The production of outstanding leadership -- an analysis of leadership images in the Swedish media

In this paper the constructive and ideological aspects of (business) journalism provide the starting point for an exploration of the images of (outstanding) leadership (re)produced in the Swedish printed media. Using an ethnographic semantics method, articles in five major Swedish publications during two separate weeks were scanned, selected and analysed, resulting in 853 media statements about leadership subsumed under 60 leadership categories. These statements were further categorised and analysed, resulting in 12 underlying leadership themes that together suggest a dominant implicit model of leadership. The results were found to be consistent to some extent with central aspects of a "Swedish leadership style" as reported in previous studies, but they also gave rise to some interesting paradoxes. These paradoxes were partly resolved by introducing a distinction between leadership in a political as opposed to a business context. The analysis shows that institutional contexts seem to generate different implicit models of leadership, but within the same national framework. Excellent leadership is evidently exercised and enacted as an expression of socially constructed institutions and culturally grounded values.