UNE Business School Seminar Series

In this seminar, Dr Helena Liu will speak to her study, which sought to problematise essentialist treatments of race, ethnicity and culture and demonstrate through a postcolonial lens the ways by which leaders’ identities are profoundly shaped by imperial relations of power. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 21 Chinese Australian leaders in government and business, this article shows how they discursively constructed their ethno cultural identities through what I call self-Orientalism; enacting Chinese stereotypes through ‘myth tapping’ and ‘myth keeping’ in order to secure recognition under an assumed white gaze. However, I suggest that their Orientalist identities are not passively determined, but are in some cases strategically co-opted and resisted.

Helena Liu is Senior Lecturer in Management at UTS Business School. She was awarded her PhD in 2012 from the University of Sydney in organisation studies. Helena’s research focuses on the discursive construction of leadership, which has led her to examine how leaders apologise for failure and the media representation of authenticity among banking CEOs during the Global Financial Crisis. More recently, she became inspired by the potential for feminist, critical race and anti-colonial theories to critically interrogate our enduring romance with leadership. Helena’s work has been published in Gender, Work & Organization, Journal of Business Ethics, Leadership, Management Communication Quarterly, and Equality, Diversity & Inclusion.