Search

In this paper we explore challenges facing leadership in a culture of "all consuming images" from a perspective which claims that images have a moral or normative dimension. The cumulative effect of contemporary image saturation is increased resistance to the normative power of an image. We also suggest that in a culturally diverse global economy, it is necessary to expand the moral aspects of good business leadership beyond providing a basis for productive, coherent group identity within a firm at the expense of seeing outsiders as "others." We also explore what imagining leadership in business might be like in a world in which visual images shape our understandings of individual and group identity. While our focus is on leadership in business, we also use examples from the political arena We also suggest that imagining business leadership in the ways we propose may be helpful to women, providing them with an image of business leadership more closely reflective of their experience of corporate culture, Its limits, and possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on examples taken from the business section of the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Correspondence (in preparation), this paper intends to discuss the linguistic means employed to express authority and convey stance in relation to different recipients (peers, superiors, or subordinates) and different subject matters (e.g., legal controversy as opposed to ordinary, routine transactions). In particular, the aim is to present a survey of the positive and negative politeness strategies adopted by encoders of varying status (e.g., bank officials, publishers, but also working-class contractors). After a general Outline of the corpus currently being compiled, different cases are discussed, in which hierarchical discourse is observed. Our concluding remarks focus on the implications this type of study may have for sociohistorical linguists on the one hand, and the study of the earliest stages of professional discourse on the other; indeed, the latter aspect may be of considerable interest also for present-day practitioners who may gain insights concerning the pragmatic strategies that have proved to be most successful over time. Similar ways of encoding stance and distance, for example, are still found in present-day formal exchanges, though the focus is probably more on corporate identity rather than on individual participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that the construction of reputation in the scientific sphere can prove illustrative for the study of corporate reputation. Background on the case of two individuals in science and its implication on organizational research about corporate reputations; Lessons for academics and business.