The Fishing President: Ritual in constructing leadership mythology

Abstract

We study leadership using anthropological and visual methodological viewpoints, starting from Lévi-Strauss' association of ritual and mythology. We explore the private fishing ritual of the Cold War era President of Finland, Urho Kekkonen and his political elite 'tribe' using visual discourse analysis. We show how the emergent leadership mythology was communicated both within and outside this tribe. The qualitative dataset consists of one primary and two secondary data types: photographs, and correspondence exchanges and media material fragments. We report our analysis through a photo-essay, in which the development of ritual and mythology is presented over time. Our theoretical contributions include showing the association of ritual and myth in the leadership context and how they are intertwined and how they also may separate, as well as the description of a primal leadership archetype, that of the hunter.

The ‘Corbyn Phenomenon’: Media Representations of Authentic Leadership and the Discourse of Ethics Versus Effectiveness

“…We began this article by highlighting the puzzle surrounding how an 'authentic leader', with all the positive moral connotations usually attached to this category in the existing literature and in naturally occurring discourse, could also be subject to persistent criticism. The media offers a unique context for understanding the social construction of authenticity in leadership and leaders, and in the political context especially our views of leaders are necessarily heavily influenced by television, newspapers and social media (Chen and Meindl 1991;Kuronen and Virtaharju 2013). But business leaders, too, are increasingly required to operate in the public eye and thus to balance representations of themselves and their activities as both ethical and effective.…”

Leading through ritual: Ceremony and emperorship in early modern China

“…In the leadership literature, a small but emerging discussion cites rituals as a mechanism by which ideological adhesion to leadership is achieved (Mumford et al., 2007) and leaders achieve mythical status (Kuronen and Virtaharju, 2015). Ritual provides an explanation of how situated “micro” events ground the formation, maintenance, and change of “macro” governance orders (Collins, 1981; Dacin et al., 2010; Powell and Colyvas, 2008; Summers-Effler, 2002).…”

“…Collins, 1981). While this theme is still nascent in the leadership literature, some authors stress the need to examine micro–macro linkages within leadership (Collinson and Grint, 2005; Islam, 2014), and others note how symbolic rituals are instrumental in creating leadership myths (Kuronen and Virtaharju, 2015). Recent perspectives on ritual (e.g.…”

“…With very few exceptions, however (e.g. Kuronen and Virtaharju’s, 2015 study of ritual in the symbolic construction of Presidential leadership in Finland; Mumford et al.’s 2007 quantitative link between ritual and ideological protection), little of this empirical literature has been applied to leadership (cf. Grint, 2010, for a theoretical link between ritual and leadership).…”

Leadership in the Contemporary Military: Mavericks in the Bureaucracy?

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