Speakers
Description
As an important component of authentic leadership, trustworthiness is omnipresent in the context of leaders of social responsibility and their social media presence. While essentialist views of trustworthiness and authenticity have dominated early scholarship, emerging perspectives argue that such values are constructed discursively (Clifton et al., 2020). Thus, being informed by such previous research (Mueller et al., 2019), our study aims to examine tweets by Haluk Levent, who has been a remarkably important and extraordinarily influential figure following the earthquakes in Turkey in February 2023. More specifically, we focus on the following research question: What are the discourse-level strategies in Haluk Levent’s tweets to construct trustworthiness and authenticity as an extraordinarily trusted leader of social responsibility? We have analyzed tweets by Haluk Levent posted between February 6 and April 6. We have created a corpus of over 400 tweets by Haluk Levent in Turkish using an Excel spreadsheet and taking screenshots of the tweets. Also, relying on discourse analytic approaches (Gee & Handford, 2012) and research on digital discourse (Vásquez, 2022), our preliminary analysis indicates that trustworthiness in his unifying discourse is supported by strategies, such as the frequent use of we language often inclusive of the audience, the sense of modesty constructed through his acknowledgement of others’ work and downplay of his own involvement, the notion of accountability both through an emphasis on institutional transparency and frequent calls to government offices for cooperation, and finally self-deprecating humor with his emphasis on commitment and consistency and establishment of himself as an atypical character. These findings are discussed in the context of authentic leadership scholarship and the specific sociocultural context of post-earthquake Turkey.
References:
Clifton, J., Schnurr, S., & Van De Mieroop, D. (2020) The language of leadership narratives: A social practice perspective. Routledge.
Gee, J.P., & Handford, M. (2012). The Routledge handbook of discourse analysis. New York:
Routledge.
Vásquez, C. (2022). Research methods for digital discourse analysis. New York: Bloomsbury Discourse Series.
Mueller, F., Whittle, A., & Gadelshina, G. (2019) The discursive construction of authenticity: The case of Jeremy Corbyn. Discourse, Context & Media, 41, Article: 100324
