A constructivist perspective on leadership thought among Brazilian and North-American scholars

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an exploratory, inductive cataloguing of the views of Brazilian and U.S. academics regarding current leadership theory and development. Semi structured interviews with academics from a variety of institutional settings in Brazil and the U.S. were content analyzed to identify major themes and tendencies across the two countries. Our analyses revealed that neither Brazilian nor U.S. academics adopted the bulk of current formal leadership thought uncritically. Instead, both the Brazilian and North American business education fields adopted theories selectively and formulated idiosyncratic approaches to the field. The U.S. interviewees appeared to vary much more from one another than the Brazilian scholars, whose positions were more critical but more homogeneous overall. There was also considerable variation across the two national settings. We found Bourdieu's practice theory useful in interpreting our results, particularly the concepts of field differentiation and heteronomy, habitus, and cultural capital. Still, much research remains to be done to disentangle the purely historical and cultural factors from the impacts of the social construction of the field of business education in the two countries.