ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 takes as a starting point the observation that leadership has revealed itself to be a slippery notion, always open to debate and having a multitude of incarnations. Indeed, leadership is sometimes considered to be an empty signifier that can be filled with just about anything. We thus argue that leadership researchers could profitably shift their focus from trying to define what leadership is to explicating (1) how “something” is defined as leadership through in situ social practice and (2) what this practice does. Using conversation analysis as a research methodology, this chapter picks up on how stories are told in a digitalised environment. It uses leadership training material publicly available on YouTube as data and considers how a leadership trainer frames vignettes of mundane workplace experiences as stories of leadership-in-action and how, through doing this, he talks himself into being as an expert in leadership.
