Fantasies of leadership - identity work

Stefan Sveningsson () and Magnus Larsson ()
Additional contact information
Stefan Sveningsson: Department of Business Administration, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Postal: Department of Business Administration, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Box 7080, SE-220 07 Lund, Sweden
Magnus Larsson: Department of Psychology, Lund University, Box 213, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden, Postal: Department of Psychology, Lund University, , Box 213, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden,

No 2005/9, Working Paper Series from Lund University, Institute of Economic Research

Abstract: In this paper we investigate and explore middle managerial talk and practice connected to expectations of leadership in a planned corporate cultural change. In the paper we follow how a middle manager positions himself in relation to the contemporary discourse on leadership. In particular we discuss how managerial claims of leadership in practice seem inconsistent with the actual practice. Based on these findings we suggest that leadership ideas could be seen as a kind of fantasy related to identity work more than actual practice. We investigate this fantasy in terms of its various sources and try to relate the fantasy construction to management education and to the planned cultural change in particular.

Keywords: Leadership; managerial work; identity work; identity process; fantasy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2005-06-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lri.lu.se/pdf/wp/2005-9 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.lri.lu.se:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhb:lufewp:2005_009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Lund University, Institute of Economic Research Institutet för Ekonomisk Forskning, Box 7080, SE-220 07 LUND, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elsbeth Andersson ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).