Who Is In Charge Here? A Feminist Communicology Of Followership And Leadership In An Academic Organization

Abstract

This feminist critical study explicates the ways that followership is conceptualized at an academic organization in the Pacific Northwest. Through the use of qualitative methods, stories were solicited providing descriptions of events that define the hegemonically masculine ways that followership is conceptualized, suggesting the need for a feminist critical analysis and revisioning. A number of themes emerged from conversational interviews including: conceptual verisimilitude, archetypes of leadership, alternative conceptions of followership, the role of action in leadership and followership, and the emergent organization. The capta gathered from this qualitative study suggest a revisioning of human organization and recognizes leadership and followership as existing in a reciprocally defining communicative relationship. Leadership and followership are found to be constructed in an existential exchange addressing a specific need within an organization and its immediate requirements. When viewed from this communicative perspective organizational members come to develop a more sophisticated, relational, and dialectic understanding of the construction of leadership and followership.