The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education by Steyaert Chris. Beyes Timon. Parker Martin

Author:Steyaert, Chris.,Beyes, Timon.,Parker, Martin.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317918677
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Using film and television to understand leadership

The use of film and television in management education has increased in recent years as a consequence of the influence of the narrative turn. This calls into question the objectivity of scientific conventions that have traditionally guided management studies and advocates the development of new ways of understanding management as a creative, emotional and embodied practice (Czarniawska-Joerges and de Monthoux 1994; Gagliardi and Czarniawska 2006). Our experience as management educators suggests that managers and students may learn more about how to talk and act like a leader through popular culture than from scholarly articles or business school cases (Czarniawska and Rhodes 2006). Film and television are useful in understanding the importance of bodies in leadership because they create a ‘sense of active, exploratory touch which involves all the senses simultaneously’ and ‘demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being’ (McLuhan and Fiore 1967). This enables educators and students to literally and metaphorically ‘freeze-frame’ vivid moments of leadership-in-action, giving space and opportunity to explore their meanings and impacts.

Popular culture thus provides resources to investigate and challenge representations of leadership in a way that traditional cases and classroom materials do not. As Pullen and Rhodes (2011: 52) suggest, popular culture not only reveals gendered power regimes in organisations but also ‘contains within it the resources for the critique and even subversion of those norms’. They draw on Tyler and Cohen’s (2008) deconstruction of the UK version of The Office, where the self-proclaimed ‘transformational leadership’ of manager David Brent is parodied, inviting the audience to recognise and critique the effects of ubiquitous leadership jargon. Similar dynamics can be found in other aspects of popular culture including novels. Phillips and Knowles (2012: 422) in their study of fictional entrepreneurial women suggest that novels provide a form of ‘cultural fantasy’, sites where conventional, gendered ‘truths’ about entrepreneurs can be upended. Research on the impact of media on young people confirms that audiences are not passive recipients of idealised images, but rather select and reject according to understandings of the norms of image presentation (Coleman 2008). The observer/reader is therefore an active interpreter of the text who is able to explore the processes whereby some characters espouse dominant narratives, whilst others escape straightforward signification within dominant gender discourses. By ‘widening the repertoire of representation modes’ and exploring their aesthetic force (Czarniawska 2011: 106), students are given space, not only to critique the gender norms that are represented on screen, but also to disrupt them by envisaging ways of doing leadership differently.

To illustrate what is entailed in this, we focus on the Danish TV series Borgen (2010, 2011 and 2013), a political drama set and made in Denmark. We suggest that the importance of TV series like Borgen arises from their potential as a means of representing lived experience and offering mobilising representations of leadership to audiences. Such narratives are meaning making through offering convincing interpretations (Czarniawska 1999, 2006). They provide spectators with role models of embodied organisational behaviour that they may choose to emulate (Bell 2012; Buzzanell and D’Enbeau 2014).

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