Taking a Narrative as Social Practice Approach to the Romance of Leadership, What New (Critical) Insights Are There to Be Had?

Abstract

Research that investigates the romance of leadership (ROL) neglects the real-world practice of romancing leadership. In order to address this lacuna, this paper investigates new (critical) insights that a narrative as social practice approach may bring to ROL. Using stories from a celebrity interview as data, this paper analyzes how the social practice of storytelling romances leadership. Reflexively considering the relationship between knowledge of leadership and the situated process of producing knowledge of leadership, findings add to prior work by making visible not only how organizational players romanticize leadership as part of in situ social practice, but they also demonstrate what romanticizing leadership ‘does’ as part of social practice. The paper closes with a discussion of the implications and new (critical) insights that taking a narrative as social practice approach to ROL can offer, and it argues for a more critical, and destabilizing, approach to teaching leadership in business schools and beyond.