This study aims to investigate discourses of the charisma of Barack Obama in articles in a leading Finnish newspaper during the first 6 months of his presidency. The results show that the media created a very enthusiastic atmosphere around Obama. His charisma was built up mostly around his person, with the emphasis on an exceptional personality, life story and behaviour. In addition, the various crises that arose were used to reinforce the picture of Obama as charismatic. The findings undermine the (...) idea of a single form of charismatic leadership and provide empirical support for the framework put forward by Steyrer (Organizational Studies 19(5), 807–828, 1998), that various types of charismatic leadership exist: In this study paternalistic, heroic, missionary and majestic are identified. The study contributes to Steyrer’s framework by showing that certain types of charisma occur in different social contexts. The results also suggest that ethics is constructed as a crucial part of charismatic leadership, but the construction of Obama’s charisma in contrast to others raises ethical concerns. (shrink)

This paper explores the discursive processes of legitimizing leadership claims in the context of the nuclear proliferation crisis. Three complementary analyses of texts are carried out: discourse analyses of United Nations Security Council resolutions and relevant speeches by members of the US administration, as well as a corpus analysis of news media accounts of nuclear proliferation published in prominent US and UK broadsheets. Findings suggest that leadership claims are legitimized through a range of discursive strategies, which are echoed across the (...) different text types. However, a combination and comparison of the different datasets puts these findings into perspective and reveals that the various contexts and text types in which these leadership claims are made differ remarkably in terms of their use of relevant terms relating to leadership and crisis. We argue that this dynamic is best captured by the notion of an discursive chain of legitimization. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to qualitatively describe and critically explain the discursive construction of employee co-operation negotiations in Finland as an arena for management-by-fear. The article consists of a theoretical review, covering the legislative basis of co-operation negotiations and recent research on management-by-fear. The empirical study consists of media texts and company media releases in Finland in 2012–2013. The main conclusions are that there are distinctive features in the co-operation negotiations that enable and enforce the possibility of management-by-fear, (...) and thus destructive leadership. The process, supported by law and very much against the original aim, enhances authoritative leadership, objectification of employees, distortion of information and misleading, and the negative consequences thereof. The process is an employer-invited discursive dance where the employee has to follow through the set steps and in the set rhythm, with the media orchestrating the tune and managing the fear. The study adds a valuable element to the research areas of downsizing, bad management, and the discursive construction of these phenomena. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explores two views of the changes that have occurred in the U.S. security services as a result of their post 9/11 reform. The first is Bigo’s suggestion that agencies worldwide have become enmeshed in shared activity so as to constitute a new ‘field of security’. A second, novel perspective is that the security services have developed many of the characteristics of a discipline or ‘discursive formation’, constructing intelligence both as a form of expertly constituted knowledge and as the (...) basis for a new type of professional, disciplinary power. The investigation combines corpus techniques with other discourse analysis procedures to examine a corpus of public-facing texts generated by the U.S. security agencies. The investigation aims to synthesise evidence consistent with both views of the security services’ recent historical change; that features of their discourse signal their emergence simultaneously as a new field and discursive formation. (shrink)