Examining Context in Leadership Studies

Leadership theories and concepts often identify context as a significant leadership variable. The examination of context often focuses on the micro-level. This focus involves relationships among people, within work teams, or within a formal organization. To what extent do leadership studies (LS) relate to context more generally? Does the larger societal or cultural milieu significantly affect how we approach and understand LS? And if it does affect LS, to what extent or how is this context recognized and dealt with? This and the next two posts address these topics.

The significant changes of leadership related terms

When I was a graduate student in the late 1960s the Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) was arguably the premier journal dealing with administrative, management, and leadership topics. A recent article by Mautner and Learmonth examines how the word choices used in scholarly articles in ASQ changed over time. The article demonstrates through word choices how societal context may affect LS.

The authors reviewed every article in ASQ from its first publication in 1956 through the end of 2018. They used an approach called “corpus linguistics.” This methodology searches through a body of text, in this case, ASQ issues, often to identify a listing of words or search terms. The assumption here is that academic writing changes over time and that over time identities or how LS view social actors. More particularly, they focus on how researchers think about or label elite organizational actors

The significance of the socio-political culture on leadership studies

The article explicitly relates to the wider socio-political background and how this broader environment or context may affect the use of language. The authors believe that this broader context influences a drift in language/word use that often unconsciously influences researchers. They argue that “labels” for social actors, whether leader, team member or some other label “typically convey (or gloss over) identities and power asymmetries, as well as legitimize certain constructions of roles and functions.”

As you look at the following tables think about the possible influence of broader socio-political trends on changes in word usage. These tables refer only to the words that showed the most or least change. Thus several words not included in the tables showed a degree of continuity over time: employee, leader, manager, and member. The article later deals with leader and manager word use.

Table 1. Frequency of Selected Word per Million Words in Corpus

Table 2. Frequency of Selected Wordes Ranked from Largest Increase to Highest Decrease in Percentage

Table 3. Selected Words Ranked by Change in Frequency of Use from Largest Increase to Largest Decrease

Do these word changes have significance beyond mere labeling? Mautner and Learmonth suggest that the answer is yes. They find the staff vs. team word usage especially significant. In the earliest years of their corpus the word member was often used in conjunction with the word staff, but in the later years, the word team was the preferred partner for the word member. Does it make a difference if the boss refers to his reports as staff members vs. team members?

Collocates

Unexpectedly, however, the word usage of manager and leader showed little variation over time in their frequency of use. The authors used a collocation tool to explain this anomaly. First, they looked at the three words surrounding the words leader and manager. This analysis produced two interesting findings.

One, little overlap existed among the strongest collocates of leader and manager. Thus for all their semantic similarities, each word had very different collocational profiles. Manager collocates in the 1950s/1960s specified a manager’s function or responsibility, such as city, departmental, plant, district, and production as well as top and assistant. But from the 1970s onward, the key collate was the word top, followed by words related to hierarchical position, such as lower-level or middle-level.

Two, the most frequent collocates in the early part of the corpus for leader included such words as community, business, political, union, labor, civic, legislative, military, and party as well as followers and charismatic. But in the 1980s through the 2000s, team was the most frequent collocate. However, in the 2010s the strongest collocate was corporate.

The authors then examined the adjectives applied to the word manager and the word leader. They found that the adjectives surrounding the word manager were largely less evaluative than for the adjectives applied to the word leader. The only evaluative adjectives assigned to manager were creative, experienced, good, and successful along with the (negative) ingratiating. For the word leader, the evaluative adjectives included charismatic, good, effective, ethical, experienced, humble, philanthropic, powerful, positive, prominent, strong, supportive, and visionary. The negative adjectives applied to leader were inexperienced, narcissistic, passive, and untrained. The word manager seems predominantly a functional label with little need to explain or justify the title while the word leader is a more malleable term.

The next step identified only the adjectives immediately to the left of the word manager and the word leader. For the word leader, political was the most frequent adjective in the 1950s/1960s. For the 1970s the word experienced was most common, followed closely by political. In the 1980s, the key adjective was organizational; for the 1990s charismatic; and for the 2000s and 2010s, corporate.

The authors say that the traditional use of the word leader went from a context that focused on politics to a context that focused on the organizational and corporate world.

Background of elite scholarly writing

Mautner and Learmonth say their findings support the neo-liberal drift in words used about leadership. Terms for organizational elites back in the ’50s and ’60s now have negative connotations, such as bureaucrat and administrator. These words became replaced by trending words such as entrepreneur and corporate. Similarly, words that once referenced elites as wielding coercive authority, such as superior, supervisor, and subordinate, have declined greatly in usage. These words have been replaced by words that indicate that staff members now internalize norms useful to elites. They also note that words once used solely in market or business writings, such as entrepreneur, are now also found in political discourse.

However, they point out that words like leadership and leader have not significantly replaced the word usage of manager. This is contrary to their expectations. Consequently, it seems unlikely that there is a difference between a person referred to as a corporate leader or as a corporate manager. Thus, “CEO shares with leader a similarly highly positive semantic valence that is more likely to be flattering to organizational elites than mere manager.”

Social scientific writing as a discursive practice

Perhaps the main conclusion of the authors is that social scientists are not merely observers of social change but are caught up in social change as well: “research is inescapably socially and culturally contingent.” More specifically, “it seems likely that scholars (like everyone else) more or less unwittingly imbibe the wider cultural milieu to make decisions about which terms to select (administrator or CEO? Market or hierarchy?) in their writing.” The authors “encourage the practice of stopping and thinking about the lexical choices we make, even in what may appear to be the straightforward matter of naming social actors.”

Finally, the article suggests that both organizational elites and academics cause the discursive shift in language – that is, the cultural shift to a neoliberal society caused both academics and senior executives to shift the language terms they used.

Discussion

The decade of the 1980s appears to be the key inflection point decade for many of the word usage changes. The term CEO first appears in the ’80s and then rapidly ascends insignificance through the remainder of the decades. The ’80s also appear to be the key change decade for subordinate, superior, corporate, hierarchy, and staff. What was happening in the ’80s for this decade to be a key inflection point?

An LS perspective suggests the advent of transformational leadership began about this time, perhaps most notably kicked off in the late ’70s by James Burns. Bernard Bass and others then further developed in the early and mid-’80s the concept of transformational leadership. Also around this time, LS studies began focusing on senior executives in organizations, contrary to much of the earlier studies at the mid-level or supervisory leadership level. In the ’80s, for example, Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, became the “rock star” of leaders in much of LS literature.

One can argue that in the decade of the ’80s LS moved from mid-level and a supervisory focus to executive leadership focus and moved context away from the broader environment to a much narrower formal organization context.
I think this perspective contains much merit, but still raises the question of why these specific kinds of changes occur in this specific time frame (’80s)?

Overall, the most dramatic positive changes in word usage occurred with CEO, market, and team, while the most dramatic drop occurred with authority. Supervisor, staff, bureaucratic, administrator, and bureaucracy also experienced significant drops in word usage.

Relatively speaking, CEO, corporate, market, team, entrepreneurial, and entrepreneur captured the greatest relative changes, far greater than the relative drops in all the other words. But again relatively speaking, subordinate, supervisor, administrator, bureaucratic, superior, bureaucracy, and foreman saw significant drops.

What was happening here? Did these roles or positions (meaning subordinates, supervisors, superiors, administrators, and foremen) dramatically decline during the last several decades? Or did just the labels for these roles/positions change? Similarly, did bureaucracy (rules and hierarchy) dramatically lessen?

From my perspective, it seems the labels changed much more than did the roles/positions. Here, a broader context may provide some explanation. The ’70s witnessed a transition from the New Deal era, which very roughly lasted from the mid-’30s to the early ’70s. What took its place? Beginning more forcefully in the early ’80s, the political and social culture entered the Reagan-Thatcher era marked by a strong belief in the free market, the importance of business (the supply side dimension of business and employment growth), and a very diminished view of government and bureaucracy. Could this view, often labeled neoliberalism, affected LS?

The Neoliberal perspective became infused throughout society. Almost no institution escaped being influenced by this perspective. This included universities. In the 1980s, universities increasingly moved from scholarly universities to administrative universities. Non-scholars increasingly took up administrative positions, marketing and selling became significant university activities, and students became customers.

Arguably, LS moved away from the disciplines of political science, public administration, and public policy and toward the discipline of business administration. Business schools and business majors proliferated. Perhaps regardless of how or wherein a university leadership was taught, courses and syllabi came under a neoliberal influence.

Finally, the methodology employed by Mautner and Learmonth appears useful for possible dissertation use. One can examine word/label use changes over time in a single leadership journal, such as The Leadership Quarterly. Or one can compare such changes in two or more journals. This might contrast, for example,  The Leadership Quarterly with Leadership.

The first, focusing on The Leadership Quarterly, may show changes in concepts and word/label usage similar or dissimilar to the Administrative Science Quarterly. The second, contrasting The Leadership Quarterly with Leadership, may show differences due to the geographical orientation of the authors and articles (e.g., the U.S. v. Europe). If so, then one would ask the question of why such differences exist.