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As teachers of leadership, we have noticed that our students often get “stuck” thinking about leadership in overly simplistic ways that dichotomize task and relationship-orientations, often resulting in overly simplistic understandings of leadership processes. In this reflective essay, we draw upon two approaches to leadership theory—leadership psychology and discursive leadership—to consider why the leadership dichotomy occurs and provide ideas for how leadership instructors might restructure and refocus their courses to help students transcend it to develop more reflexive, contextualized understandings of leadership. We suggest four ideas for innovating leadership pedagogy: 1) rethink the typical chronological organization, 2) challenge students to identify leadership myths, 3) engage students in applied leadership contexts, and 4) emphasize leadership as a communicative practice.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance the knowledge of how leadership concepts are embraced by leadership actors and perceived to influence relationships between leaders and co-workers. Specifically, the authors aim to investigate how leaders and co-workers discursively construct the concept of “communicative leadership” and its practices and perceive that communicative leadership influences relationships, work processes, and agency.

The authors analyzed interviews with leaders and co-workers in two Swedish business organizations about their understandings and experiences of leadership.

Communicative processes that enhance co-worker agency, defined as a capacity to act; include: facilitating autonomy, sharing responsibility, and mutual participation. Relational and discursive leadership processes such as responsiveness and dialogue were seen to enhance mutual participation in both organizations. Broader Swedish cultural macro discourses shaped the leader/co-worker relationship, making agency a relational accomplishment rather than an individual phenomenon.

This study relies on data from individual and focus group interviews, rather than direct observation of leadership processes.

Findings suggest that organizations would benefit from making explicit their goals and expectations for communicative leadership in their respective social and cultural contexts.

The authors provide new theoretical and empirical knowledge of leaders’ and co-workers’ discursive construction of a leadership concept; leadership communication research in the Swedish context; empirical research on communicative leadership as an empowering form of leadership communication; and how leadership communication discourse on a micro level is connected to organizational and macro-social cultural levels.

This article presents a research framework that understands any management innovation, such as total quality management (TQM), as discursive knowledge that can have certain power effects. It may transform individuals into subjects that secure some sense of their own meaning and identity through participating either as managers or employees in the practices the knowledge embraces. But TQM can also have the opposite effect, resulting in subjects resisting or distancing themselves from, rather than embracing, the discourse. The paper reviews three interpretations of TQM, which are described as rational managerialist, critical control, and processual. It critiques each of these approaches so as to offer an alternative way of understanding TQM, which would also have application to a wide variety of other innovations. In short, it attempts to build upon earlier approaches in the anticipation that we might move beyond our present understanding of innovations such as TQM.

Considers the development of international retail thought and the need for an integrated conceptual approach to the process of retail internationalisation. The paper considers the development of international retail thought within the context of international retail activity and subject development and suggests the intellectual influences on the development of retail thought have, at times, constrained the development of a better understanding of the internationalisation process. Having established the parameters of debate, the paper considers the search for a synthesised approach to the understanding of the internationalisation process and integration of retail international theory within broader economic and international business frameworks. In the context of this theoretical material, the paper presents a framework within which international activity may be considered.

Scholars increasingly depict hybridity as pervasive across organizations. The authors offer insight about how paradox theory informs and expands this approach to hybridity. To do so, the authors do a deeper dive into paradox theory, comparing and contrasting a dynamic equilibrium approach with a permanent dialectics approach. Integrating these two approaches offers paradox theory insights that can enrich and expand hybridity scholarship. The authors offer suggestions for how paradox theory can help develop a future research agenda for organizational hybridity.

To evaluate the chances of success for Auchan in Russia, and draw conclusions for retail internationalisation theory.

Provides a comprehensive analysis of the Russian retail landscape and emerging patterns of consumption, especially in the capital Moscow.

The success of Auchan's Russian venture will depend on the extent to which the retailer is able to leverage its three sources of competitive advantage in its domestic market, namely the hypermarket concept, the channel mix, and the environmental context. This in turn will be a function of its ability to exploit its retail marketing skills, distribution abilities, unique retail formula, strong retail brand, or a combination of these.

The paper is not built on empirical data, but is speculative.

The paper's primary value lies in the call which it contains for a more eclectic conceptual framework underpinning retail internationalisation theory. Such a framework would reflect the importance of a firm's capital structure, and also pay greater attention to organisational dynamics. Attention to these issues would enable researchers to reflect more accurately the reality of the retail internationalisation process in emerging markets.

This study explores interactions on internal social media (ISM) in a Danish bank in order to understand how communicative leadership is enacted in social media dialogues within an organizational context. Three months of posts, comments and likes from September to November 2018 were analyzed to identify communicative leadership roles and communicative leadership behaviours. Three types of communicative leadership arose in this study: formal communicative leadership, coconstructed communicative leadership and peer communicative leadership. Communicative leadership was further identified in communicative acts such as setting directions, making sense, solving problems and listening. The findings suggest that communicative leadership is coconstructed in interactions between managers and employees as well as in interactions among employees. In this respect, communicative leadership on ISM is not only enacted by formal managers but aslo by knowledgeable individual organizational members and it is also coconstructed by groups of employees. In this respect, the findings help us understand leadership as a complex set of interactions in organizational contexts and know that empowering communication on ISM can therefore enhance employee engagement.

A frame is an interpretive scheme of meanings that guide participants’ interpretations of social interaction and their actions in social situations (Goffman, 1974). By identifying early-career physicians’ identity and relationship frames, this study aims to produce information about socially constructed ways to interpret leadership communication in a medical context.

The data consist of essays written by young physicians (n = 225) during their specialization training and workplace learning period. The analysis was conducted applying constructive grounded theory.

Three identity and relationship frames were identified: the expertise frame, the collegial frame and the system frame. These frames arranged the meanings of being a physician in a leader-follower relationship differently.

The findings suggest that identity questions discussed recently in medical leadership studies can be partly answered with being aware of and understanding socially constructed and somewhat contradictory frames.

This paper proposes a model of word memory based on an interconnected network of simple neuron‐like computational cells. Major features of the model are the ease of implementation using currently available hardware, and the fact that the principles underlying its operation may be extended to a comprehensive information processing system based on a hierarchy of such networks. The concepts of distributed data storage, the establishing of logical relations between stored items, and the construction of an integrated data structure are characterised in terms of the patterns of activity of the network.