Making up leaders: Reconfiguring the executive student through profiling, texts and conversations in a leadership development programme

Abstract

Are leaders born or made? In this study of contemporary leadership development programmes, we find that leaders are not only made but also – in Ian Hacking’s sense – made up. Such programmes increasingly employ practices like personality profiling, appraisals, feedback and coaching aimed at creating knowledge about individual leaders in order for them to develop. The effects of these practices on participants have been theorized in terms of identity regulation and resistance, yet in our view the situated accomplishments of authority and identity remain inadequately theorized. This study follows a number of such practices as texts and conversations, and shows how a programme participant’s leader identity becomes authorized and acknowledged as participants and instructors ventriloquize texts in conversations. We theorize this as identity reconfiguration, as it entails the continual staging and authorizing of diverse figures. Our findings have implications for the relation between governmentality studies and studies of texts and conversations in leadership development programmes as well as for how we approach agency and context in this realm.

Leading or led? A critical exploration of youth leadership development

“…Discussions of agency, freedom and autonomy point to the essential seductiveness of these five discourses with participants, and at least in their reflections and interviews, an unawareness of any subjectification and regulation at work. While youth tend to be cognisant to the struggles of identity work in leadership development (Carroll and Nicholson, 2013; Nicholson and Carroll, 2013), they appear to be less attentive to the reliance of leadership development on theoretical and conceptual assumptions, frameworks and models and development technologies that shape the leadership development space and agenda constraining language, meaning and interpretation long before any developmental agency is excercised by any participant (Meier and Carroll, 2020). This means the disciplinary and regulatory role of such discourses are effectively invisible to participants and they make developmental choices within a terrain already constrained and defined by purpose, design and delivery choices.…”

“…There is also a growing stream of work for exploring such spaces as sites of identity regulation where such participants are very explicitly moulded to construct idealised leader selves in programmes assuming compliance to pre-fixed organisational technologies and outcomes (Ford and Harding, 2007; Gagnon and Collinson, 2014). Consequently, research is now exploring whether the actual ‘leadership’ in a leadership development programme can more likely be found in the dissent, resistance and struggle (as opposed to accommodation, acquiescence and acceptance) of participants to the explicit selection, shaping and assessment regimes associated with these programmes (Carroll and Nicholson, 2013; Gagnon and Collinson, 2017; Meier and Carroll, 2020). We would argue at the barest minimum that the critical scrutiny being brought to adult-orientated leadership development needs to be paralleled in youth-orientated leadership development.…”

The work of conflict mediation: Actors, vectors, and communicative relationality

“…The ways in which written texts operate as agents has been studied across contexts (see Benoit-Barné and Cooren, 2009 ; Brummans, 2007 , 2018 ; Caronia, 2015 ; Caronia and Cooren, 2014 ; Caronia and Mortari, 2015 ; Cooren, 2004 , 2008 , 2009 , 2015a ; Jahn, 2018 ; Meier and Carroll, 2020 ; Spee and Jarzabkowski, 2011 ; Vaara et al, 2010 ). Yet, how the sharing of agency is accomplished and, in turn, affects the composition of the nature of human relations remains obscure.…”

“…One specific type of actor that the mediation literature rarely considers is the role of written texts (reports, letters, memos, etc.) in the composition of relations during mediation, even though research in fields ranging from linguistics to organization studies suggests that texts make a difference ( Latour, 1996 , 1999 ) in the ways human beings relate to each other, structure interactions, and enact social collectives (see Anderson, 2004 ; Asmuß and Svennevig, 2009 ; Brummans, 2007 , 2018 ; Brummans et al, 2020 ; Castor, 2018 ; Castor and Cooren, 2006 ; Chaput et al, 2011 ; Cooren, 2004 , 2008 , 2009 , 2015a ; Fauré et al, 2010 ; Hall and Butler, 2017 ; Jahn, 2018 ; Kameo and Whalen, 2015 ; Karlsson, 2009 ; Kuhn, 2008 , 2012 ; Meier and Carroll, 2020 ; Sergi, 2013 ; Smith, 2001 , 2005 ; Spee and Jarzabkowski, 2011 ; Svinhufvud and Vehviläinen, 2013 ; Vaara et al, 2010 ; Vásquez et al, 2016 ). Written texts, for example, dictate rules of conduct, give some people authority while depriving others of it, assist people in managing tensions or making decisions, or give organizations a constitutional basis.…”

The deep organisation: The organisational view in a public management and leadership development programme

“…The literature on identity assumes that MLD programmes not only promote certain skills but also shape or enable certain leader identities. MLD can thus be seen as spaces for identity work and identity reconfiguration (Carroll and Levy, 2010;Meier and Carroll, 2019), where participants can work through frustrations and emotional challenges to establish new, more constructive identities (Petriglieri and Petriglieri, 2010). More critical approaches have emphasised how MLDP may involve control and regulation of participant identities (Carden and Callahan, 2007;Ford and Harding, 2007;Gagnon and Collinson, 2014;Nicholson and Carroll, 2013;Stead and Elliott, 2019).…”