Leadership, Popular Culture and Social Change

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.

Now is an exceptional time to explore the synergy between leadership, popular culture and social change. With analyses that span time, genre and space, the book’s contributors investigate works of popular culture as objects of leadership that help us to both reinforce and question our understandings of who we are and how we want to reshape the world around us.

This dynamic examination of leadership presents a useful model of analysis not only for scholars of leadership and popular culture but also for cultural historians and educators across the humanities.