Enacting and negotiating power relations through teasing in distributed leadership constellations
Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: This paper explores how power relations are enacted and negotiated in the largely under-researched non-hierarchal leadership constellation of distributed leadership. Drawing on more than 300 hours of audio-recorded interactions of a corpus of interdisciplinary research group meetings, we analyse how members of a team that does not have an officially assigned leader or chair regularly draw on teasing thereby enacting and reflecting, as well as sometimes challenging existing power relations. Findings show that the highly ambiguous discursive strategy of teasing enables all members, regardless of their official role or position, to contribute to the team’s leadership performance. However, findings also show that although teasing has the potential to facilitate more collaborative approaches to leadership, the ways in which power is actually enacted in our data resembles more traditional hierarchical leadership constellations.
Source: Pragmatics and Society
DOI: 10.1075/ps.7.3.07cho
Authors: Seongsook Choi, Stephanie Schnurr
Institutions: University of Warwick, University of Edinburgh
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2199589656