The Importance of Multimodal Resources for Micro-Oriented Analyses of Interactions: A Case Study of Emergent Leadership in a Hybrid Meeting

Abstract

In this article we argue in favor of the fine-grained, integrated analysis of multimodal resources for the study of interaction in organizational contexts. For the case presented here, we use video recordings of an authentic hybrid meeting during which the superior is absent for the majority of the interaction. We scrutinize in particular how proximal and distal deontic claims are made and leadership thus emerges in this meeting, which turns out to be out of sheer necessity to ensure the progressivity of the activity. Given that there is thus no explicit struggle over leadership, many subtle semiotic resources—such as gaze, gestures, nodding and paralinguistic features—are used to enact deontic stances. This makes this case of emergent leadership particularly interesting as it demonstrates the importance of an integrated, nonlogocentric approach to obtain a fuller insight into how meaning—and leadership—is negotiated in day-to-day interactions in organizational contexts.