Reading In-Between: How Women Engage with Messages of ‘Superstar’ Business Role Models

With role models being seen as central for developing women as leaders, recent research has been critical of messages that contemporary elite businesswomen role models promote. But how do women actually relate to female business ‘superstar’ role models’ messages? We argue that the implicit assumption that role models’ effects may be understood through exploring exclusively the kind of messages they send is problematic. Through introducing active audience theory, specifically de Certeau's concepts of ‘tactics’ and ‘strategy’, to analyse interviews with women who read autobiographies of business celebrity role models, we identify three key tactics in which female role aspirants engage with role models’ messages: tactics of confirmation, namely a selective adoption of intended messages; tactics of challenge, namely a contestation of messages; and tactics of change, through which unscripted meanings of collective consciousness and support for other women emerge. In doing so, the paper offers a novel way of theorising the influence of distant role models – as emerging from a process of co-creation in the ‘in-between’ space. We argue that theorising the role of models’ influence as co-creation allows us to systematically incorporate role aspirants’ perceptions into the role-modelling process and to further understand the unscripted and unforeseen effects of role models.