Description
In leadership studies two broad models of leadership can be identified: a traditional individualistic mode – presenting leadership as action and activity at the top of hierarchical organisations, highlighting the importance of influence and ‘power over’ people and environments - and a more relational, collective (sometimes cited as feminine or feminist) model of leadership. Understanding discourses in a constitutive sense, as “dynamic constellations of words and images that legitimate and produce a given reality” (Iverson, Allan and Gordon, 2017), I argue that signifiers associated with a traditional, individualistic model of leadership act as tropes or available resources from which presidential leadership in the United States is constructed.
This paper addresses findings from my multi-modal analysis of televised advertisements from the 2016 Presidential Election campaign, taking seriously the productive work done by visual imagery in the discursive construction of presidential leadership across these texts. Rather than aiming to trace how the use of particular visual and rhetorical tropes or devices might be explained by an individual candidates’ characteristics, background, or experience, my interest lies in unearthing the (limited) range of leadership styles or types that become associated with and accessible to modern presidential leaders through the images represented in candidate campaign communications.
