Vol. 13 No. 4 (2025): Business & Management Studies: An International Journal
Articles

Has the leadership paradigm shifted in the digital age? A metaphor-based critical discourse analysis

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  • Emine Şener
Emine Şener
Doç. Dr., Kırşehir Ahi Evran University, Kırşehir, Türkiye
Bio

Published 2025-12-25

Keywords

  • Leadership, Leadership Metaphors, Critical Management Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis
  • Liderlik, Liderlik Metaforları, Eleştirel Yönetim, Eleştirel Söylem Analizi

How to Cite

Has the leadership paradigm shifted in the digital age? A metaphor-based critical discourse analysis. (2025). Business & Management Studies: An International Journal, 13(4), 1610-1630. https://doi.org/10.15295/bmij.v13i4.2597

Copyright (c) 2025 Emine Şener

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Has the leadership paradigm shifted in the digital age? A metaphor-based critical discourse analysis. (2025). Business & Management Studies: An International Journal, 13(4), 1610-1630. https://doi.org/10.15295/bmij.v13i4.2597

Abstract

This study aims to reveal whether a paradigmatic transformation has occurred in leadership discourse in the digital age through the lens of metaphors. It critically examines how leadership is represented in metaphors and what normative effects these representations produce. To this end, a two-stage qualitative research design was adopted. In the first stage, a systematic literature review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 protocol. In the second stage, Fairclough's three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework was employed. A total of 28 scholarly articles published between 2015 and 2025 in the Scopus database were selected through a systematic review and analysed within the CDA framework. The analysis focused on four key discursive functions of leadership metaphors: representation, legitimation, suppression, and discursive emergence. The findings indicate that while leadership metaphors have diversified in form under the influence of the digital age, they predominantly reproduce traditional, individual-centred, and hierarchical leadership norms. Although new metaphors such as the "cloud leader" or the "tango partner" suggest alternative leadership paradigms, they remain discursively marginal. To systematically examine these structures, the study proposes the Discursively Framed Normative Metaphor Model. The research concludes that a true paradigm shift in leadership has not yet occurred at the discursive level.

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