THE ENACTMENT OF LEADER IDENTITY IN ORAL NARRATIVES OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IN THE YOUTH ORGANIZATION AIESEC
THE ENACTMENT OF LEADER IDENTITY IN ORAL NARRATIVES OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IN THE YOUTH ORGANIZATION AIESEC

Summary/Abstract: Through using narratives as data and sociolinguistic narrative analysis and positioningtheory as analytical tools, the paper shows the discursive resources through which the enactment ofleadership and leader identity is achieved in narratives-in-interaction. The analysis centres on anarrative of personal AIESEC experience excerpted from a corpus of naturally-occurring oral storiesgenerated during video-based fieldwork at an international AIESEC conference in 2016 with the aimof teasing out leader identity within the context of narrative practice. To achieve this, sociolinguisticnarrative analysis (Labov & Waletsky 1967) has been coupled with positioning analysis (Bamberg1997) at the backdrop of the discursive approaches to leadership affiliating with a socialconstructionist stance on (leader) identity and emphasizing the primacy of discourse as a medium foridentity construction (Fairhurst 2007). These lines of investigation zoom in on the aspects of leaderidentity negotiated by AIESEC members in the narrative performance and indicate that leaderidentity is crafted through acts of identity at three interrelated levels: the narrative world, thenarrative interaction, and the wider sociocultural context, i.e. master narratives.

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