Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Local meaning-making in discursive, embodied and affective registers

Local meaning-making in discursive, embodied and affective registers The purpose of this paper is to argue and explore how local meaning-making processes of leaders also occur in embodied and affective registers. The paper aims to introduce the theoretical concept of affect to studies of local public leadership.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reports from an ethnographic study of local leaders managing educational institutions in Denmark. The paper takes a constructivist or interpretive approach where it is acknowledged that data is not just out-there ready to be collected and reported but is constructed and interpreted in particular manners as part of the complex encounter between researcher and field.FindingsThe paper zooms in one particular instance where a leader breaks down in tears and where the tears seem to evoke a particular affective atmosphere. Thus, the paper shows how, just below the elite narrative of a need for stronger, individual and more evidence-based management, we find a myriad of meaning-making processes that transgress distinctions between the corporeal, affective and discursive.Research limitations/implicationsAs an ethnography conducted in a local setting, the paper avoids broad generalisations. The findings reflect the theoretical ambition of discussing the role of embodiment and affect in local leadership as much as the studied setting.Practical implicationsThe study testify to how policy implementation can take many unexpected turns as local leaders interpret and make sense of policy ambitions in many different ways. Moreover, it testifies to how leaders are informed by embodied experiences and affective atmospheres in their sense-making processes.Originality/valueThe paper is one of the first attempts in public leadership to discuss the role of embodiment and affect in local public leadership. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png International Journal of Public Leadership Emerald Publishing

Local meaning-making in discursive, embodied and affective registers

Download PDF
18 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/emerald-publishing/local-meaning-making-in-discursive-embodied-and-affective-registers-iP0jRgz7s9
Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
© Emerald Publishing Limited
ISSN
2056-4929
DOI
10.1108/ijpl-06-2020-0053
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to argue and explore how local meaning-making processes of leaders also occur in embodied and affective registers. The paper aims to introduce the theoretical concept of affect to studies of local public leadership.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reports from an ethnographic study of local leaders managing educational institutions in Denmark. The paper takes a constructivist or interpretive approach where it is acknowledged that data is not just out-there ready to be collected and reported but is constructed and interpreted in particular manners as part of the complex encounter between researcher and field.FindingsThe paper zooms in one particular instance where a leader breaks down in tears and where the tears seem to evoke a particular affective atmosphere. Thus, the paper shows how, just below the elite narrative of a need for stronger, individual and more evidence-based management, we find a myriad of meaning-making processes that transgress distinctions between the corporeal, affective and discursive.Research limitations/implicationsAs an ethnography conducted in a local setting, the paper avoids broad generalisations. The findings reflect the theoretical ambition of discussing the role of embodiment and affect in local leadership as much as the studied setting.Practical implicationsThe study testify to how policy implementation can take many unexpected turns as local leaders interpret and make sense of policy ambitions in many different ways. Moreover, it testifies to how leaders are informed by embodied experiences and affective atmospheres in their sense-making processes.Originality/valueThe paper is one of the first attempts in public leadership to discuss the role of embodiment and affect in local public leadership.

Journal

International Journal of Public Leadership – Emerald Publishing

Published: Jul 14, 2021

Keywords: Affect; Ethnography; Embodiment; Education policy; Local leadership; Decentered theory

References

  • On the history of the form of administrative decisions: how decisions begin to desire uncertainty
    Andersen, N.Å.; Pors, J.G.
  • Affective atmospheres
    Anderson, B.
  • Coding military command as a promiscuous practice? Unsettling the gender binaries of leadership metaphors
    Ashcraft, K.L.; Muhr, S.L.
  • Case om samskabelse af tværsektorielle velfærdstilbud: et værdifuldt samarbejde?
    Bergmann, R.; Plotnikof, M.
  • A decentered theory of governance
    Bevir, M.
  • Decentering tradition: interpreting British government
    Bevir, M.; Rhodes, R.A.W.
  • Interpretive approaches to British government and politics
    Bevir, M.; Rhodes, R.A.W.
  • Strangely familiar: the uncanny and unsiting organizational analysis
    Beyes, T.; Steyaert, C.
  • Self-management through shame – uniting governmentality studies and the 'affective turn
    Bjerg, H.; Staunæs, D.
  • Affect
    Blackman, L.; Venn, C.
  • Just ‘good and bad news’? Disciplinary imaginaries of head teachers in Australian and English print media
    Blackmore, J.; Thomson, P.
  • Mapping tax compliance: assemblages, distributed action and practices: a new way of doing tax research
    Boll, K.
  • Organizational atmospheres: foam, affect and architecture
    Borch, C.
  • The rule of mimetic desire in higher education: governing through naming, shaming and faming
    Brøgger, K.
  • Standards and (self)implosion: how the circulation of affects accelerates the spread of standards and intensifies the embodiment of colliding, temporal ontologies
    Brøgger, K.; Staunæs, D.
  • Affect and the archive, archives and their affects: an introduction to the special issue
    Cifor, M.; Gilliand, A.J.
  • On ethnographic authority
    Clifford, J.
  • The affective turn: political economy, biomedia and bodies
    Clough, P.T.
  • Managerialism and ‘infinite human resourcefulness’: a commentary on the ‘therapeutic habitus’, ‘derecognition of finitude’ and the modern sense of self
    Costea, B.; Crump, N.; Amiridis, K.
  • Graduate employability and the principle of potentiality: an aspect of the ethics of HRM
    Costea, B.; Amiridis, K.; Crump, N.
  • Organizing: how to study it and how to write about it
    Czarniawska, B.
  • Ethnography, interaction and ordinary trouble
    Emerson, R.M.
  • Becoming the leader: leadership as material presence
    Ford, J.; Harding, N.; Gilmore, S.; Richardson, S.
  • Can consumer choice replace trust in the national health service in England? Towards developing an affective psychosocial conception of trust in health care
    Fotaki, M.
  • Organizational blind spots: splitting, blame and idealization in the national health service
    Fotaki, M.; Hyde, P.
  • Thinking critically about affect in organization studies: why it matters
    Fotaki, M.; Kenny, K.; Vachhani, S.
  • Five stories of accidental ethnography: turning unplanned moments in the field into data
    Fujii, L.A.
  • Theorizing affective ethnography for organization studies
    Gherardi, S.
  • Labels and labelling in the field of educational leadership
    Gunter, H.
  • Aesthetic leadership
    Hansen, H.; Ropo, A.; Sauer, E.
  • Knowing bodies at work: embodiment and ephemeral teamwork in anaesthesia
    Hindmarch, J.; Pilnick, A.
  • ‘Someone big and important’: identification and affect in an international development organization
    Kenny, K.
  • From gendered organizations to compassionate borderspaces: reading corporeal ethics with Bracha Ettinger
    Kenny, K.; Fotaki, M.
  • The anthropology of empty spaces
    Kociatkiewicz, J.; Kostera, M.
  • Postbook: working the ruins of feminist ethnography
    Lather, P.
  • Evidence-based management: the very idea
    Learmonth, M.; Harding, N.
  • Børn og unge i fritids- og klubtilbud [children and young people in recreation centre]
  • Testing regimes, accountabilities and education policy: commensurate global and national developments
    Lingard, B.; Martino, W.; Goli, R.-R.
  • The role of emotional labor in the delivery of public services
    Ljungholm, D.P.
  • The importance of ‘knowing the patient’: community nurses constructions of quality in providing palliative care
    Luker, K.A.; Austin, L.; Caress, A.; Hallett, C.E.
  • Emotional intelligence in nursing work
    McQueen, A.C.H.
  • Enter the transformational leader: network governance and the micro-politics of modernization
    Newman, J.
  • Beyond cognition: affective leadership and emotional labor
    Newman, M.A.; Guy, M.E.; Mastracci, S.H.
  • Local government chief executives' everyday hauntings: towards a theory of organizational ghosts
    Orr, K.
  • Relational leadership, storytelling, and narratives: practices of local government chief executives
    Orr, K.; Bennett, M.
  • Traditions of local government
    Orr, K.; Vince, R.
  • ‘It sends a cold shiver down my spine’: ghostly interruptions to strategy implementation
    Pors, J.G.
  • The emergence and workings of a process view in public education policy
    Pors, J.G.; Ratner, H.
  • Corporeal ethics and the politics of resistance in organizations
    Pullen, A.; Rhodes, C.
  • Ethics, embodiment and organizations
    Pullen, A.; Rhodes, C.
  • The materiality of leadership
    Pullen, A.; Vachhani, S.
  • Data warehousing organization: infrastructural experimentation with educational governance
    Ratner, H.; Gad, C.
  • Making invisible forces visible: managing employees' values and attitudes through transient emotions
    Ratner, H.; Pors, J.G.
  • Producing and projecting data: aesthetic practices of government data portals
    Ratner, H.; Ruppert, E.
  • Genre blurring in public administration: what can we learn from the humanities?
    Rhodes, R.A.W.
  • A feel for numbers: affect data and education policy
    Sellar, S.
  • International large-scale assessments, affective worlds and policy impacts in education
    Sellar, S.; Lingard, B.
  • A material dean
    Sinclair, A.
  • Democratic governance and the changing role of users of public services
    Sørensen, E.
  • Governing the potentials of life itself? Interrogating the promises in affective educational leadership
    Staunæs, D.
  • How reforms morph as they move: performative approaches to education reforms and their un/intended effects
    Staunæs, D.; Brøgger, K.; Krejsler, J.B.
  • The emotional organization and the problem of authenticity: the romantic, the pedagogic, the therapeutic and the ludic as liminal media of transition
    Stenner, P.; Andersen, N.Å.
  • Sensible knowledge and practice-based learning
    Strati, A.
  • Maggie's day: a small scale analysis of English education policy
    Thomson, P.; Hall, C.; Jones, K.
  • Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect
    Thrift, N.
  • (Re)creating objects from the past – affect, tactility and everyday creativity
    Vachhani, S.J.
  • Making organizational ethnography
    Watson, T.J.
  • Policy prolepsis in education: encounters, becomings, and phantasms
    Webb, P.T.; Gulson, K.N.
  • The corporeality of practice-based learning
    Yakhlef, A.
  • Travelling and embedded policy: the case of knowledge transfer
    Ozga, J.; Jones, R.