Unpacking the narrative of non-positional leadership in academia: Hero and/or victim?

This article, based on narrative inquiry, explores how academics with/out formal leadership positions experience and understand themselves as leaders in their everyday working contexts. A single case of a fixed-term academic was chosen to illustrate how different analytical lenses – ‘plot analysis’ and ‘discourse analysis’ – can unpack the complexities of experience associated with non-positional leadership, a topic scarcely represented in studies of leadership in higher education. Two interdependent plots – the heroic plot and the victimised plot – were found to recur throughout the participant's narrative. These plots signified the conflictual dynamics and the unique subjectivity in which this person made sense of himself as a leader. The analytical lens was then shifted to pay greater attention to the ways in which broader networks of discourses were at play within this participant's narrative. Using discourse analysis, the discourses of autonomy and masculinity, among others, were present in constitut...