Coding military command as a promiscuous practice? Unsettling the gender binaries of leadership metaphors

Abstract

Despite abundant scholarship addressed to gender equity in leadership, much leadership literature remains invested in gender binaries. Metaphors of leadership are especially dependent on gender oppositions, and this article treats the scholarly practice of coding leadership through gendered metaphor as a consequential practice of leadership unto itself. Drawing on queer theory, the article develops a mode of analysis, called ‘promiscuous coding’, conducive to disrupting the gender divisions that currently anchor most leadership metaphors. Promiscuous coding can assist leadership scholars by translating the vague promise of queering leadership into a tangible method distinguished by specific habits. The article formulates this analytical practice out of empirical provocations encountered by the authors: namely, a striking mismatch between their experiences in military fields and the dominant metaphor of leading as military command. Ultimately, the article seeks to move scholarly practices of leadership toward queer performativity, in the hopes of loosening other leadership practices from a binary grip and pointing toward new relational possibilities.

Queering Control and Inclusion in the Contemporary Organization: On ‘LGBT-friendly control’ and the reproduction of (queer) value

“…?’ (Browne & Nash, 2010, p. 11). In response to this, I followed others in adopting a queer ing method which understands the interview as data producing , rather than (simply) data collecting (Ashcraft & Muhr, 2018; Ford & Harding, 2008; Lee, Learmonth, & Harding, 2008; Riach et al, 2016; Rumens, 2012). In conducting interviews, I therefore do not intend to treat participants’ accounts as revealing a ‘transparent self’ ‘but rather a self who is constructed in the very process of speaking the narrative in the interviews’ (Ford & Harding, 2008, p. 235).…”

“Together we rise”: Collaboration and contestation as narrative drivers of the Women’s March

“…In our study of the Women’s March, then, we are not concerned with questions of how the leaders of the march use narratives to establish the organization, but with the issue of how the organization and its leadership is narrated. Thus, we begin from the assumption that organizations, generally, and organizational leadership, more specifically, are communicatively constituted (Ashcraft and Muhr, 2017; Ashcraft et al., 2009; Cooren et al., 2011; Fairhurst and Connaughton, 2014); that organizations and their leaders only exist in and through their narration (Brown, 2006; Fairhurst and Cooren, 2009; Kuhn, 2017). Common to studies that share this basic assumption is that they leave traditional scientific ideals of unveiling objective truth behind and instead attend to the “fabric” and “fabrication” of organizational narratives, to the ways in which stories do not represent, but rather create reality (Gabriel, 2004).…”

New and alternative metaphors for school leadership

“…These papers respond to calls to inject creativity into the methods and topics of focus in educational leadership research (Alvesson and Spicer 2010;Thomson 2017). This collection of papers contributes to critical leadership studies by exploring issues of power, gender, and relationships, and by problematising dominant discourses associated with leadership (Paetcher 2004;Hoyle and Wallace 2007;Ashcraft and Muhr 2018).…”