Language leadership and academic identity: rethinking the discourses of academia for the 21st Century

This paper draws on a more extended study that explored the narratives of academic chairpersons. In analysing the narratives of the chairpersons I became aware of a number of interesting sub-stories that prompted closer investigation. A particularly noteworthy strand was the recurrence of certain phrases in the narratives of my interviewees. These are phrases that we are all familiar with from the literature and from our experience of our own academic communities. The focus of this particular paper is to put one of these key phrases under the microscope and critically evaluate its usage.