ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on issues of the construction and reconstruction of identities as essential aspects of global leadership processes. It examines influential narratives constructed within global political leadership, revealing their roles as cultural formulations brought about by structural changes at the international level. Leadership is about generating change, introducing social practices, providing motivation and justification for them and allowing people to adjust to new contexts. Sense making is a leadership instrument through which, by virtue of filtering and interpreting, there is creation of facticity to render “the subjective” into cognitive constructs that are instinctively recognisable. The leadership relationship, just as every other meaningful interpersonal relationship, embodies particular assumptions about the world and the way it works, creating a persistent influence that does not dissolve simply because actors change their strategies. Few issues carry as much political weight as the identity issue.
