual lives of leaders but on the stories told by them to portray their experiences of leadership. This perspective means that I do not approach the leaders’ stories as

‘windows to the leaders’ actual lives or history, but as texts that operate at the time of their telling’

(Shamir, Dayan-Horesh, & Adler, 2005, p.16). Aligning with Shamir and peers, I do not intend to postulate on whether the experiences conveyed in the leaders’ stories are true, even if they could be. Instead, my point of interest is the selected content performing in the leaders’ life stories and ‘how this content reflects the leaders’ self- concepts and their concept of leadership, and allow or enable them to enact their leadership role’ (Shamir et al., 2005, p. 16).

The choice of methodological lens for my project seems to be a counterpart for the contemporary call for a more broadened application of qualitative methods in leadership research (Bryman, 2004; Klenke, 2008; Parry et al., 2014). Even if the use of qualitative approaches is increasingly being applied within leadership studies, a widespread notion has been that scientific virtue cannot be well-served by qualitative instruments (Klenke, 2008). Furthermore, the particular origin of leadership as a research field has clearly influenced this notion. In their review of the presence of qualitative studies in the Journal of Leadership Quarterly’s first 25 years, Perry et al. (2014) pointed to the tradition of North American scholars within social science as one of the leading causes of the dominance of quantitative approaches within the domain of leadership studies.

Since the 1990s, the qualitative volume on leadership research has been growing, emerging with The New Leadership School and the recognition of leadership as a relational phenomenon (Ospina, 2004). Still, it is only recently that leadership studies have taken on a qualitative perspective, been recognised as rigorous research, and accepted in top-rated peer-reviewed management journals (Klenke, 2008; Parry et al., 2014). With her background from anthropology, Klenke described the qualitative approach using the analogy of a cave explorer, seeing qualitative methods in leadership research as a possibility for examining ‘phenomena at deeper and unexplored levels’, as well as to ‘experience first-hand’ what we ‘are examining’ (Klenke, 2008, p. 109).

As Wengraf (2006) indicated, the particular nearness that comes with first-hand experience is dense with emotions and notions, confronting researchers with their own prejudices, biases and tacit knowledge:

You do not leave behind your anxieties, your hopes, your blindspots, your prejudices, your class, race or gender, your location in global social structure, your age, and historical positions, your emotions, your past and your sense of possible futures when you set up an interview, and nor does your interviewee when he or she agrees to an interview and you both come nervously into the same room. Nor do you so when you sit down to analyse the material you have produced. (Wengraf, 2006, p. 4)

As much as a qualitative approach provides researchers with lavish possibilities to explore experience, meaning, and motif in the lived world of others, it is also an impending trap because of the contextual complexity residing in the qualitative encounter. This aligns with Alvesson and

Kärreman when they stated, ‘Our approach to, perceptions of, and interpretations of what we experience are filtered through a web of assumptions, expectations and vocabularies that will then guide entire projects and be crucial for the results we arrive at’ (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011, p.

5).

For this project, the data multiplicity generated by a qualitative approach facilitates a richness in detail and sensitivity concerning nuances of how leaders act as active makers of meaning, as well as for the cultural and contextual dimension of this meaning-making, which quantitative approaches cannot provide (Alvesson, 1996). Consequently, the investigative journey came to take on a genuinely inductive character; I did not set out to falsify or confirm a distinct hypothesis.

Rather, I articulated a research question based on my existing knowledge of leaders and leadership as concept and practice from the point of view of an experienced ethnographer, action researcher, and leadership consultant. I believed that I had clear ideas about which leadership areas I specifically wanted to examine and how this examination could best be made feasible. Hence, my choice of qualitative interviews as a tool was obvious.

In this sense, the abductive point of departure was initially a dominating view from the onset of this project. The inductive dimension grew as it became clear to me that what emerged as insights out of the interviews was something very different from what I had expected when I set out. I had neither anticipated nor articulated finding trust and self-trust rising to be the main theme in my qualitative exploration. Similarly, the idea of a narrative ecology also emerged as a result of the analytical process. When I eventually chose trust and self-trust and a narrative ecology as my main concepts for further discussion, this choice was a result of the processing of my data and the analytic tools I applied in the process. I will attend to that particular choice of tool in more detail later in this chapter. However, the choice of analytic instrument was informed both by my phenomenological and constructionist outlook, and the theoretical knowledge I had at the onset of this project. That is why I see the final results of this research as a product of what began as an abductive curiosity and turned into a truly inductive voyage. If the methodological tool I chose as transportation for my journey was a classic vehicle in the qualitative leadership research terrain, the road I ended up travelling must be said to be one less travelled topic-wise.

The phenomenologist Van Manen claimed that ‘meaningfulness happens when meaning speaks to our existence in such a way that it makes “contact” and touches us”’ (Van Manen, 2014, p.

373). The insights that have emerged on the ontological and epistemological grounds of this project appear meaningful to me for two reasons; first, they provide me with a new conceptual skyline for grasping the potential meaning of trust and self-trust in the leaders’ stories, and second,

according to my understanding, they connect with other existing theories and notions about leadership identity constructions that I consider significant.