Placing self: How might we place ourselves in leadership studies differently?

Abstract

In this contribution to ‘Leading Questions’, I explore ‘place’ in leadership studies experimenting with a bifurcated textual presentation. I suggest that our writing about leadership comes from a mixture of internal and external, personal and geographic, places: ‘real’ and current as well as remembered and reconstructed. Making these places more explicit, I argue, is a form of identity work, facilitating reflexivity in leadership writing. It prompts us to ask questions. ‘Why am I interested in these aspects of leadership?’ ‘How do the places I have been inform and limit what I argue for?’ While the ‘top’ story/text in this piece makes these arguments in a formal academic discourse, the ‘bottom’ story seeks to enact it. The two stories come from different places (in me) and bring with them different voices. In their co-existence I seek to experiment with writing leadership differently, to reveal the dualities and duplicities in discourses, as well as the power and vulnerabilities that may be in play or repressed when we write about leadership.