Seongsook Choi

Exploring distributed leadership : solving disagreements and negotiating consensus in a 'leaderless' team

This article explores how leadership is done in a ‘leaderless’ team. Drawing on a corpus of more than 120 hours of audio-recorded meetings of different interdisciplinary research groups and using a discourse analytic framework and tools, we examine how leadership is enacted in a team that does not have an assigned leader or chair. Our specific focus is the discursive processes through which team members conjointly solve disagreements and negotiate consensus – which are two activities associated with leadership. More specifically, we analyse how meaning is collaboratively constructed and how team members arrive at a solution in those instances where there is some kind of disagreement, or even conflict, among team members. This discourse analytic study thus contributes to leadership research in two ways: i) by exploring some of the discursive processes through which leadership is actually performed in a ‘leaderless team’; and ii) by looking at a largely under-researched leadership constellation, namely distributed leadership. We thereby illustrate some of the benefits that discourse analytical approaches offer to an understanding of the specific processes that are involved in the complexities of leadership performance.

How Leadership Works

This chapter, the final analytical chapter in the book, explores the dynamics of leadership and the different forms it can take in research project meetings. It addresses the ways in which leadership activities and processes such as decision-making, negotiating and reaching consensus are discursively constructed by team members, and how different forms of leadership are instantiated through research interactions.

Knowledge Exchange in Initial Meetings

This chapter is the first of two chapters with an epistemological focus. These examine the extent to which a standard model of stages in interdisciplinary research can be applied to the data set used in the book, beginning in this chapter with interaction in initial meetings. It begins with an introduction to work on epistemics in talk then develops an analysis of two initial interdisciplinary meetings on different subjects and with different aims. For the purposes of comparison, it also includes a brief consideration of an initial meeting in an interdiscipline: systems biology.

The Disciplinary Landscape

This chapter focuses on the disciplines because these are the foundations of all interdisciplinary work. It provides a historical context for understanding some of the forces that influence the development of interdisciplinarity, working towards a conclusion that makes the case for the importance of interactional relationships in interdisciplinary communities. The chapter includes three cases that illustrate the complex relationship between disciplines and interdisciplines, and the different ways in which new interdisciplines emerge.

The Collaborative Construction of Knowledge

This chapter completes work begun in Chap. 5 on stages in interdisciplinary research. This time attention is directed to the way in which knowledge is constructed collaboratively. The analysis draws on data from a number of interdisciplinary meetings, some from within systems biology involving different projects and others from a specific research project bringing together the social sciences, biology, mathematics and economics. The second part of the chapter identifies a discourse marker that plays an important part in the building of understanding and draws attention to a significant interactional pattern in which it features. In its conclusion the chapter returns to the issue of terminology in interdisciplinary engagement and challenges a widely accepted claim.