Leadership is attributed great effect on organizations’ working-environment, effectiveness and profit. Leadership is also associated to managers, but leadership skills is not described as necessary for becoming a manager. If leadership skills are not necessary for attaining high managerial position in organizations, and society as a whole, then what are leadership skills used for in regard to social positioning? This is the interest of my study. I aim to examine what is considered important leadership skills by students voluntarily engaged in leadership education, how it came to interest them to develop such skills and if there are differences between students in regards to their resources and social background. My theoretical framework consists of Pierre Bourdieus ‘educational capital‘ (EC), ‘fine culture’-capital and ’strategy’ together with Donald Broadys ‘organizational capital’ (OC). I have applied a mixed method with interviews and surveys; analysed with principal component analysis and OLS- regression analysis. I find that social and relational ’leader-skills’ are valued more by the students than bureaucratic ’manager-skills’, though both sets of skills are considered important and can be considered as forms of capital. The evaluation of these forms of capital is fixed in a configuration of capital consisting of students’ EC, their fathers’ higher EC and if the students’ have OC or not. The greatest difference in the evaluation of the skills is the greater evaluation of ’leader-capital’ if the students’ have OC, while OC does not impact the evaluation of ’manager-capital’. The cultural capital of ‘fine-culture’ have no effect considered important. Students aim to use ’leader-capital’ in order to understand and develop others and think that such skills will benefit and develop them in their working-life. This strategy has no ambitions for managerial- or leadership positions, indicating that this is a strategy for employment and employee-ship. Students with accumulated OC does not consider this as much of a legitimate way of using leader-capital in comparison to the students without OC. I interpret this as a replacement strategy for students lacking OC, who instead places more trust in accumulated leader-capitals usage and merit for employee-ship in order to position themselves and to further develop in their working life.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-104708 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Svensson, Linus |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för samhällsstudier (SS) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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