Method

From the chapter's own abstract

If leadership is constituted through narrative as this book maintains, it is fair to say that the methods most suited to studying it are not the ones that dominate leadership research. There is a predominance of quantitative research, often based on applied psychology, that affords many insights but can never access the colour, richness and complexities of everyday situations and ordinary language. When it comes to the most popularly used qualitative methods, these tend to prioritise extracting themes from texts or talk. This tradition treats language rather narrowly, as a means of conveying meaning. In doing so it has two significant limitations that the earlier chapters identify. First, it recreates the problem Propp identified with analyses of folk tales that preceded his Morphology: privileging content can come at the expense of studying structure and as a result miss deeper underlying commonalities and patterns. Second, it overlooks the insights of Austin: words do things. This chapter develops a series of alternatives to content and thematic analytic by working through different stances (stances used because this is a little broader than method): Proppian analysis, ethnography, discourse analysis, and Foucauldian archaeology. Each is grounded in empirical work and each opens up possibilities for representations of leadership-as-narrative that can inform future research.

1. What is this method able to find, and what is it constitutionally unable to see?
2. What is the gap between the official account and what people say off the record?
3. Which stories cannot be told here, and what makes them unsayable?
4. Whose interests does the polished retrospective account serve?
5. How would I know if I were finding only what my apparatus prepared me to find?

• Stances rather than methods
• Proppian analysis
• Ethnography
• The view from below
• Storytelling halo
• Cultural audit
• Iceberg model of culture
• Foucauldian archaeology
• Method as story
• Pygmalion effect
• Falsifiability
• Positionality
• Reflexivity as performance
• Narrative and failure

• Tax and folk tales
• Measuring which stories circulate
• Evidence-based management

Related lens: Method

Related tools: Narrative Landscape Mapper

Status: abstract quoted directly from the manuscript · questions and concepts are site-written · author review required