From Starship Captains To Galactic Rebels

Real-world leaders hold the fates of companies, armies, and nations in their hands, but the leaders portrayed in science fiction play for larger stakes. Their decisions determine the survival of species, planets, or reality itself. They tend, therefore, to be larger-than-life characters like Doc Savage, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Captain James T. Kirk. In From Starship Captains to Galactic Rebels, Kimberley Yost brings the principles of leadership studies to bear on characters from a quarter-century of classic science fiction television series, examining how their adventures can illuminate the challenges of real-world leadership. These in-depth case studies cover a full range of science-fictional leaders—from conventional heroes such as Jonathan Archer of Star Trek: Enterprise to William Adama and Laura Roslin, the dark, conflicted protagonists of Battlestar Galactica. Charismatic rebels like Malcolm Reynolds of Firefly and the ragtag fugitives of Farscape stand alongside pillars of the establishment like John Sheridan of Babylon 5. In her analysis, Yost considers emerging, flawed, and failed leaders as well as successful ones; women as well as men; and aliens as well as humans. An insightful examination of how leadership is represented on the small screen, From Starship Captains to Galactic Rebels will appeal not only to fans of televised science fiction but also to those grappling with the problems of leadership, regardless of their species.

By leveraging the intersection of popular culture, leadership theory, and followership theory, Courageous Companions offers an accessible new perspective for those who desire to gain a greater understanding of leaders and followers to transform their relationships and organizations.

In a richly developed fictional universe, Doctor Who, a wandering survivor of a once-powerful alien civilization, possesses powers beyond human comprehension. He can bend the fabric of time and space with his TARDIS, alter the destiny of worlds, and drive entire species into extinction. The good doctor’s eleven “regenerations” and fifty years’ worth of adventures make him the longest-lived hero in science-fiction television. In The Language of Doctor Who: From Shakespeare to Alien Tongues, Jason Barr and Camille D. G. Mustachio present several essays that use language as an entry point into the character and his universe. Ranging from the original to the rebooted television series—through the adventures of the first eleven Doctors—these essays explore how written and spoken language have been used to define the Doctor’s ever-changing identities, shape his relationships with his many companions, and give him power over his enemies—even the implacable Daleks. Individual essays focus on fairy tales, myths, medical-travel narratives, nursery rhymes, and, of course, Shakespeare. Contributors consider how the Doctor’s companions speak with him through graffiti, how the Doctor himself uses postmodern linguistics to communicate with alien species, and how language both unites and divides fans of classic Who and new Who as they try to converse with each other. Broad in scope, innovative in approach, and informed by a deep affection for the program, TheLanguage of Doctor Whowill appeal to scholars of science fiction, television, and language, as well as to fans looking for a new perspective on their favorite Time Lord.

The newest generation of leaders was raised on a steady diet of popular culture artifacts mediated through technology, such as film, television and online gaming. As technology expands access to cultural production, popular culture continues to play an important role as an egalitarian vehicle for promoting ideological dissent and social change. The chapters in this book examine works and creators of popular culture – from literature to film and music to digital culture – in order to address the ways in which popular culture shapes and is shaped by leaders around the globe as they strive to change their social systems for the better.

Gender, Media, and Organization: Challenging Mis(s)Representations of Women Leaders and Managers is the fourth volume in the Women and Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice series. This cross?disciplinary series from the International Leadership Association draws from current research findings, development practices, pedagogy, and lived experience to deliver provocative thinking that enhances leadership knowledge and improves leadership development of women around the world. This volume addresses the lack of critical attention in leadership research to how women leaders and professionals are represented in the media. The volume acts as a companion piece to a Seminar Series, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC), to address this gap in the research. The lack of research interrogation of gendered media representations of women leaders and professionals is a surprising omission given the wealth of evidence from stakeholders outside academia revealing that women, and women leaders, continue to be underrepresented across all forms of media outlet. This volume contributes to social change, equality, and economic performance by raising consciousness about women’s lack of representation in the media and challenges gendered mis(s)representations of women professionals and leaders in the media through the presentation of a range of empirical investigations and methodological approaches. The volume contributors use various theories and conceptualizations to problematize and analyze women’s limited representation in the media, and the gendered representations of women professionals and leaders. Together, the volume’s 14 chapters reflect the beginning of a rich, diverse, emergent strand of academic research that interrogates relationships between the media in its multiple forms and women’s leadership. Illuminating the positioning of women leaders and professionals as both complex and problematic, these chapters offer an important agenda for management and organization scholars. They attest to the need to describe and make visible women’s mis(s)representations in the media while drawing attention to the importance of situating these mis(s) representations in the broader social, economic, historical, cultural, and political context as a means to gain insight into their development and evolution. As a rich and diverse site of research, examination of the media calls for a broad methodological repertoire. The chapters in this book draw from multiple sources and include, among others, the development of thematic analysis to illuminate stereotypes, the use of critical discourse analysis to understand professional women’s experience, a rhetorical analysis of the covers of Time magazine, and an interrogation of the power dynamics manifested in the media’s practice of nicknaming women leaders. Gender, Media, and Organization is a first step in stimulating further research that poses critical questions concerning gendered and sexualized representations of women leaders in textual and visual forms, and considers the media’s influence on gender equality and social justice. The chapters offer fruitful avenues for future research to continue the momentum of challenging gendered media representations of women leaders and professionals.

Leadership, Populism, and Resistance draws upon the study of history, politics, policy, media, virtue, and heroism to examine the ways in which populism and popular movements have evolved, what we have learned (and failed to learn) from them, how we depict and discuss them through popular media and the press, and, finally, how we can understand virtue and heroism as a consequence—or reaction—to populism and popularity.

Although it started as a British television show with a small but devoted fan base, Doctor Who has grown in popularity and now appeals to audiences around the world. In the fifty-year history of the program, Doctor Who’s producers and scriptwriters have drawn on a dizzying array of literary sources and inspirations. Elements from Homer, classic literature, gothic horror, swashbucklers, Jacobean revenge tragedies, Orwellian dystopias, Westerns, and the novels of Agatha Christie and Evelyn Waugh have all been woven into the fabric of the series. One famous storyline from the mid-1970s was rooted in the Victoriana of authors like H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle, and another was a virtual remake of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda—with robots! In Doctor Who and the Art of Adaptation: Fifty Years of Storytelling, Marcus Harmes looks at the show’s frequent exploration of other sources to create memorable episodes. Harmes observes that adaptation in Doctor Who is not just a matter of transferring literary works to the screen, but of bringing a diversity of texts into dialogue with the established mythology of the series as well as with longstanding science fiction tropes. In this process, original stories are not just resituated, but transformed into new works. Harmes considers what this approach reveals about adaptation, television production, the art of storytelling, and the long-term success and cultural resonance enjoyed by Doctor Who. Doctor Who and the Art of Adaptation will be of interest to students of literature and television alike, and to scholars interested in adaptation studies. It will also appeal to fans of the series interested in tracing the deep cultural roots of television’s longest-running and most literate science-fiction adventure.

According to Joss Whedon, the creator of the short-lived series Firefly (2002), the cult show is about “nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things.” The chronicles of crewmembers on a scruffy space freighter, Firefly ran for only four months before its abrupt cancellation. In that brief time, however, it established a reputation as one of the best science-fiction programs of the new millennium: sharply written, superbly cast, and set on an exotic multicultural frontier unlike anything ever seen on the small screen. The show’s large, enthusiastic fan following supported a series of comics and a theatrical film, Serenity (2005), that extended the story, deepened the characters, and revealed new wonders and dangers on the deep-space frontier. In Firefly Revisited: Essays on Joss Whedon’s Classic Series, Michael Goodrum and Philip Smith present a collection that reflects on the program, the characters, and the post-cancellation film and comics that grew out of the show. The contributors to this volume offer fresh perspectives on familiar characters and blaze new trails into unexplored areas of the Firefly universe. Individual essays explore the series’ place in the history of the space-Western subgenre, the political economy of the Alliance, and the uses of music and language in the series to immerse audiences in a multicultural future. These essays look at how the show offered viewers high adventure as well as engaged with a range of themes that still resonate today. As such, Firefly Revisited will intrigue the show’s many fans, as well as Whedon scholars and anyone interested in the twenty-first-century renaissance of science-fiction television.