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.
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