Lens 3 of 6 · Chapter Three
Naming
What the word leader does before anyone has spoken
In plain terms
Naming is the act of calling something what it is — and, where the name is performative rather than descriptive, of bringing into being what it names. Saying you are a leader is not a report on an existing property. It is an act of casting.
Why it matters
This is where the book is at its most critical, and it is the part most easily lost when narrative is reduced to storytelling technique. Before a leader tells any story, someone has already been placed in the hero slot, and that placement imports a whole narrative logic: a quest, obstacles, a resolution, and followers who are by definition not the hero. The vocabulary of leadership performs ideological work that most of the people using it do not notice.
How the book develops it
Austin's distinction between constative and performative utterance does the opening work. Some utterances describe; some act. I name this ship does not report a fact, it makes one. The book's claim is that leader belongs in the second category, and that this makes naming the most elemental act of emplotment available in organisational life.
The drift is documented rather than asserted. Corpus evidence shows the collocations of leader migrating from political and historical contexts into corporate ones across recent decades, while manager acquired distinctly more limiting associations. In the Wall Street Journal, articles using managers fell from 4,481 a year in 1989 to 2,839 in 2017, while those using leaders rose from 3,235 to 4,911. Among the top ten US graduate business schools in 2017, nine referenced leadership in their mission statements and two management; in 1977 the proportions were the other way round.
The asymmetry is visible in what each word will take. A servant leader or an authentic leader is a standard item of management vocabulary. A servant manager or an authentic manager makes no cultural sense. Calling someone a great manager praises competence; calling them a great leader attributes something closer to innate distinction. The choice between the words is not terminological. It is political.
A substitution test makes the point concrete. Replace leader with manager and follower with worker throughout a serious piece of critical leadership scholarship and see whether the argument changes. In the case examined, it did not — which suggests the leadership vocabulary was doing less analytical work than it appeared to, while quietly obscuring a power asymmetry that the manager/worker pairing makes explicit.
The timing is not incidental either. The spread of leadership language runs alongside the rise of an individualising political economy, and the hero slot and the sovereign individual are structurally the same figure: both attribute to one person outcomes produced by cooperative labour, market conditions and inherited advantage.
Related concepts
Terms you will meet in this chapter, kept in the author's vocabulary:
One short example
A question to sit with
Take a sentence from your own organisation that uses leader or leadership. Substitute manager, colleague or group. What changes, and who loses standing when it does?
Where to go next
This lens is developed in Chapter Three: Naming.
Related tools: Critical Narrative Review · Narrative Landscape Mapper
Related cases: Made in Dagenham · Naming in the 2011 parliamentary debate
Status: paraphrased from the manuscript · author review required · no manuscript text reproduced