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People give meaning to their experience through sense-making devices such as culture. Power distance, for example, is a critically important sense-making mechanism (Hofstede, 1980). Leadership can also be seen as a sense-making device that helps people understand organizational outcomes (Meindl, Ehrlich, & Dukerich, 1985). This thesis explores the intersection of these two things. Using both experimental and field research designs, I test whether and how understanding follower power distance values encourages us to rethink some of the classical assumptions scholars have made about leadership. In one empirical paper, I re-examine the assumption that election, as compared with appointment, grants a leader more legitimacy in the eyes of followers. Through correlational and experimental designs, I find that power distance is positively (negatively) associated with the legitimacy of appointed (elected) leaders. In my second empirical paper, I address the dark side of leader humor expression. Across a series of studies involving multiple cultural samples, I demonstrate the potential emotional cost, in the form of employee emotional labor (surface acting), posed by leader humor expression at work. I also find the effect of leader humor expression on employee surface acting to be particularly strong among people with high power distance values. The third empirical paper highlights the role of power distance at team levels. Using multi-source top management team data that were collected at different time points, I show that leaders who seek prestige in the eyes of group members reduce task-related debates in high power distance groups. Together, these findings explain how and why many 'effective' leadership characteristics and practices may have entirely different consequences for followers with different cultural programming.

This thesis examines the trope of the child in South African literature from the early years of apartheid to the contemporary moment. The chapters focus on some of the most established and prolific authors in South African literary history and roughly follow a chronological sequence: autobiographies by the exiled Drum writers (Es'kia Mphahlele and Bloke Modisane) in the early 1960s; Nadine Gordimer's writing during the apartheid era; confessional novels by Afrikaans-speaking authors (Mark Behr and Michiel Heyns) in the transitional decade; and J. M. Coetzee's late and post apartheid works. I argue that, while writing from diverse historical and political positions in relation to South Africa's literary culture, these authors are all in one way or another able to articulate their subjectivities-with their underlying ambiguities, contradictions, and negations-by imagining themselves as the child or/and through childhood. My analyses of the works under discussion attend to the subversive and transformative potential of, and the critical energies embedded in the trope of the child, by investigating narrative reconfigurations of temporality and space. Firstly, I will be looking at the ways in which the images, structures, and aesthetics making up the imaginings of the child disrupt a linear temporality and serve as critique of a teleological historiography of political emancipation and the liberation struggle. Secondly, I will pay attention to the spatial relations with which representations of the child are bound up: between the country and the city, black townships and white suburbs, the home and the street. By attending to specific transgressions and reorderings of these spatial relations, my reading also explores the ways in which spatial underpinnings and ideological boundaries of national identities are contested, negotiated, and restructured by forces of the transnational, the diasporic, and the global around the figure of the child.