Methodology
The study of leadership as a discourse provides considerable insights
into how scholars, practitioners, and the public perceive leadership.
Various spaces of discursive practices can be studied to understand
leadership discourses. One such discursive practice space is the
business media that devotes considerable effort in disseminating
information about leadership. While understanding the discourse of
leadership in the context of business media offers insights into the
dominant meaning of leadership that the business media present, it is
also useful to look at discourse strategies that these writers adopt to
communicate meanings about leadership. This study attempted to analyze
the discourse strategies employed in five business e-magazines, and the
findings indicate that writers exploit lexical, syntactic, and textual
methods to present their meanings of leadership.
The present study is part of a larger project on exploring the discourse
of leadership in the business media. The project looks at leading
business media and their coverage of leadership. A universe of
texts for the project was sampled through online searches for leading
outlets that feature leadership texts to a wide audience. The sampling
criteria include the following: i) readership reach as confirmed by the
size of print circulation or number of readers; and ii) frequency or
regularity in which the topic “leadership” and related issues are
featured as measured by having a regular section totally devoted to the
subject “leadership.” As a process, five online business magazines
were identified, and these magazines are Forbes,Entrepreneur, Fast Company , Inc, andFortune . These e-magazines (which also have print circulations)
cover leadership extensively and regularly either as news items (e.g.,
when they feature news of CEOs) or feature articles contributed by
business journalists, CEOs, leadership trainers, coaches, consultants,
and gurus.
Table 1