ABSTRACT
Our arguments thus far have been premised on an assumption that leaders gain power through their ability to define group identities. Our argument was that leaders who want to get things done need to harness the power of the collective. In this chapter, we look more closely at the link between leadership, identity, and power. What are the different ways—both in terms of how they speak about the social world and also how they organize the social world—in which leaders can makes their constructions of social identity compelling and hence influence the behavior of others? As is apparent from what has gone before, our aim is to demonstrate that, where leaders can establish a consonance between themselves, their proposals, and group identity, there will be a qualitative shift in their ability to shape mass action. In the process we also develop additional insights into the importance of leadership processes to social phenomena in general. For such is the power of identity, and such is the importance of gaining control over identity definitions, that a range of key social processes can be understood as arising out of this struggle. Most notably, we will see that leadership is central to the origins of intergroup hostility. This is because conflict against “them” cannot be properly understood without also addressing the intragroup conflict about who truly represents “us.”
