Leaders and Leadership: A Corpus-Based Approach for Evaluating the Evolution of Leadership

摘要

Much has been written about leaders and leadership, managers and management. The terms are often used interchangeably, (see http://thesaurus.reference.com). With rapid changes in technology, and the spread of capitalism, networks which use English as the common language are flourishing. Many authors have written about the affects this has had on management and leadership and the differences between the two. This paper reviews common definitions of leadership, explores some of the key concepts associated with the transition from the industrial to the information age, and the evolution of the terminology of leadership, and then reviews the results of a preliminary research project which uses a corpus-based methodology to analyse the text in a diachronic set of documents collated from the Leadership Quarterly 1990 to 2005. Future research will build on this study as the basis for reviewing other sources and domains in the field of leadership, modelling the relationship between cross-cultural issues and leaders in organizations.