Communication Studies, Department of
Date of this Version
2008
Abstract
As I write, the year has not yet ended, but by mid-November 2007, an Amazon.com advanced search of book titles and materials published on leadership yielded 15,601 hits, more than double the 7,519 titles appearing just 10 years earlier. Although I cannot comment on all 15,601 titles, I know that one of these—Gail Fairhurst’s Discursive Leadership: In Conversation With Leadership Psychology (2007)—promises to make a meaningful difference in how leadership is understood and practiced. With this forum, we highlight the book’s contribution by providing space for a group of management and communication scholars from a variety of locations to reflect on discursive and psychological approaches to leadership studies. These scholars offer their thoughts on the book in general and address how discursive leadership and leadership psychology inform each other and can be held in tension with each other, what aspects of leadership require study through a psychological versus discursive lens, and how the two approaches might inform studies of leadership across various scales of action.
Comments
Published in Management Communication Quarterly 21:4 (May 2008), pp. 508–509; doi 10.1177/0893318907313718 Copyright © 2008 Sage Publications. Used by permission. http://mcq.sagepub.com