Chapter Five
Method
Methods adequate to a constitutive claim
Overview
If leadership is constituted through narrative, the methods that dominate leadership research are studying something else. This chapter makes that argument positionally rather than as a menu of options, and works through five analytical stances with the empirical projects that produced them.
It opens with an induction story told to new tax officials — treat negotiation like a game of chess — and shows how differently that material reads under content analysis and under structural analysis. It closes with three limitations stated plainly, on the grounds that pretending they do not exist would repeat the incoherence the chapter criticises elsewhere.
Key questions
- What is this method able to find, and what is it constitutionally unable to see?
- What is the gap between the official account and what people say off the record?
- Which stories cannot be told here, and what makes them unsayable?
- Whose interests does the polished retrospective account serve?
- How would I know if I were finding only what my apparatus prepared me to find?
Central concepts
Cases in this chapter
Work with it
Related lens: Method
Related tools: Narrative Landscape Mapper
Status: paraphrased from the manuscript · author review required