Discourses of Leadership: Gender, Identity and Contradiction in a UK Public Sector Organization

Abstract

This article explores leadership as a discursive phenomenon. It examines contemporary discourses of leadership and their complex inter-relations with gender and identity in the UK public sector. In particular, it focuses on various ways in which managers’ identities are constructed within discourse, produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies (Hall, 1996). Drawing from interviews with senior managers employed in a large UK local authority, this article researches the dominant discourses of modernization and the primacy afforded to discourses of leadership in the council. It explores first how these discourses become part of managerial workplace identities, and second, what other discourses help to shape managers’ identities. Contradiction, discursive production, plurality and ambiguity feature heavily in the analysis of these managers. Accordingly, the article questions dominant hegemonic and stereotypical notions of subjectivity that assume a simple, unitary identity and perpetuate androcentric depictions of organizational life.