From interview transcripts to empirical material

In my reading, what floats to the surface in this memo is that language as a construction tool is at work in leadership identity contexts. Here, Nils explicitly expresses how our conversation and his own story about his leadership experience feed into his perception of himself as a leader. Whether his insight bears a true-life correctness is not so much of interest here. I am not evaluating whether what he claims holds truth. To me, the interesting part lies in the ‘doing’ of what he says about himself as a leader and the context he says it in: what does it possibly do to his and my understanding of the context—and his leadership identity? My point here is that this memo exemplifies how leadership language creates agency, as well as how sayings can be performative in leadership identity constructions, and thus, how they hold significance as leadership agency even if they are not compared with actual doings.

nothing must be kept secret to no one, they need to know (..) then they are part of it and they help pull, while..he thought of it as only distracting, so there we really disagreed, and then I realized (..) that if I am to build a research group (..) if I am to develop my own research (..) I need people with me, and if I can’t manage them the way I want to and the way I believe is right in order to promote this research, then I can’t.

Concluding notes

The overall purpose of this chapter has been to make my positionality and standpoint as a researcher clear to the reader in order provide transparency concerning my methodological approach and how I have worked to produce the results I present in this thesis. As Miles and Huberman (2018) stated in their classic textbook on qualitative data analysis, ‘to know how a researcher construes the shape of the social world and aims to give us a credible account of it is to know our conversational partner’ (p. xxviii). With the positioning of this project within the social constructionist tradition, it follows that my own role as researcher is also a part of the on-going construction of knowledge. Having argued in this chapter that reflexivity is the most important tool for the qualitative researcher regarding validity, providing transparency for the reader to understand exactly how data was co-created through iterative interactions between myself as researcher and my research data is therefore of importance for this project’s legitimacy.

Although I have placed this project within the social constructionist tradition and explained how a social constructionist stance aligns with the epistemological departure point and a linguistic take, this does not imply that other ontological stances are without importance for researchers who are curious to understand more in terms of leadership as a contemporary phenomenon in social life.

The social constructionist perspective deepens our understanding of leadership and lets us explore what vital experiences mean to those involved (Tourish & Barge, 2010), yet as Tourish and Barge underlined, ‘the world of leadership is too complex to avail of a single explanation, and no one theoretical orientation can exhaust all its complexities’ (2010, p.325). By applying analytic bracketing as my method for analysis, I worked with both the Discourse-in-practice and the discursive practice dimension and tried to map emic categories against both with the academic Discourse in leadership theory and the public Discourse on leadership. This kind of analytic bracketing also made the emic-etic distinction make sense as a perspective to add to my analysis, in order to be able to clarify what was the local leadership language being used, and what was my abstracted interpretation of that language.

After I analysed and interpreted the 20 conversations with leaders and attempted to make sense of the stories told, the result is a map showing a terrain in which the two types of analytical dimensions intertwine and mutually inform each other. This project suggests one way that the interplay between Discourse-in-practice and discursive practices in leadership narratives can be understood. However, this does not imply that this interplay could not be interpreted differently.

Consequently, the choice of theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as the ontological and epistemological stances that constitutes the bases for this project, do not represent a sole answer to the question of what leadership is really about. However, based in the emic data that constitutes the foundation for the next chapter’s presentation of analysis and findings, I believe that in that which is explored, there are novel insights concerning the narrative construction of leadership identity, and perhaps a contribution on terms of adding nuances to an eclipsed leadership Discourse in leadership studies.

Considering that this project was founded on narrative data, it is clear that just as how theoretical conceptualisations on leadership could be misguiding in regard to leaders’ ‘doings’, their stories on leadership could of course also diverge from what is genuinely going on in their practice.

Alvesson and Jonsson identified this when they stated, ‘At least one cannot determine a straightforward relationship between talk and practice’ (Alvesson & Jonsson, 2016, p.2). This implies that an eclipsed discourse concerning the conceptualisation of leadership could therefore appear both in academic theory and in the leader narrative. Saying versus doing remains a binary distinction that calls for an investigation of all leadership contexts.

What this thesis presents is a snapshot of what I understand to be the phenomenon called leadership identity constructions. The conveyed stories on leadership reveal a brief glimpse of how the leaders themselves understand their own identities as leaders. I have no material showing the relationships between what leaders say they do and what they actually do. Nevertheless, I do not take for granted that the gap between saying and doing is an empty space, even if the word

‘gap’ might generate that image. A mindful approach to this gap is a facet of what I understand when Alvesson and Spicer referred to circumspect care (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012). In this project, I align with Fairhurst (2009) when I ‘attempt to care for the views of how people actually doing leadership understand and engage in the process rather than imposing the researcher views’

(Alvesson & Spicer, 2012, p. 376). The choice of method for this project was made for the purpose of ‘taking respondents seriously’. Adopting a CLS perspective, this simultaneously implies that I will be ‘challenging their views’ (2012).

By paying attention to how things were being said and the context they were being said in, I aim to engage with the leaders’ stories with a professional and care-driven commitment to listening to what the leaders themselves said. However, I also commit to taking a critical stand and not just accepting what was being said, but to rather challenge the views that were being conveyed. I will retain this circumspect care throughout this thesis as I proceed to a closer inspection of what is going on in the leaders’ stories. In this chapter I have positioned my methodological approach within an ontological and epistemological tradition, and also clarified the specifics of the data collection, the mechanics and specifics of the interpretive process with coding and analysis that facilitated for the discoveries and mystery tour of this particular project. In the next chapter the result of this interpretative process of work is presented. As Clandinin and Conelly (2006) stated, stories are means for making one’s experience of the world meaningful. In the next chapter my main aim is to demonstrate how leaders talk about their experiences in ways that are meaningful to them.

Chapter 4. Trust and self-trust in stories