Social Construction and Leadership

‘Social construction’ is an orientation to ‘reality making’ in which reality is approached as socially defined and constructed intersubjectively between social actors through situated, historical, temporal, and relational practices. As opposed to positivism and empiricism, which assume an objective, universal, and measurable reality, social construction views phenomena such as leadership not as essential or natural, but as culturally, historically, and politically specific and relative. Phenomena are constructed through social processes and interactions which choose, sustain, and exclude some interpretations and meanings over others.

Given that individuals tend to experience everyday life as largely external and independent of the self, social construction prompts them to investigate their own individual and collective assumptions and analyse the social forces that lead them to understand phenomena in certain ways and ...