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