How does telling a life story help someone present themselves as a leader?

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Analyzing leaders’ life stories is widely regarded as a way to get at what defines their identity as leaders. Most research using these stories, however, treats them as resources for investigating leader identity. Little, if any, research examines the stories themselves as a research topic: how they are accomplished through interaction in a particular situation, sensitive to its context.

This paper analyzed a video-recorded extract of an alumni talk to MBA students at an American business school. It took a social constructionist approach to identity and used positioning theory as its methodology. Its purpose was to reveal the fine-grained process of talking oneself into being a “leader” by telling a life story, in that setting, as a “leader’s” life story.

The findings indicate that this leader identity is constructed through a complex interplay of three elements: characters within the storyworld; the here-and-now interaction among participants during the storytelling; and wider societal Discourses about what is, and is not, an acceptable leader identity.