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Information is often defined in terms of meaning. Traditional theories of meaning, each with some drawbacks, have been rooted in language; but a more satisfactory theory of meaning may be rooted in information. Meaning can be defined as coordinated action toward some end. In this sense, the meaning of something is the way it affords and constrains actions, and it is therefore inextricable from its context. Meaning can be discussed in several senses, including personal, social, environmental, historical, political, etc. Because information studies is concerned with the intersection of people and information, two key conceptualizations of meaning are personal meaning and social meaning. When activities have this meaningful dimension, they make a person's life feel more valuable and worth living, as a person and/or as a member of a group. In general, personal and social meaning include aspects such as purpose and connection with others.

The purpose of the current innovative practice paper is to introduce a technique to explore leader identity development and meaning-making that builds on the narrative pedagogical tradition. In this paper, we recommend a process for combining turning-point graphing and responsive (semi-structured) interviews to co-explore leadership identity development and meaning-making with college students.

The paper provides student feedback data on the effectiveness of the technique in improving understanding of leader identity and transforming meaning-making.

We hope practitioners can utilize this approach to build leadership identity development and meaning-making capacity in college students.

The current paper is part of a larger scoping review project investigating the intersection of leader(ship) identity development and meaning-making. In this review, we analyzed 100 articles to determine the current extent of literature that covers the intersection of leader(ship) identity development, meaning-making and marginalized social identities.

A review of the extant literature is included, and a conceptual model is suggested for further exploration into this critical and under-researched domain.

More research is needed at the intersection of leadership identity development, meaning-making and marginalized social identities.

As this area of study has expanded, scholars have noted an absence of research on the effect of multiple social identities, especially marginalized identities, on meaning-making and leadership identity construction.

Most of the literature on strategic management portrays the strategic leader as a planner, decision formulator, and implementer of structure and processes. Theories of strategic management have not paid much attention to the essence of all leadership roles, namely the role of influencing others, and have not been much informed by leadership theories in this regard. In this chapter, I argue that the existing gap between the field of leadership and the field of strategic management can be bridged by paying closer attention to the fundamentally social and interpretative nature of the strategy formation and implementation, and in particular to the role of strategic leaders as managers of meanings. The chapter presents the idea of leadership as the management of meanings, applies this idea to the role of strategic leaders, offers a set of meanings to focus on when we consider strategic leaders as managers of meanings, discusses the link between meaning making and organizational performance, and attends to some potential dangers involved in viewing leaders as managers of meanings.

The design of a job is deeply consequential for employees’ psychological experiences at work. Jobs are collections of tasks and relationships that are grouped together and assigned to an individual (Ilgen & Hollenbeck, 1992), and scholars have long been interested in the way these elements come together to constitute the experience of a job (Griffin, 1987; Hackman & Oldham, 1980). Research in this area has traditionally built on a core assumption that managers design jobs in a top-down fashion for employees, which places employees in the relatively passive role of being the recipients of the jobs they hold.

To date, the vast majority of existing research on unethical leadership has focused on top leaders’ actions and behaviors as the primary catalyst for the permeation of unethical behaviors in organizations. In this chapter, we shift the focus to middle and junior managers and argue that they too have an active role in contributing to the permeation of top-level unethical leadership. More specifically, we adopt a meaning-making lens to investigate how junior and middle-level managers perceive and interpret top-level unethical leadership and how such meaning-making affects their (un)ethical legitimacy. Understanding the role played by lower-level managers becomes vitally important to develop a more holistic picture of the permeation of unethical leadership. Findings from 30 in-depth interviews with top, middle, and junior managers reveal variables such as survival, group membership, and strain as buttressing meaning-making by lower-level managers. Findings also revealed two contrasting aspects, that is, “interactions” within organizational members as well as “silence” by top-level managers playing into individuals’ information processing and attribution capacities during ethical dilemmas. Real cases experienced by participants pertaining to the flow of unethical leadership illustrate how the central bearings play out in managerial practice.

Relationships are socially constructed by companies in interaction. This study explains the dynamic character of business-to-business relationships with the aid of rules theory, a theory borrowed from the communications field. Two forms of rules are identified: constitutive rules guide the interpretation of the other's acts, and regulative rules guide the appropriate response to the interpreted act. Rules theory asserts that companies act as if applying these rules. Relationships provide not only the context in which the parties’ acts are performed but are also the result of such acts. Thus, relationships are potentially reshaped each time one party performs an act and the other party gives meaning to that act and reacts.