Abstract
The utilization of popular culture as an empirical field and as an alternative knowledge system within management studies remains to this day an underutilized and understudied opportunity. While there has been some work done in this field (see Hassard & Holliday, 1998; Rhodes & Parker, 2008; Westwood & Rhodes, 2007), these represent only tentative steps in mining the vast expanses of popular culture for insights into management and organization. The edited volume reviewed here thus represents a great opportunity to extend this, particularly when it comes to theories of leadership and social change. While the primary audience for this book is likely to be leadership researchers, I see it having interest beyond this in organization and management studies more generally.
The book analyses either representations of leadership and social change in popular culture, or how engagements with the same can be utilized to enrich our understanding of, for example, leaders and leadership. In this, the book is nothing if not inclusive in the kind of themes covered. The book is divided into parts on written, aural, visual and digital leadership, and covers topics as varied as video games, folk music, children’s literature, Instagram and narcocorridos (Mexican folk songs that celebrate the lives and exploits of drug traffickers). Many of these engagements are quite interesting, both as counterpoints to more mainstream analyses and by introducing novel and original empirical fields. These engagements also represent numerous avenues for further research. There is overall much to like about the book, and at times the diversity of topics works quite well, while also highlighting the challenge of edited volumes.
As a result, there is much to learn from the book. For instance, chapter 6 by Patricia Catoira and Virgina Bratton, on the fascinating topic of folk songs about drug cartels, is a lovely piece on how ‘low’ culture can transmit ideas about leadership. In addition, many cases of less than perfect leadership are discussed throughout, and the book makes sure to not simply glorify and iconize leadership – Mark Meraldo’s discussion in chapter 3 about dictators and their literary representations is arresting (albeit it makes you wonder about the category of ‘popular culture’ employed by focusing on the work of Mario Vargas Llosa – a fine author and Nobelist, but usually considered literary fiction rather than than pop culture). Further, it is for once a book on leadership that cannot be faulted for a lack of diversity, as it brings it in spades. Few leadership books would have had the courage to include a piece on young women’s presentation of the self on Instagram, such as in Eileen Holowka’s chapter 12, or to embrace ‘light-painters’ as Laura DelPrato does in chapter 13. Certainly, there are some fairly straightforward leadership pieces, such as Nicholas Warner’s fine analysis of leader–follower dynamics in chapter 8, but these remain something of a minority.
That said, this is a wildly uneven book, in several ways. There are chapters that have at best a tangential connection to the professed theme of leadership in the book, such as chapter 2, where Kavitha Ganesan discusses the influence of Abdullah Munsyi’s writing on Malaysian literature – which is a fine piece of scholarship but it isn’t entirely clear how this contributes to our broader understanding of leadership. Something similar might be said about the interesting if not all that original analysis of David Bowie in Shawna Guenther’s chapter 7, which mainly serves to highlight the critical difference between hagiography and theoretical development. There are interesting analyses directly of leadership in obvious popular culture settings, such as Yost’s analysis of Harry Potter as a leader in chapter 4, as well as the aforementioned chapter by Warner, but the notion of popular culture is often extended quite broadly in the book. At the same time, theoretical engagements are not extended quite as far as one would have liked. In fact, I was at times gripped by the feeling that I was reading something more akin to a long summary of a very interesting workshop on leadership, popular culture and social change, and I really began looking forward to a later, more developed book, one that unfortunately fails to materialize. I assume the editors would argue that the book’s key stated aim is to show the role of popular (and not so popular) culture in the emergence of social change more generally, but the sweeping nature of such a claim does make the book quite sprawling as well.
The editors are very present in the volume, with four out of the fourteen chapters written by one of the two, in addition to the introduction and the epilogue. It is thus somewhat surprising that a number of the chapters seem so underdeveloped in relation to the book’s core theme, and one wonders if the book couldn’t have been improved with more judicious and engaged editing. A number of the chapters introduce fascinating openings towards new discussions or theoretical development, but these are only rarely expounded upon at any length. Looking to the already mentioned chapters, one comes away feeling that, for example, the chapter on narcocorridos could, with better editorial guidance and encouragement to develop it further, have become something quite wonderful. The material is there, as is the vision, but the chapter ends just about when it gets interesting. This is actually something of a theme in the book, with a number of chapters outlining really interesting ideas, and then doing at best a one-page conclusion that feels like anything but. This tendency to close chapters prematurely does often make the reader feel somewhat cheated and dissatisfied. The fault for this clearly lies with the editors, who seem to have not wished to really push the contributors to have their contribution be all it could have been.
Maybe this is the curse of popular culture in management and organization studies? Further, might this say something about leadership more generally? In both cases, we desire closure, yet rarely if ever get it. What often defined popular culture is that storylines go on and on, and in the few cases where there seems there is an actual ending, there’s always a sequel, a prequel, a reboot, or, as in the case of comic books, people literally returning from the dead. It can be tricky to deal with popular culture as a source of inspiration as it can so easily confound even basic rules of logic, and although I know several leaders who would love to rewind the struggles and seeming cul-de-sacs of their organizations by simply declaring the last few years as having been an extended dream sequence, this impresses neither shareholders nor journal reviewers. Popular culture is powerful not due to what it contains but due to what it lacks or doesn’t quite show, and the manner in which this enables us to fill in the blanks ourselves. The same goes for leadership. Explain either of these too much, and you lose much of the magic. In a piece of scholarly research, this lack becomes something more problematic. I do enjoy knowing what we can learn about empathy and leadership from studying video games (the topic of Kristin Bezio’s lovely chapter 10), but I would also wish to gain this understanding from the chapter, not merely have it teased – yet I know that the subject can never be fully exhausted either, so looking for such closure is futile. So, maybe explaining either leadership through popular culture or vice versa is, at heart, an impossibility? We know from biographies of great leaders that more knowledge often makes the picture murkier, not clearer. We know that explaining genre fiction makes it considerably less enjoyable. This is an interesting dilemma, and particularly so for organization studies. It is a field that truly wishes to engage with organizing and the organized in complex, diverse, multifaceted ways – incommensurably or not. Yet it comes up against the limits of this, time and time again.
There are books where it is difficult to say whether they represent a good start or a missed opportunity, and this is one such book. I may sound harsh in my review of it, yet this stems not from a negative predisposition but from my desire to truly love it. I adored reading about Marlowe (Bezio’s chapter 1) in a book on leadership, and about female troubadours in the civil rights movement of the 1960s (Erenrich’s chapter 5). I was fascinated to read about literature on South American dictators (the aforementioned chapter 3) and self-transformation in South African cinema (Yost’s chapter 9). I certainly now know more about light-painters than I did before reading this book (the aforementioned chapter 13). Still, I step away from the book feeling that I would have wished for more from it. If nothing else, it conclusively proves that there are treasure troves of material still to be mined for leadership and organization scholars alike. It also goes to show just how complex, and difficult to work with, popular culture can be. In a time that needs both leadership and social change one hopes that this book, with its flaws, will show just how enriching these engagements can be.