Co-liderazgo en interacción: Un análisis del discurso multimodal durante una reunión de un movimiento juvenil

This article builds further on Gail Fairhurst’s influential work on leadership (2007), in which she foregrounds a discursive perspective on leadership and turns away from the ‘great man’ school of thought, which attempted to distinguish discerning characteristics and traits of leaders versus non-leaders. From such a discursive leadership perspective, leadership is conceptualized as a collaborative process that takes place in real life and that revolves around influencing others towards achieving organizationally relevant goals. This implies that all participants are actively involved in this process, thus problematizing the strict distinction between leaders and followers, and that leadership may be shared by two or more people. In this study, we look at the way in which such a shared co-leadership constellation is constructed in interaction and how it is continuously negotiated with the other participants. In order to do so, we adopt a multimodal discourse analytical approach to tease out the micro-processes of ‘doing’ leadership and use the conversation-analytic concepts of epistemics and (proximal and distal) deontics. Overall, we could conclude that our fine-grained multimodal analyses demonstrated the ways in which the (co-)leadership process is constantly negotiated through a complex interplay of participants’ epistemic and deontic statuses as well as the subsequent stances they express in interaction.