TOWARD A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP
ANTONIO MARTURANO
Centre for Leadership Studies
University of Exeter
Xfi Building
Rennes Drive
Exeter
EX4 4ST
Tel: +44 (0)1392 262580
Fax: +44 (0)1392 262462
Email: Antonio.Marturano@exeter.ac.uk
MARTIN WOOD
Department of Management Studies
University of York
JONATHAN GOSLING
Centre for Leadership Studies
University of Exeter
1
TOWARD A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP
ABSTRACT
Process theories of leadership emphasize its relational nature but lack a substantial method of
analysis. We offer an account of leadership as a language-game, employing the concepts of
opaque context and propositional attitudes. Using established methods of linguistic analysis,
we reformulate Weber’s understanding of charismatic leadership. A by-product of this
approach is to limit the epistemological role of individual psychology in leadership studies,
and to increase the relevance of linguistic and semantic conventions.
2
“Without a powerful modern philosophical
tradition, without theoretical and empirical
cumulation … we lack the very foundations for
knowledge of a phenomenon – leadership … that touches and shapes our lives” (Burns,
1978, p. 3)
INTRODUCTION
Taking a clue from the seminal work of Burns (1978), this paper will take a modern
philosophical approach, beyond the oft-repeated return to classical philosophers (Grint, 2000;
Adair, 2003). Amongst modern philosophies, post-modern ‘continental’ traditions have
recently been popular in organization studies, focusing attention especially on the
‘genealogy’ of power relations (Foucault, 1977) and habits of thought exposed by ‘process
philosophies’ (Chia, 1999; Tsoukas and Chia, 2002; Wood, 2003; Wood, 2005). But so far
there has been very little application of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of analytical philosophy to
the field of organization studies, in spite of the growing interest in semiotics (CzarniawskaJoerges, and Joerges, 1990).
This paper proposes an analytical philosophical foundation to leadership studies. Analytic
philosophy attempts to clarify, by analysis, the meaning of statements and concepts. It
emphasizes a clear, precise approach with particular weight being placed upon argumentation
and evidence, avoidance of ambiguity, and attention to detail. As such, our approach is an
alternative
to
psychologically oriented
approaches,
performative
business-oriented
approaches, and normative ethical approaches. According to Ciulla (1998a), leadership
studies rests on a paradigm based primarily on the work done in business and psychology1.
Our research turns to a different methodological paradigm: studying leadership phenomena
philosophically from both a language and a logic point of view.
3
This change of perspective allows us to discover semiotic mechanisms in the leadership field
and, importantly, without the need to define a leader as such. Our analysis bypasses this
troubling problem in the field (see for instance Rost, 1991)2, and shows that neither a precise
notion nor a shared definition of a leader is necessary.
The aim of this paper is to provide a rational reconstruction3 of the leadership phenomenon
focusing on the notion of a language game (Wittgenstein, 1953); this is not the first attempt
to use the notion either in management (see Astley and Zammuto, 1992; Mauws and Phillips,
1995) or in Leadership studies (Astley and Zammuto, 1992, Pondy, 1979), but it is the first
time the notion has been used systematically to produce a precise description of leadership.
Leadership will be reconstructed as a language game; in particular it is the object language of
a discipline, namely Leadership studies that makes assertions about that language game: such
assertions can be viewed as a meta-language game. This distinction (along with the
distinction between the normative viz. the descriptive level) will turn out to be very useful in
understanding some of the conceptual problems Leadership studies usually faces.
PLAN OF THE PAPER
In the first and second sections, we will adopt a process theory perspective in order to
criticize the conventional ‘individualistic’ approaches to leadership studies and their
normative assumption that leaders have certain ‘essential’ attributes that can be identified,
measured and developed. On the contrary, we will focus on the relational nature of
leadership, based on the mutual exchange between followers and leaders. We will argue that
the very core of leadership lies in this mutual exchange.
Analysis of the leader-follower relationship has drawn on theories of personality (Wenger,
1998), social dynamics (Hollander, 1998; Weber, 1925), group dynamics (Rice, 1965);
psychological contract (Conger and Kanungo, 1987, 1992, 1994; Raelin, 2002), and
economic exchange (Hermalin, 1998; Jensen, 1994). From our philosophical perspective, the
4
reality of leadership shifts from the generalized “minds and hearts of leaders and followers”
(a subject belonging to psychology), to something more particular and having no
psychological implications. In doing so we do not reject a theory of traits; we will try to make
it more subtle and sophisticated without making a reference to any psychological
background. The novelty of our approach is that we reduce traits to meanings, which belong
to language and not to an individual’s psychology. In other words, this paper will construct
human relations in general and the leadership-followership relations in particular, as
linguistic activities: language-games. Which kind of linguistic relations constitute the
language-game of leadership? What is the real meaning of sentences like: “The person such
and such is a leader”?
People use words with a broadly understood meaning but one not easily defined. The lack of
close definition in leadership theory is not the result of inadequate theory; it is an essential
feature of language that enables words to have a symbolic value beyond a mere denotative or
representational use. Language - including talk about leadership – creates and
institutionalizes those symbols as “fact-like”. Searle, for example, points out that “language is
partly constitutive of institutional facts amounts to the claim that institutional facts essentially
contain some symbolic elements in this sense of “symbolic”: there are words, symbols, or
other conventional devices that mean something or express something or represent or
symbolize something beyond themselves [that is according to a code of beliefs, norms and
values], in a way that is publicly understandable” (Searle, 1995: 60-61, original emphasis).
Moreover, language also contains expressions that suggest properties that “are not intrinsic to
the entities but are imposed by or derived from the intrinsic intentionality of humans” (ibid.).
More importantly language is the means by which humans create social phenomena such as
leadership or money and these exist only if people have certain sorts of beliefs, values or
5
other attitudes (Searle, cit.: 63) within social relationships in which symbols play a central
role.
Therefore, a necessary step will be to characterize these relationships as language-games. In
doing so we avoid the need for a specific ontology of leaders or leadership. Nor are we
making claims about the psychological and cognitive states of individuals or groups, because
we are accepting nominalistic-conceptualistic points of view (see note 7).
In the third section we will deal with the idea that relations are made of and are arising from
actual linguistic practice. When one person perceives another as “a leader”, s/he is saying
something that has meaning in a shared symbolic linguistic medium, and only secondarily
referring to the person s/he describes. But perceiving a person as a leader is to ascribe to them
a quality they don’t possess naturally. Some peculiar characteristics (such as being-a-leader)
emerge from such linguistic activities and are not based on a particular and esoteric ontology
of traits. On the contrary, these qualities are not dependent on a direct reference to the
observed object, but to the way in which this reference is given. This way of referring is
constituted by the intension and by the expression in which we make reference to that
perceived object. Changing reference (and therefore intension) could change its
identification4.
In the remainder of the paper we construct our linguistic approach to leadership. We will
analyze relationships in terms of propositional attitudes; that is in terms of sentences, which,
for example, typically are sentences like: “it is thought that”, “it is believed that”, or “it is
known that”. Additionally we will analyze (starting from Quine’s approach, 1960) a
particular feature of propositional attitudes, which is their referential opacity, in order to
understand their logic and therefore aspects of the logic of the language game of leadership.
Finally we will examine the historically controversial notion of charismatic leadership, in
order to show how our analysis of leadership in terms of referential opacity and propositional
6
attitudes powerfully explains the logic behind “charismatic leadership” without using
ontological presuppositions. Our conclusions turn out to be surprisingly close to Max
Weber’s view.The paper will end suggesting further studies arising from the use of the notion
of language game into the realm of leadership.
THEORIES OF LEADERSHIP
Public attention and interest in leadership typically reflects highly romanticized views of the
personal qualities and capabilities of a few “outstanding” individuals (Den Hartog et al, 1999;
Meindl et al, 1985). Such observations emphasize leadership as “the premier force in the
scheme of organizational events” (Meindl et al, 1985: 79). Alternatively, leadership is seen as
a form of social influence, based on communication and relationships between leaders and
followers, within a work setting (Engle and Lord, 1997; Pondy, 1999). Here, leadership is
“recognized based on the fit between an observed person’s characteristics with the perceivers
implicit ideas of what “leaders” are” (Den Hartog et al, 1999: 225). Thus, extant leadership
theories broadly can be located between “self-oriented” approaches, based on an outstanding
leader’s personal characteristics, and “socially oriented” methods, in which the leadership
offered by an individual is perceived in terms of relations to others.
In each case, leadership research can be traced from the trait approach (Stogdill, 1948),
through the behavioral and contingency schools (Burns, 1960; Blake and Mouton, 1964;
Fiedler, 1967), situational leadership (Hersey and Blanchard, 1977) and transformational
leadership (Bass, 1985; Bass and Avolio, 1994). Classical trait theories argue great leaders
are ‘born and not made’. They are said to have natural leadership based on certain personality
characteristics. As might be expected, these approaches equate leadership with a set of selforiented values, qualities and behaviors exhibited by superiors that encourage the
participation, development, and commitment of subordinates. Their legacy suggests leaders
do or should have the ability to control and influence the fates of the organisations in their
7
charge (Meindl et al, 1985, p. 96). It is leaders who impress others; inspire people; push
through transformations; get the job done; have compelling, even gripping, visions; stir
enthusiasm; and have personal magnetism (Maccoby, 2000).
Nonetheless, such one-dimensional, almost iconographic, ideas of the leader as a multitalented individual, with diverse skills, personal qualities and a large social conscience, pose
at least two difficulties. First, the liberal focus on observable behaviour and interests typically
promotes naïve individualism: I am a visionary, I communicate well, I encourage
participation, I build teams, I am clear what needs to be achieved, and so on. Second, whilst
personal qualities of the leader are undoubtedly important they are unlikely to be sufficient in
themselves for the emergence and exercise of leadership. Observers tend to overestimate the
role of leadership to explain and account for organizational activities and outcomes (Meindl
et al, 1985). One implication is that leadership is not as important as normally thought – at
least not in this naïve individualist sense. For example, Pfeffer (1977) argues the meaning and
behavioral attributes of leadership remain ambiguous and the literature assessing the
magnitude of the effects of leaders is equivocal. He points out “there are few meaningful
distinctions between leadership and other concepts of social influence” (Pfeffer, 1977: 110).
The belief in leadership effects, he continues, only “provides a simple causal framework and
a justification for the structure of the social collectivity” (ibid: 110). Again, the implication is
that a focus on the exceptional actions of one person (guru, teacher, icon or hero) may fail to
recognize the importance of a given social context. Thus, the enthusiasm for attributing
causation to individual leaders solely may be a little injudicious. It might be that the
importance of leadership is actually contingent upon social processes, leading to the selection
of only those who match the socially constructed image.
The idea that leadership should be understood as a form of social influence is highly
consistent with models of social interactions at interpersonal levels. These models attend
8
variously to the important impact of leadership style (Blake and Mouton, 1964), the
contingency in particular work situations and organisational contexts that are important to a
manager when attempting to decide which style is likely to be most appropriate (Fiedler,
1967; Hersey and Blanchard, 1977), and the role of a leader in setting the goals for a
subordinate and identifying appropriate paths toward these goals (House, 1971).
Furthermore, the shift in emphasis over recent years, from planned goals to visions, from
communication to trust, from traits to self awareness and from contingency to effective
presentation, distinguishes between economically driven models of transactional-leadership
and the transformational, and sometimes transcendent, appearance of leaders (Bass, 1985).
Transformational leaders “move followers to go beyond their self-interests to concerns for
their group or organization” (Bass and Avolio, 1997, p. 202). Yet, a consideration of
inspirational leadership may simply mark an avowed return to neo-traitism, elevating those
activities that “engage people and rouse their commitment to company goals” (Goffee and
Jones, 2000: 63) and so represent a blatant retreat to the much criticized heroics of stand
alone leaders.
Subsequently, attention has been devoted to the differing relationships that supervisors
develop with subordinates within a work setting (see, for example, Graen and Scandura,
1987). Graen and his colleagues’ leader-member exchange (LMX) model is an influential
approach grounded in role theory. It is based on the concept of a leader’s relational identity.
The focus is on a “developed” or socially “negotiated” leadership role and it suggests a
“vertical dyadic relationship”, in which superiors have a vested interest in the role
performance of a subordinate and will exert pressure on the subordinate in the form of a role
expectation episode (Dienesch and Liden, 1986). The model represents a qualified
individualism, in as much as it accepts leaders “can profoundly influence subordinates’ selfconcepts, and thereby influence follower behavior” (Lord et al, 1999: 167). It defines two-
9
dimensional communication and relationships to which both leaders and followers can
contribute and that both parties value, in the belief this will result in higher satisfaction and
deliver improved organizational performance (ibid).
In that which follows we will analyze the notion of leadership in three steps. In the first step
we analyze two conceptual errors usually committed in our opinion by theories of leadership;
thereafter we will give an alternative idea, a competitor, for the notion of leadership.
TWO CONCEPTUAL ERRORS IN LEADERSHIP THEORIES
A first conceptual error in leadership theory turns upon the idea that leadership is a
personality trait. Great achievers are distinguished from most people by their talents, their
accomplishments, and their personality characteristics. It is their exceptional qualities and
abilities that set them apart, or grade them as different. This proposal assigns personal
responsibility for organizational events, rather than the workings of impersonal forces, which
in turn remain as elusive concepts. It points to the need to protect the separateness, and
perhaps cohesiveness, of leaders. That is to say, the magnitude of the effects that grades them
as different – usually established through some output or effectiveness measure. But such
generalizations, like the choice of a new CEO fundamentally altering a market and financial
position that has developed over years, are not supportable by the data (Pondy, 1978).
Mintzberg has made this point several times and repeats it once more when he questions
Fortune magazine’s assertion that “within four years, Lou Gerstner added more than $40
billion to IBM’s shareholder value. All by himself?” (Mintzberg, 2004: 22, original
emphasis).
The key point is that the superficial emphasis on personal qualities may usefully articulate
some of the things that a person does, is, or aspires to, but simply doing these things may still
do little to get effective leadership done. At best, we can arrive at a list of features that are
common to this community of individuals, which may be necessary, but are hardly sufficient
10
to constitute the rarefied initiator envisaged within earlier debates. I may endeavor to know
myself – my strengths, my values, how I best perform, where I belong, and what I should
contribute (Drucker, 1999). I may even be visionary, communicative and honest, balance
respect for the individual and for the task at hand, and yet still find leadership to be elusive.
So, these qualities and roles out to be ascriptive, i.e. ascribed to people in a particular role,
rather than descriptive.
A second conceptual error in leadership theories emerges out of attempts at solutions to the
first. It flows from a resistance to the thing-oriented language that truncates overarching
leadership processes and relationships and through which doubts about assigning personal
responsibility for organizational events are posed. This is the refusal to accept a leader’s
separate and cohesive individuality and is resolved by the constitution of an “other”, against
which they define themselves. Once the leader is no longer treated as a separate and cohesive
thing-in-themselves, they cease to have a positive identity. Any subsequent identity is marked
only in the process of negating its nothingness. To continue the self-reassurance of his or her
identity the leader must actively engage with (negate) what he or she is not. It is this tactic of
the negative determination that enables Hegel to declare all differences are consolidated in an
Identity of identity and opposition – which is both negative and oppositional (Widder, 2002).
Without this opposition “being will fade into nothingness” (Hardt, 1993: 3-4). Logically,
however, it also consolidates the place of the opposite and identifies it – the ‘other’ is itself an
identity. Thus, this second conceptual error rests on an identity-politics, in which the certainty
of a leader’s self-identity “through its own nature relates itself to the other” (Hegel, quoted in
Houlgate, 1999: 99). The dual nature of this relationship means the self-reassurance of a
leader’s identity is constituted through the construction of otherness and so the displacement
of a leader’s individuality is only partial.
11
For example, in LMX theory leaders’ and members’ influence over each other’s attitudes and
behaviors is now seen as an important component in the leadership role. But nonetheless, the
LMX model continues to assume the separateness and cohesiveness of leaders, whose
identity is constructed and consolidated within “interpersonal” (inter-person) exchange
relationships (Dienesch and Liden, 1986). LMX theory sees the leadership role emerging as
the result of a series of discrete exchanges/relations between separate leaders and individual
members. It continues to understand perceptual experience through simple dyadic elements,
which it sees as fundamentally constitutive of the “reality” within which we find leadership.
Yet, this type of dyadic model is inadequate because we cannot say once and for all that
either leaders or individual members exists before, after, or in parallel to the other, or that one
is like or not like the other. Moreover, for there to be an interface between things, they must
be different; they must be at least two things: the product of two; a valence of two; a group of
two; a couple; from the Late Latin dyas and the Greek duas: two (Soanes and Stevenson,
2003).
Dienesch and Liden’s (1986) critique of LMX theory intends to support and extend Graen
and his colleagues’ earlier research. But, it is precisely this tendency to support earlier claims,
and thereby divert attention from a fuller engagement with several entrenched concepts
within the LMX approach, which is the focus of our critique. LMX theory denotes an
exchange relationship between two separate and cohesive “things” – “supervisors” and
“subordinates” in Graen and his colleagues’ early research – “each one, being, included in
itself and including only itself” (Deleuze, 1993: 44), each being capable of entering into
discrete exchange/relations, which in turn remain as an external aspect of the things related. It
is this position with which we have particular difficulty. Leadership can be approached as a
process as opposed to a thing, as an ongoing accomplishment, sustained through qualitative
change, rather than separate and cohesive entities. As we experience it, leadership is not some
12
combination of separate leaders and individual members in direct face-to-face interaction.
Instead, its character extends into a portion of both separate leaders’ behaviour and individual
members’ minds and words as a “predicate”, an “unlocalizable primary link”, or “infinite
fold” (Deleuze, 1993: 111). Leadership ‘is nothing but a succession of qualitative changes,
which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to
externalise themselves in relation to one another’ (Bergson, 1910: 104). Whilst leadership
researchers have come to know and use terms such as “‘process” and “interdependency”,
there remains an urgent need for the ramifications of these insights to be more sufficiently
developed: we have come to know only very weak versions of these concepts.
AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH
Lord and colleagues (1999) believe their self-oriented approach can provide a rich basis for
theory development currently not considered by leadership researchers. They suggest personal
and social identities are highly stable schemas and thereby valuable in understanding
leadership processes. Nonetheless, heavy dependence on theory framed in terms of
generalized leadership concepts might actually reflect an implicit narrowing of options. For
example, Den Hartog and her colleagues (1999: 219) argue “that specific aspects of
charismatic/transformational leadership are strongly and universally endorsed across
cultures”. Such “universalizing” conceptualisations might enable “communication and
exchange of information about the categorized entities” (ibid, p. 226), but nonetheless, given
the large variations of cultural experience, they are just as likely to express entrenched and
strongly branded contingencies, cultivated by homogeneous groups of “middle managers”
from “selected industries” (Den Hartog et al, 1999: 233), which can prove highly resistant to
reconstitution.
As the current discussion intends to illustrate, extant leadership theories focus strongly on the
self-reassurance of identity, or else firmly remain within a comparatively contestable socio-
13
psychological process of categorization in which dyadic members can be conceptualized
clearly. In both cases, the aim is to reduce “the complexity of the external world by
organizing information about an infinite number of stimuli into a smaller number of
categories” (Den Hartog et al, 1999, p. 226). But in doing so, the tendency is to rely upon
hypothetical labels and categories exclusively rather than plunge into a world of intensive
relations of interdependence that always exceeds our categorizing reaches. This is why, in
what follows, we seek to re-establish a qualitative continuity with our perceptual sense of
leadership – a continuity that is no longer based on hypothetical conceptualizations, but a
more precise description of leadership behavior as it is experienced and lived – through
linguistic practice.
Our alternative approach pursues the conviction that leadership is no longer based upon some
combinatory series involving “leader behaviors, subordinate perceptions, and resulting
outcomes” (Lord et al, 1999: 197) but is now raised to the state of being the internal
characteristic of each: the relation is leadership itself, a freely interpenetrating process,
whose “identity” is consistently self-differing. Our particular contribution is to consider
leadership as an “opaque context”, one that disturbs the dogmatism of identity and folds
concern for identity-politics into the paradox and tension of internal difference (Connelly,
1991). It is the hitherto “excluded middle”; the “in” of the “between” (Wood, 2003; Wood,
2005), in which difference is something itself; the difference of identity itself. The idea is that
leadership is always “vague” (Russell, 1995). It is a perception, made of, and enacted by
actual linguistic practice.
Our argument is that social processes of relevance that are
dependent on mutual values and belief sets, and which are embedded within actual linguistic
structures and uses, invoke leadership. In other words, we are now aware that leadership is
enacted in a linguistic process of production and no longer simply the property of exceptional
individuals or the result of a dyadic interface. An important task is to look at these rich,
14
linguistic processes and examine the evidence for our claim that leadership, in a much more
primary sense than typically endorsed by extant leadership theories, is to be found within
relations.
We now turn our attention to the notion of propositional attitudes that constitute the typical
language-game of leadership. In the following, we analyze a particular feature of
propositional attitudes: their referential opacity. Starting with Quine’s (1961) approach, we
first describe the notion of referential opacity.
THE NATURE OF REFERENTIAL OPACITY
What is referential opacity? Different names or words may be used for referring to the same
thing; that is, using a more technical language, different names or words referring to the same
thing can be freely substituted. In other words, given a true statement of identity, one of its
two terms may be substituted for the other in any true statement and the result will be true (or
rule of substitutivity or principle of indiscernibility of identicals, or Leibniz Law 5). For
example, the sentences
(1) Silvio Berlusconi is the Owner of Mediaset
(2) Silvio Berlusconi is a supporter of Milan FC,
are true and this is called referential transparency (see Quine, 1961: 142n); we can substitute
in the sentence (2) “Silvio Berlusconi ” with “the Owner of Mediaset ” and we will still have
a true sentence.
On the contrary when the referent is part of a sentence that follows a mental state verb such
as “it is thought that”, “it is believed that”, or “it is known that” (that is a propositional
attitude6) the above will not hold: that is called referential opacity.
Let us consider the following sound argument:
(A) The Italian Prime Minister is the Owner of Mediaset
15
(B) The Owner of Mediaset is a successful leader
(C) ├ The Italian Prime Minister is a successful leader
The fact that the third sentence follows from (A) and (B) is due to a certain property of the
identity relation, that is the so-called Leibniz’s Law (see footnote 4), or the law of
substitution of identicals: two things are identical if and only if they share all their properties;
therefore we are allowed to freely substitute them in a sentence. In the argument (A) we can
substitute the expressions “The Italian Prime Minister” and “The Owner of Mediaset”;
therefore the property of “being a successful leader” belonging to “The Owner of Mediaset”
can also be ascribed to “The Italian Prime Minister” in virtue of Leibniz’s Law.
Sentences (B) and (C) are implicit attributions of propositional attitude. Their utterance
implies the belief (in followers and others) that the owner of Mediaset is a successful leader.
Thus a propositional attitude is implied in sentences (B) and (C). To make it a genuine
attribution of propositional attitude, we should restate the sentence thus:
(B*) Tony believes that the owner of Mediaset is a successful leader.
We take this up in the following argument, wherein we make exactly the same claim as the
first premise and the same structure of argumentation (namely hypothetical syllogism7), but,
now that we recognize the implicit propositional attitude, the result turns out in to be the
opposite. Since it is possible for the premises to be both true and the conclusion false, the
argument is fallacious or is deductively invalid:
(D) The Italian Prime Minister is the Owner of Mediaset
(E) Tony believes that the Italian Prime Minister is a successful leader
(F) Tony believes that the Owner of Mediaset is a successful leader
In order to make the above argument deductively valid we should add another premise, which
is:
16
(G) Tony believes that (D - The Italian Prime Minister is the Owner of Mediaset)
The structure of this reasoning is the same, because a property belonging to “The Italian
Prime Minister” is asserted, that is the property of being-believed-to-be-a-successful-leaderby-Tony. According to Leibniz’s Law such a property should also belong to the Owner of
Mediaset. But (without G) Tony would not understand such an identity, namely the Owner of
Mediaset is the same person as the Italian Prime Minister (that is Mr. Berlusconi): this is
exactly what is called referential opacity. This example shows that something intrinsic to
logic must have changed when we went over from the first to the second (propositional
attitude) reasoning. When we recognize (B) as a propositional attitude, which we do in (E),
we are obliged to recognize (F) and (G) as belief attributions too. When we add epistemic and
intensional operators (such as the “belief” operator) to standard logic, we get puzzling cases
that seem to violate Leibniz’s Law. Even the following sentences:
(H) Tony believes that the Italian Prime Minister is a successful leader
(I) Tony believes that the Owner of Mediaset is not a successful leader
could both be true! Let’s imagine, indeed, that Tony is not able to understand that “The
Italian Prime Minister” and “Owner of Mediaset” are referring to the same person, both
sentences could be true. There is nothing unsound in recognizing these two sentences as true,
that is believing (E) – namely believing Mr. Berlusconi the politician is a successful leader is not incompatible with believing (F) – namely believing Mr. Berlusconi the businessman is
an unsuccessful leader, or vice versa. But even if Tony knows that Mr. Berlusconi (that is the
referent which in both sentences does not change) is actually both the Italian Prime Minister
and the Owner of Mediaset, he may still make these utterances without unsoundness because
he is using “successful leader” in two different senses attached to two different beliefs about
“being a leader” in business and in politics. In the first case “Italian Prime Minister” has a
17
different sense to “owner of Mediaset”, even if we employ “successful leader” in the same
sense. In the second case, “successful leader” is employed with two different senses.
The notion of leadership, which we assume to be dependent upon a contingent framework, is
now clarified: it is addressed as a set of beliefs and values in a speaker or a set of speakers; in
this sense, for example, Hitler was indisputably a leader because he came to embody values,
norms and beliefs of a majority of the German community through actual language games in
Germany at that time. The characteristics of ‘leader-ness’ will be different in each community
(see for example Tucker, 1968). In a separate set of language games, the academic discipline
of leadership studies may address the fact of Hitler’s leadership by, for example, evaluating
his effectiveness or morality. This is a meta-language game, free from the set of the values,
norms and beliefs (in a similar sense to Weber’s notion of Wertfrei), which actually
constituted Hitler as leaderful.
Furthermore, our approach can explain the limits of Den Hartog and colleagues (1999) claim
that “specific aspects of charismatic/transformational leadership are strongly and universally
endorsed
across
the
cultures„
(idem:
219).
Such
attributes
associated
with
charismatic/transformational leadership that the authors claim to be “universally seens as
contributing to outstanding leadership, (idem) are rather very abstract traits which are not
saying anything about the meanings they actually have in different cultures and language
games. A more abstract definition can be always found starting from spheres of distinct
realities. This definition will be still able to unify those spheres by means of a semantic
ascension, but such an abstracting process cannot take into account the actuality of those
spheres of reality. For example, the fact that a leader needs to be recognised as such by
his/her group of followers would be understood as a trait shared by every culture, but that
lacks to address these particular differences that each culture use to individuate a leader. Den
Hartog and colleagues, in other words, confuses a metalinguistic abstraction (such as, for
18
example, Charisma) with the relativedness with which each culture address a leadership time
after time (for example, the way in which charisma is enacted in different cultures). Den
Hartog and colleagues’ claim that there are universal traits in a leader needs to be explained
at the level of a meta-language; on the other hand, how a leader is recognised is explained
only at the level of an object-language in relation to a set of beliefs, norms and values. Den
Hartog and colleagues simply did confuse these two different levels.
Importantly, ‘traits’ (interpreted as propositional attitudes) ascribed to persons have, so to
speak, a psychology independent status – they have meaning (sense + reference) only in the
language game of a particular community and therefore are not rooted in someone’s actual
psychology. Moreover, trait theory is often viewed as an alternative to style theory
(authoritarian, facilitative, etc.), but in our analysis we have shown that that they are not
really alternatives, in that neither deal with the relational nature of leadership. Like traits,
styles will be acknowledged in the beliefs of community members. They are all subject to
attribution of propositional attitudes; and can be viewed as opaque contexts. Thus styles and
trait theories are not alternatives – they are both forms of attribution of propositional
attitudes. We have shown how language games of leadership works, the way it arises from
the beliefs and values of all communities, and the fact that they basically are propositional
attitudes. The next section takes us into these in more depth.
CHARACTERISTICS OF PROPOSITIONS AND PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES
Let us turn our attention to some characteristics belonging to propositions and “propositional
attitudes”.
First let us see some general characteristics of propositions. Propositions are abstract entities
(that is time and place independent) designated by declarative sentences in particular
languages. Propositions are objective because their existence is independent of peoples’
having them; by contrast, feelings cannot exist in the world if there is nobody to have
19
feelings. Propositions have truth conditions: according to the so-called tarskian T-condition a
proposition stating, “The snow is white” is true if and only if the snow is white. Moreover,
Frege claimed that propositions are mind and language independent. This assumption has a
strong Platonist flavor that other authors have disputed (i.e. Russell and Whitehead, 1925).
Therefore we claim that propositions are mind-independent but language-dependent, in the
sense that propositions can be expressed only by means of language. More fundamentally,
propositions are socially constructed by means of language, so that structures of individual
minds are likewise constructed through language.
Now let’s examine a particular characteristic of propositional attitudes that is their being
relational.
Propositional attitudes do not presuppose the existence of the object they are about. In other
words, from the fact that Tony believes that Mr. Berlusconi has charisma, for example or,
more generally, that Mother Theresa believes in God, it does not follow that there are such
things as God or Berlusconi’s charisma actually existing.
Propositional attitudes are relational. They have the form “X believes that Y” where X stands
for instances of proper names, or classes of them, or individuals (such as “John”, “the
Italians” or an impersonal “it”), and Y stands basically for instances of expressions of
propositions (sentences). The truthfulness of Y is unimportant; the significant point is that X
believes it. The sentence would be false if X does not in fact believe Y. For example,
“Mother Theresa believes God exists” would be false if Mother Theresa was an atheist; but
true if Mother Theresa was a believer, regardless of the actual existence of God. Propositional
attitudes, therefore, establish a relation between the speaker who is issuing the whole
sentence (the speaker who is making a belief attribution, claiming that, for example, Mother
Theresa believes that God exists) and the proposition (e.g. God exists) to which the attitude is
attached.
20
According to this relational account of propositional attitudes the truth of a belief statement is
decided by virtue of what is believed, and not in virtue of somebody’s having a certain
property or not. In other words, the truth of a belief such as “Tony believes that Mr.
Berlusconi is charismatic” is based on whether Tony actually does believe that Mr.
Berlusconi is charismatic and not on whether Mr. Berlusconi has actually the property of
being charismatic, even if sometimes natural language masks such a fundamental difference.
IS “LEADERSHIP” EMBEDDED IN OPAQUE CONTEXTS?
The concept of leadership in our perspective appears to be an instance of referential opacity
as the language-game we use to talk about leadership is imbued with propositional attitudes.
We have seen that it is not possible to have a well-grounded concept of ‘leader’ in
abstraction: the concept of leader depends on a mutual relationship between the players in a
company (namely followers and leaders). These relationships can be viewed as ascriptions of
propositional attitudes, in particular as intensional sentences of believing. Followers will
believe the leader has particular attributes or, better, they will ascribe to the leader some
properties the leader is believed to possess as if it was her natural capacity (similar to a
natural quality such as color). The mutual acknowledgment of such capacities is created
through particular language practices. Therefore the leader does not “naturally” own
characteristics such as charisma, rather such traits, which are ascriptions of propositional
attitudes, are abstract and universal concepts created by means of language. We do not know
whether or not such mental objects (that is propositional attitudes) have any foundation
outside our minds. The concepts have an ideal value; they have no real value, or at least we
are not interested in the question whether they have a real value. In other words we are
conceptualists on the nature of traits8. In this way we can bypass psychological assumptions
about the nature of those traits. Traits are representations that have meaning only in a
particular social context, and only as attributions within propositional attitudes. The full
21
understanding of its meaning is linked to social conventions (namely values and beliefs) used
in that believer’s community; as Wittgenstein (1953) pointed out in his critique to the idea of
private language, semantical characteristics of a language are - for definition - public
characteristics.
Charismatic Leadership
Let us take the concept of charisma to explain how our approach might work - based on the
notions of propositional attitudes, opaque contexts and sets of values and beliefs.
For years, social scientists have analyzed and debated the origin of charisma and why people
gravitate toward charismatic leaders. The influential sociologist Max Weber was one of the
first to study the theory of charismatic leadership. He borrowed the notion of charisma from
the Christian tradition, in which the word charisma (“gift”) was semantically linked to
another Greek word “Karis” to mean “gift of grace”: a donation by the Holy Spirit to all
believers. The New Testament sees in it the powerfulness of God’s spirit, which is always
working through the Church. Nonetheless, in Christianity there is more than one idea of
charisma. In the apostolic writings we find several “charismas”, such as the ability to make
prophecies, the power to perform miracles, discernment of spirits, some particular capacities
to lead a society, glossolalia etc. According to St. Paul (Corinthians, 12.7 foll.) charisma is
given to the individual in order to serve the whole community (in its original formulation
therefore such a notion has a strong moral flavor) and it reaches its apogee when a
charismatic person serves with inner willingness and gentleness. Weber revised this religious
concept of charisma in the following way: “The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain
quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and
treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers
or qualities. These qualities are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of
22
divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as
a “leader”” (Weber, 1968: 241).
Talcott Parsons (see Tuccari, 1991) has suggested that Weber proposed two notions of
Charisma. The first one is a general theory of Charisma defined as an extraordinary objective
quality belonging to just few elected and qualified people. The second one is the definition
cited above. The notion of charisma, therefore, changed even in Weber’s writings. The first
one focused anthropologically on a world in which religion and magic played a fundamental
role in the social sphere. The second notion applied to a disenchanted world in which what is
extraordinary had lost its metaphysical raison d’être (A fundamental Weberian notion is that
modernity is characterized by World disenchantment - Entzauberung der Welt). Weber
therefore revised the religious notion in order to fit with a mundane kind of legitimate
authority that was also applicable to multiple contexts, including political, administrative and
economic institutions.
Moreover, it is not clear whether Weber conceived of charisma as something belonging to
extraordinary persons; or only to what is perceived as such. The 1925 Tübingen edition of
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft suggests a translation as in the Henderson and Parsons edition
(Weber, 1947: 329) that claims a psychological interpretation of charisma. On the contrary,
more recent critical editions of Weber in German (Winckelmann, 1956) suggest a translation
more along the lines of “‘Charisma’ is a quality of a person that is so extraordinary that it
leads others to believe that he has powers or abilities that are supernatural, superhuman or at
least exceedingly rare; OR that he is sent by God; OR that he is worthy of emulation; OR,
that as a result of these beliefs, he is accepted as their ‘leader’” (Bullen, 1987). In other
words, Weber aimed at describing an inter-subjective and sociological notion of charismatic
leadership. (In support of this interpretation see Dow, 1978; Tucker, 1968; and Tuccari,
1991). Conger and Kanungo (1994) interpret Weber’s notion of charisma still in an
23
anthropological sense, from which we distinguish our linguistic and analytical approach.
Other passages in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft suggest our interpretation, (such as Weber,
1925: 156).
According to Shills (1965) the concept of charisma has continued to be modified by
sociological, political and organizational scholars. The result of this shift from the religious to
a mundane meaning has resulted, according to Paul and his/her colleagues (2002), in the
creation and use of a new terminology to describe charismatic leadership in politics and
business. Moreover, Burns claims that Weber did not make clear whether his new notion of
‘gift of grace’ “was a quality possessed by leaders, independent of society or a quality
dependent on its recognition by followers” (Burns, 1978: 243).
Burns (ibid) allows for leadership to emerge as a social construct, conceiving of it as a bundle
of interrelated concepts often understood as different aspects of the same phenomenon. By
contrast, strong current trends in the so-called new traitism emphasize a leader’s personal
qualities regardless of followers’ perceptions or beliefs (Paul, et al., cit.). Finally other
scholars have continued to modify these concepts so that a common set of terminology,
definitions and measures have not emerged (see for example Conger and Kanungo, 1987).
Conger and Kanungo (1987, 1992, and 1994) undertake a similar analysis in their treatment
of charisma. They claim that charismatic leadership can be considered as a set of observable
behaviors that elicit the affirmation of followers:
“When members of a group work together to attain group objectives, observations of
the influence process within the group help them to determine their status. One who
exerts maximum influence over other members is perceived as a leader. This role is
consensually validated when followers recognize and identify the leader on the basis
of interaction with him or her” (Conger and Kanungo, 1987).
24
In their model “charisma is viewed both as a set of dispositional attributions by followers
[our ‘propositional attitudes’] and as a set of leaders’ manifest behaviors [in place of which
we mobilize ‘beliefs and values’]” (Conger and Kanungo, 1987). Our model differs to
Conger and Kanungo’s in two ways: (1) In their approach leaders remain the center of the
language game, while we place the language game itself in the center, seeing leaders and
their behaviors as incidental, of the same status as followers’ (and leaders’) beliefs and
values. (2) We focus not on behavior, but rather on a more abstract and symbolic level of
language game.
The continuing and unstable revision of the notion of charisma shows us that,
1. Rather than an objective quality of the leader, it is a quality to be understood by
followers. It is a social quality, the current meaning of which is established in debates
such as those joined in this article.
2. Changes in terminology mean a change of the meaning we ascribe to a word, which is
strongly socially oriented: it changes according to beliefs and values in a society.
3. In the ultimate analysis the notion of charisma is expressed by means of propositional
attitudes.
Weber points out that there is a need for the charismatic leader to constantly exhibit
leadership performance to his followers in order to reinforce the legitimacy of his authority.
We are more specifically claiming that the leader acts to maintain the language games that
constitute the leader-follower relationship. That is, the function of this continuing leaderperformance is to maintain the language game (Gardner and Avolio, 1999; Vickrey, 2004). If
followers cease to believe the leader possesses charismatic characteristics, her leadership will
melt away; similarly her leadership will vanish if the followers possess different beliefs and
values. Again, followers can continue to follow an absent leader through their belief in her
continuing charismatic influence, which functions as a surrogate presence; or they may
25
recreate her as a leader ex postumo if they belatedly come to believe in her. Wills, for
instance, argues that successful leaders need to understand their followers far more than
followers need to understand leaders (1994: 17). According to our analysis, we can go further
to say what it is that leaders need to understand about their followers: that is, how the
followers understand their leaders!
CONCLUSIONS
Our analysis of leadership in terms of opaque contexts and propositional attitudes allows us
to draw some conclusive remarks.
With regard to the question concerning whether leadership is an innate or acquired
characteristic - the question of leadership inheritance - our model is neutral. In any given
community a leader can be born or made; a leader could also be recognized a posteriori: a
change in the set of followers (and therefore the set of beliefs and values) can influence the
relationship between the followers and the (potential) leader, because of the change in the
shared beliefs.
No set of trait theories based on personal qualities or behavioral standards would be sufficient
for constructing leadership. In this paper we argue leadership is a contingent relation between
leader and followers implying an overlapping between sets of beliefs and values endorsed by
leaders and followers; or as Gini puts it: “Followers set the terms of acceptance for
leadership” (Gini, 1998). Very importantly, it is interesting to notice that the linguistic
analysis suggested in this paper is surprisingly analogous to the earlier notion of leadership
proposed by Max Weber. In fact, Weber viewed leadership as fundamentally based on a
mutual relationship between leaders and followers.
In the societies Weber described, as pre-modern charisma was believed to descend upon an
individual from a supra-personal and super-natural origin; and then to flow through that
person to others in the charismatic community. Trait theories attempt to locate charisma in
26
the individual, arguing about whether it is inherited or developed, but in either case denying a
supra-personal or super-natural aspect to its origins. We have shown that charisma is indeed
supra personal, but originating not in the super-natural, but in the inter-subjective language
games of a community. Using Weber’s term “intended meaning” (Weber, 1947: 87) we can
see that the community intends (consciously or unconsciously) to ascribe charisma to an
individual as a quality of that person (Weber uses this term to describe the subjective
meaning of social actions - no matter whether implicit or esplicit). Thus we find that our
analytical philosophical approach brings us surprisingly close to Weber’s conceptualization
of social organization.
Additional Implications
The proposed theory analyses the notion of leadership in terms of propositional attitudes: it is
a rational reconstruction of leadership that is useful both for descriptive theories (sociological
theories) and for normative theories (ethical-philosophical) – namely what leadership is
versus what leadership ought to be. Recent trends are considering ethical claims as a conditio
sine qua non for leadership (for example, Burns, 1978); but such theories should be picked up
as normative theories of leadership. As Ciulla argues, “Burn’s theory of transforming
leadership is … clearly a prescriptive one about the nature of morally good leadership”
(Ciulla: 1998: 15). According to Ciulla (1998) Burns would not accept Hitler as a leader (see
for example, Burns, 1978: 426) while, on the contrary, for Bass (1985) interpretation of
transformational leadership would call Hitler a transformational leader. From our perspective
we do not need to distinguish between “transformational” and “transactional” leaders. In
other words, “transformational” and “transactional” leaderships belong to the normative, and
they cannot be distinguished at the descriptive level; in fact, the distinction between
normative versus descriptive notions of leadership allows to affirm that Hitler is a leader from
27
a merely descriptive point of view while he is not a “morally good” one from a normative
point of view.
It is very important to distinguish between these two approaches to leadership studies because
a descriptive theory (a sociological one) needs to be, according to Weber, as Werthfrei, that is
“value-free”, in the sense values can appear as described in the theory but not in its true
valuations. The Burns approach can lead to confusion between two quite sharply distinct
epistemological levels (sociological and ethical-philosophical), representing a misleading
interpretation for the construction of a sound descriptive theory of leadership and for a true
ethical conception of leadership (for the importance of this distinction at meta-ethical level,
see, for example, Marturano, 2002). However, the recent literature on leadership seems to
deal with this important philosophical distinction in an ambiguous way (see for example
Adair, 2003; Burns, cit, Doyle and Smith, 1999; Gastil, 1997; Gini, cit.; Greenleaf, 1977;
Heifetz, 1994; Kuhnert and Lewis, 1987; and Peters and Waterman, 1982).
The linguistic analysis of leadership proposed in this paper appears to be subtler than many
theories in leadership and organization studies. In this sense, our theory is able to avoid what
Pfeffer (1977) described as the existing ambiguities in the conceptual description of
leadership. Leadership theories proposed in the past will appear as empirical generalizations9
of a particular subset of leadership phenomenon; in other words, they fail to explain what
leadership is as they do not move beyond a lower level of understanding which is explaining
only certain specific features of the phenomenon that can be labelled, at best, as empirical
generalizations (Gosling and Mintzberg, 2003: Heifetz and Laurie, 1997; Kotter, 1990; and
Zaleznick, 1977). They deal with extensions of leadership. The current discussion has tried to
draw attention to the intension, around which, and in elaboration of which, language games
of leadership are played.
28
Directions for Future Research
Our approach offers a powerful explanation of a very pragmatic and well-recorded problem
in the field of leadership and management development. Management competencies and socalled standards frameworks have been popular tools for describing the personal and
behavioral characteristics of managers and leaders. Many firms design their selection,
training and development of high-potential leadership candidates on the basis of a list of such
competencies (Bolden and Gosling, 2004). However their impact seems to be mixed, at best:
while competency and standards frameworks have proved useful for designing training and
development interventions, and for “balanced score-card” (Kaplan, 199?) measurement and
reward systems, they have been much less successful at predicting leadership or management
performance. If there they have been useful in improving the practice of leadership and
management, it is where the discussion of “what makes for success” is integrated into the
performance management system (Bolden and Gosling, 2004) – that is, where competency
frameworks are used to inform a conversation, and not as a simple measurement yardstick.
The current discussion suggests why this might be so: competencies and standards are clearly
important elements of the language games that construct leadership. They address directly the
beliefs and values that we ascribe to followers and leaders about the nature of good
leadership: they are, in a sense, attempts to formally describe the conventions that comprise
corporate culture. But when listed as a general model (as in the National Occupational
Standards, for example. MSC, 2004), they are a simple re-statement of propositional
attitudes, throwing little light on the conventions (that is beliefs, values and norms) which are
essential for understanding what constitutes a leaderful role in a corporation.
This observation also points to potentially valuable further research: We have shown that any
talk or writing which affirms a leader in his or her position, or which describes the qualities
of a leader, is in fact a specific kind of language game. Hitherto, researchers wanting to focus
29
on the relational aspects of leadership (and other areas of organization studies) have resorted
to theories of individual and group psychology. Recent attempts to conceive leadership in
purely processual terms (Wood, 2005) do not operationalize this perspective in
methodological terms. Language-games are precisely what is needed here: a method of
analyzing emergent organizing activity “in the between” of leaderful situations. For example
House points to the challenges faced by a global manager in “acknowledging and
appreciating cultural values, practices and subtleties in different part of the world… to
succeed in global business, managers need the flexibility to respond positively and effectively
to practices and values that may be drastically different from what they are accustomed to.
This requires the ability to be open to other’s ideas and opinions” (House, 2004: 5). In effect,
these managers are moving between communities using different language games, and part of
their struggle is to assert the propositional attitudes which confirm their leaderful positions.
We propose a next step will be to construct a formal model based on Possible Worlds
Semantics (similarly to Hintikka, 1962, Kripke, 1963, Stalnaker, 1987: and, in a different
perspective, Eco, 1979).
30
NOTES
1
In this sense we can say that traditional views (such as traits theories) in leadership studies
are flawed with psychologism. Psychologism is the claim that epistemological problems (i.e.,
of the validity of human knowledge) can be solved satisfactorily by the psychological study
of the development of mental processes. According to critics psychologism destroys
objectivity (and intersubjectivity) and reduces the validity of any form of human knowledge
to people’s subjective preferences, determined solely by the constitution of the individual or
group of individuals. For example, let us analyze the meaning of the word “tree”; from the
point of you of psychologism its meaning is its mental representation; but, each individual
have his/her own mental representation of a “tree” which springs from his/her experiences.
The meaning of a word, on the contrary, is an objective one which is common to every
speaker: therefore it is an error to equate the meaning of a word with its mental
representation. In other words, that is not an empirical point, but a question about the
meaning of the word. The empiricist must consequently reduce the meaning of the word to
the physical content of somebody’s brain thinking of the word; but this means reducing
logical concepts to psychological object (Constant, 2003:4).
2
Ciulla cites a series of symposia organized by J.G. Hunt in which “scholars constantly
lament that they have done so much studying and know so little about leadership. Yet these
same scholars – she claims – who lament this fact do little to change the way that they do
research” (Ciulla, cit.: n. 32).
3
Rational reconstructions standardly operate so as to transform a given problematic
philosophical scientific account -particularly of a terminological, methodological or
theoretical entity- into a similar, but more precise, consistent interpretation. This method
occupies a central position in the practice of analytic philosophy.
31
5
The intension of a word or phrase (not to be confused with intention or intentionality), may
be regarded as a concept or a set of properties which applies to each member of the word's
extension and which distinguishes those things from everything not in the extension. The
extension of a word, phrase, or concept is the set of things it extends to, or applies to. What,
for example, would be the intension of the phrase 'Encyclopedia readers'? Simply the
property of having read any part of any encyclopedia at any time. Anything that has that
property is part of the extension of the phrase ' Encyclopedia reader'. For example, Jon has
been reading an Encyclopedia; so the intension of the phrase ' Encyclopedia reader' applies to
Jon; and so Jon is part of the extension of ‘Encyclopedia reader'. Moreover, anything that has
not read any part of an Encyclopedia at any time is for that reason not part of the extension of
the phrase 'Encyclopedia reader'. (adapted from Wikipedia, 2004)
6
Leibniz's Law says that if A and B are one and the same thing, and then they have to share
all the same properties. If A and B have different properties, then they cannot be one and the
same thing. If we find some property that B has but A doesn't, then we can conclude that A
and B are not the same thing.
7
Most propositional attitude attributions use a propositional attitude verb that is followed by
a that-clause, a clause that includes a full sentence expressing a proposition. Attributions of
cognitive relations to propositions can also take other kinds of clauses, though: John wanted
to play, Hillary wished Bill to succeed, for example. These still attribute propositional
attitudes, cognitive relations to an identifiable proposition (John will play, Bill will succeed),
though the proposition is not so directly expressed. The weakened form of the sentence,
although apparently more active, disguises the presence of a propositional attitude, as in
Hillary wished that Bill would succeed.
9
In logic, a hypothetical syllogism is a valid argument of the following form:
32
P → Q.
Q → R.
Therefore, P → R.
In other words, this kind of argument states that if one implies another, and that other implies
a third, then the first implies the third.
10
We are proposing here a nominalistic or a nominalistic-conceptualistic idea of leadership.
Nominalism is a philosophical position that argues that abstract or general terms,
"universals”, are not real entities either in the world or in the mind, but names that refer to
groups or classes of individual things. These terms are canonically used to designate the
theories that have been proposed as solutions of one of the most important questions in
philosophy, often referred to as the problem of universals, which, while it was a favorite
subject for discussion in ancient times, and especially in the Middle Ages, is still prominent
in modern and contemporary philosophy.
11
An empirical generalization is "a pattern or regularity that repeats over different
circumstances and that can be described simply by mathematical, graphic, or symbolic
methods" (Bass, 1995). In other words, there are two types of statements of sociological
uniformities. One is the empirical generalization or an isolated proposition summarizing
observed uniformities of relationships between two or more variables. The other is scientific
(universal) law of a statement of invariance.
33
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