Discursive leadership of Anson Chan and Carrie Lam : how do the most “powerful” Hong Kong women in politics take their stances?

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed the burgeoning interest of linguistic research on leadership. The questions of what leadership is and how leadership is performed discursively are at the heart of such research. Guided by the firm belief that “one of the most important things we do with words is take a stance” (Du Bois, 2007, p.139), being able to take stances effectively is deemed one of the most crucial abilities of leadership performance. This dissertation investigated how the two prominent Hong Kong women political leaders, namely Anson Chan and Carrie Lam, take their stances regarding the controversial issues of political development in postcolonial Hong Kong and the 2019 Hong Kong Extradition Bill. Driven by the overarching theoretical framework of discursive leadership (Fairhurst, 2007), a two-phase discourse analysis was adopted to examine 12 stances taken by the two women leaders during critical moments. Firstly, detailed coding and analysis of lexico-grammatical resources and discursive strategies were applied using the framework of interpersonal metafunction of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), namely APPRAISAL theory (Chang & Schleppegrell, 2011;Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Martin & White, 2005). Secondly, by incorporating the SFL findings into the stance triangle model (Du Bois, 2007), the overall effectiveness of stances were examined. The findings showed that the stances taken by Anson Chan and Carrie Lam are structurally effective in terms of evaluation, positioning and alignment. When it comes to achieving interpersonal meanings, based on the discursive strategies employed by each leader, the results showed that Anson Chan is deemed effective in construing interpersonal meanings through stancetaking, while Carrie Lam contributes less effort in establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships.