ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how speech acting theory approaches leadership and management in organizations, using exemplary materials from selected organizations and contributions on leadership and management. Leadership is the speech act and reflective, deliberative activity located in the gap open for choice there, directed at how activity in the organization as a whole should be organized. Management can be considered the implementation of the task defined by owners—leaders in the organization. The suggestion here is that the three distinctions between brute and social facts, between cognition and volition and between project and knowledge narratives and the idea of the gap can contribute some new insights into leadership and management of organizations. Owner-leadership narratives assume that capital owners set the organization structure and that operational people are not formally part of the goal setting system. The narrative of leadership as emerging from practice and allowing for self-organizing workgroups was in this sense important for the limited success of the Kenning narrative.
