Making up leaders

Reconfiguring the executive student through profiling, texts and conversations in a leadership development programme

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9891982
AutoresF Meier (0000-0002-6169-0055, Copenhagen Business School, autor de correspondencia), Brigid Carroll (0000-0002-0919-9525, University of Auckland Business School, New Zealand,, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen73
Número9
Páginas1226-1248
Fecha de publicación2020-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHuman Relations (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0018-7267 • E-ISSN: 1741-282X
EditorialSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0018726719858132
OpenAlexW2972148201
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas67

Are leaders born or made? In this study of contemporary leadership development programmes, we find that leaders are not only made but also – in Ian Hacking’s sense – made up. Such programmes increasingly employ practices like personality profiling, appraisals, feedback and coaching aimed at creating knowledge about individual leaders in order for them to develop. The effects of these practices on participants have been theorized in terms of identity regulation and resistance, yet in our view the situated accomplishments of authority and identity remain inadequately theorized. This study follows a number of such practices as texts and conversations, and shows how a programme participant’s leader identity becomes authorized and acknowledged as participants and instructors ventriloquize texts in conversations. We theorize this as identity reconfiguration, as it entails the continual staging and authorizing of diverse figures. Our findings have implications for the relation between governmentality studies and studies of texts and conversations in leadership development programmes as well as for how we approach agency and context in this realm

Coaching · Governmentality · Identity (music · Leadership development · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Profiling (computer programming · Public relations · Realm · Sociology · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Management and Organizational Studies · Psychology · Public Policy and Administration Research