The use of conversation analysis (CA) as an applied research methodology that can be of interest to business communication is sometimes overlooked. Taking the case of leadership as an example, this article demonstrates how CA can provide a fine-grained analysis of talk-in-interaction during a business meeting, which reveals an emic perspective on "what is going on." By linking such an analysis to wider social theorizing, notably a social constructivist approach to leadership and the construction of reality, CA is able to make explicit the normally "seen but unnoticed" machinery of talk with which leadership is enacted. Moreover, the results of such an analysis can give researchers a clearer insight into the phenomenon and help practitioners improve leadership and communication skills."Talk is cheap," "easier said than done," and "actions speak louder than words" are common sayings that express widely accepted lay judgments concerning the value of talk. Talk and action are seen as mutually exclusive entities: one positively evaluated, the other not. However, since Searle and Wittgenstein, words are widely accepted to be actions. Furthermore, organizational research is taking a linguistic turn whereby research interests are concentrating on organizing as an action, and thus as talk, rather than organization as an exogenous, fixed, independent reality. Consequently, because talk is action, the way practitioners talk actively shapes an organization rather than just passively defining it. Thus, the long-held Aristotelian belief that language describes reality is being set aside for an approach whereby talk and organization are collapsed into one reflexive phenomenon. To put it simply, organizations are talk, and talk is organizations.

Despite the recent interest in discursive approaches to leadership, relatively little research actually provides fine-grained analyses of how leadership is dialogically achieved in interaction. Taking a social constructionist approach to leadership and using discursive constructionism as a research methodology to analyze transcripts of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction, this article explicates the doing of leadership as a member’s accomplishment. It defines leadership in terms of being able to influence the management of meaning through the way in which decisions are framed using assessments. In this way, certain meanings are privileged over others and so meaning is managed. Findings support current theories of leadership that show it to be a distributed process rather than the possession of any one person. Furthermore, it is argued that by highlighting discursive techniques by which leadership is achieved, the results of this research can benefit practitioners.

Stories are considered to be an essential part of organisational life and thus of leadership. However, to date research into stories and leadership has concentrated on big stories and life narratives and has tended to overlook the identity work that small stories perform as part of everyday workplace interaction. Working from the premise that leaders are managers of meaning, and using transcripts of naturally-occurring stories that were video-taped during a business meeting, this paper uses positioning theory as a research methodology to explain how leadership and leader identities are achieved through narrative both at a discourse (little-d) and Discourse (big-D) levels. Findings indicate that certain participants at the meeting are able to use discursive resources to manage the meaning of the organisation in both the story world and the real world and so do leadership and talk into being a leader identity.

Leader identity has traditionally been associated with hierarchical position (formal leadership). Yet, while there is an increasing tendency to regard leadership as a collective and distributed process, very little is known about the interplay of formal and informal leadership as in situ social practice within a hierarchical context. Using video-recordings of naturally occurring workplace interaction as data and arguing that insights from applied linguistics can be profitably employed to address such a lacuna, we use multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to show how ‘doing’ leadership is not limited to the formal leader. Rather, through talk, gaze, the use of space, artefacts and so on, it is negotiated in subtle ways which allow informal leadership to emerge in conjunction, and in this case in conflict, with formal leadership. We conclude this article by discussing the wider implications of these findings to both leadership theory and methodologies used to investigate the ‘just whatness’ of leadership.

Entrepreneurism is widely regarded as being one way in which women can sidestep the sexism of male‐dominated institutionalized work environments and enter into a world in which men and women operate on a level playing field. Yet, in a corpus of stories of female entrepreneurs’ experiences, we noted that being ignored by men was a constant theme. Taking a social constructionist and narrative approach to identity, we analyse the gendered identity work that female entrepreneurs do in these stories and we seek to explicate the process through which female entrepreneurs do not evaluate being ignored by men as sexism‐in‐action. Using positioning theory as an analytical tool, we analyse these stories at three different levels: the here‐and‐now interaction between interviewer and storyteller; the there‐and‐then identity work of the characters in the storyworld; and the wider societal Discourses that the storytellers enact, and which are enacted by such identity work. Findings indicate that despite making gendered difference, inferiority and lack of agency relevant, the stories are not evaluated as sexism‐in‐action because the female entrepreneurs enact a postfeminist and neoliberal Discourse of freedom, autonomy and choice, rather than a feminist Discourse of discrimination and sexism.