Making Common Sense: Leadership as Meaning-making in a Community of Practice

Discussion of Terms

In this section, we take an in-depth look at the words that we use to express this view of leadership.

Meaning

Meaning is an elusive word. In this paper we are not trying to use it in a philosophical sense, only in a practical sense. We are aiming to reflect what people seem to generally agree they mean when they use it.

Basically speaking, meaning has two broad senses in common usage (Fingarette, 1963). The first has to do with the way words and other symbols stand for, refer to, or represent phenomena (or other words or symbols). The second sense involves people’s values and relationships and commitments. In our rough-and-ready working sense of meaning as it applies to leadership, we will use both, but it will be useful ...