Collective bargaining as the negotiation of competing stories

Abstract

Leaders assume to have recourse to narratives of crisis in order to legitimize their command authority to act as desired. Yet leaders are never the singular storytellers in organizations, and resistance to the stories they tell is possible. A recent case of collective bargaining is presented as a case of competing storytelling about an organization (a university). Drawing from excerpts from publicly available texts, the differences in narrative social construction are illustrated. The case highlights the central role for communications in leadership as leaders attempt to manage the sensemaking of organizational members through discursive activity. As a result, we are forced to rethink leadership as a set of dialectical relationships where meaning is co-constructed.