Working with Language: A Refocused Research Agenda for Cultural Leadership Studies

• Published date: 01 April 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12100
• Author: Paresh Wankhade,Pasi Ahonen,Doris Schedlitzki,Hugo Gaggiotti,Gareth Edwards
• Date: 01 April 2017

International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 19, 237–257 (2017)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12100

Working with Language: A Refocused

Research Agenda for Cultural

Leadership Studies

Doris Schedlitzki, Pasi Ahonen,1Paresh Wankhade,2Gareth Edwards

and Hugo Gaggiotti

University of the West of England, Bristol Business School, Frenchay Campus, Bristol BS16 1BB, UK, 1University of

Essex, Essex Business School, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK, and 2Edge Hill Business School Edge Hill University,

Ormskirk L39 4QP, UK

Corresponding author email: doris.schedlitzki@uwe.ac.uk

This paper critically reviewsexisting contributions from the field of cultural leadership

studies with a view to highlighting the conceptual and methodological limitations of

the dominant etic, cross-cultural approach in leadership studies and illuminating im-

plications of the relative dominance and unreflective use of the English language as the

academic and business lingua franca within this field. It subsequently outlines the nega-

tive implications of overlookingcultural and linguistic multiplicity for an understanding

of culturally sensitive leadership practices. In drawing on lessons from this critical re-

view and the emergent fields of emic, non-positivist cultural leadership studies, this

analysis argues that the field of cultural leadership studies requires an alternative re-

search agenda focusedon language multiplicity, which enables the field to movetowards

emic, qualitative research that helps to empower individual cultural voices and explore

cultural intra- and interrelationships, tensions and paradoxes embedded in leadership

processes. The paper concludes by offering suggestions on methodological approaches

for emic cultural leadership studies that are centred on the exploration of language as

aculturalvoice.

Considering the importance of

language multiplicity for cultural

leadership studies

The field of leadership research has undergone sig-

nificant changes over the last two decades. Tradition-

ally approached from a psychologicalperspective (see

Clifton 2015), the field has seen a rise in studies taking

relational and constructionist approaches to leader-

ship (e.g. Cunliffe and Eriksen 2011; Fairhurst 2007;

Ford et al., 2008; Grint 2005; Hosking and Morley

1988; Uhl-Bien and Ospina 2012) and offering criti-

cal contributions focused on gender, power relations,

resistance and difference in leadership (e.g. Collinson

2005, 2006, 2014; Ford, 2006, 2010; Gordon 2002,

2011; Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007). Empirically, the

field has seen a rise in the number and importance of

qualitative research studies (Parry et al. 2014), par-

ticularly those taking a discursive or communicative

approach (Fairhurst and Connaughton 2014; Tourish

2014) and those embracing aesthetic methods of en-

quiry (Edwards et al. 2015). This change in the re-

search culture within leadership studies is promising

to shed more detailed light on how leadership is co-

created in practice, and illuminate processes of com-

municativeinteraction and power dynamics (Fairhurst

and Uhl-Bien 2012).

Yet, just as in the wider field of management

studies (Steyaert and Janssens 2013), these changes

have so far taken place within an assumed mono-

lingual space, where English as the language of re-

search and publication has been used largely without

further reflection. Although language use, discourse

and related power dynamics are the very focus of

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238 D. Schedlitzki et al.

empirical research taking a social constructionist

or critical perspective on leadership, these studies

largely take place and get published exclusively in the

English language without paying much attention to

its nature, its peculiarities and specificities. As such,

the field of leadership studies lacks critical reflec-

tion on the complex hegemonic role of the English

language as a publication and business lingua franca

(cf. Meril¨

ainen et al. 2008).

The majority of research in both mainstream psy-

chological and emergent critical, social construction-

ist leadership studies has – in their own culturally

informed empirical ways – explored in depth the

different meanings and constructions of leadership

within the English language and at times questioned

the very existence of leadership in certain organi-

zational contexts (e.g. Sutherland et al. 2014). Yet,

as a field, it has not paused to consider the cultural

and linguistic relevance of the very notion of lead-

ership outside the English language (for exceptions,

see Koivunen 2007; Jepson 2010; Prince 2006). In-

deed, popular western-based concepts such as ‘trans-

formational leadership’ have been exported to non-

English-speaking countries (Diaz-Saenz 2011), with

a host of empirical studies testing their applicability

across the globe (e.g. Jung et al. 2009; Schaubroeck

et al. 2007; Spreitzer et al. 2005). But such studies

have failed to question fundamentally the cultural rel-

evance of the very notion (Osborn and Marion 2009)

and have instead assumed cross-cultural homogeneity

of the phenomenon as well as unproblematic linguis-

tic transferability.

This has particularly strong implications for the

sub-field of cultural leadership studies (Jepson 2010),

where the predominant focus on cross-cultural com-

parisons through the use of standardized question-

naires has further enhanced the overlooking of cul-

tural and language multiplicity (Meril¨

ainen et al.

2008; Steyaert and Janssens 2013). Zhang et al.

(2012, p. 1063) argue that it is imperative for the

advancement of cultural leadership studies to pro-

mote indigenous leadership research that centres on

and uses ‘local language, local subjects and local per-

spectives’. They show that the vastmajority of cross-

cultural (predominantly quantitative) leadership re-

search has to date taken a fundamentally non-local

approach to studying indigenous forms and configu-

rations of leadership. Yet, in their proposal of a de-

tailed framework for studying indigenous leadership,

even Zhang et al. (2012) fall into the same essen-

tialist approach to culture and language by failing to

address multiplicity in both culture and language. In

this paper, we explore the negative repercussions of

overlooking language multiplicity (both within and

beyond the English and other languages) for cul-

tural leadership studies and the opportunities that a

research agenda focused on cultural and language

multiplicity offers by encouraging exploration of dif-

ference, power and dynamics in cultural leadership

studies and practice.

The importance of uncovering power dynamics

within (and beyond) the English language has been

highlighted previously by Stephens (2003), who used

interviews of women leaders to demonstrate the way

in which language shaped their sense of themselves

as leaders. By doing so, she highlighted the particular

way in which language and culture interact to pro-

mote dominant notions of leadership and hide oth-

ers from view. Women’s leadership, for example, has

been hidden beneath traditional and largely gendered

words for leadership, such as ‘king’, ‘master’ and

‘chairman’, which refer exclusively to men. Women’s

traditional forms of leadership have been ignored or

actively defined as being outside what it might be

to ‘lead’. Related arguments on the gendered na-

ture of leadership assumptions embedded in hege-

monic leadership discourse have been put forward

by other scholars (e.g. Elliott and Stead 2008, 2009;

Ford 2006, 2010; Fordet al. 2008; Muhr and Sullivan

2013). This has helped to highlight the importance of

paying attention to language multiplicity within the

English language and, in particular, the way in which

masculinized norms pervade academic and organiza-

tional leadership discourse and institutionalize gen-

dered notions of leadership in organizational practice.

Building on these constructionist and critical contri-

butions on power dynamics in language-in-use, we

seek to expand the debate into the importance of lan-

guage beyond the English language, by highlighting

wider implications of linguistic multiplicity for our

understanding of culture and our conceptualization

of leadership.

The aim of this paper is then to review critically the

field of cultural leadership studies. In our conceptu-

alization of ‘cultural leadership studies’, we rely and

build on the existing transdisciplinary field of cultural

studies. The field itself can be divided along various

lines (e.g. geographic) and into a number of schools

with their particular areas of emphasis in terms of

theoretical orientation or the object of study, or both.

There are also a number of different conceptualiza-

tions of culture, with meanings related to civiliza-

tion, the ordinary and the everyday, resistance (of

sub- and counter-cultures) and identity (in terms of

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