One quote that stuck out to me in Harvey’s work was that “A theory of leadership is dependent on a theory of social organization” (214). I think this quote weaves into the messages of both Bezio’s reading and the podcast. All three center how leadership is influences by the social structure, cultural norms, and cultural shifts of a group. Leadership relies on the way a community or group already functions in order to have any form of followership—in order to appeal to anyone to become a follower, it must align with the pre-existing values of the group, or lean into the discontentment of a group and shift its cultural norms and social structure in way that the group agrees with.
This idea of the connection between leadership and followership through social organization and popular culture relates back to the idea of invisible leadership that we previously discussed. Without common beliefs goals and interests, any form of collective event, work, or following would not be possible, and therefore there would not be any following possible for any leadership structure, hierarchical or not. Leadership depends on the community’s unity and engagement. Bezio depicts a similar sentiment to what Harvey stated above: “put simply, through the practice of leadership, popular culture helps to both reinforce and question our understanding of who “we”—both as individuals and as members of a civilization—are and what we should strive to become or accomplish as citizens, leaders and followers” (Bezio 2). Popular culture impacts our community identity, and therefore our understanding of our social structure and who/what we want to follow. While we often dismiss popular culture, as mentioned in the podcast, its underlying messages can have profound impacts on our identity.
I think this also connects to what is happening on our campus right now. The collective values and desires of the UR community have been pushed to center stage by the work of the Black Student Coalition and the many other students supporting them, both now and before. Much of what we know about the racist histories of those whose names are on the buildings of our campus can be found online, but many of us likely first heard about them as stories through word of mouth. Both the recognizable and invisible leadership happening on campus has pushed for a shift in our social organization, our local popular culture (although this idea can also be applied to our larger scale popular culture in the United States in the past year), and as a result, our leadership.
I definitely agree with what you said about the current state of our campus. The history of our campus is becoming more well-known, but it’s mostly through word-of-mouth, articles from various news outlets and social media posts. It’s interesting that popular culture is what drives a lot of our society’s information transmission, but if it does, it makes sense that we should talk about it more often, especially in the context of leadership.
I really like your connection to current events happening on campus. I think it’s a very important point to realize that the leadership on our campus has been driving this movement. This was a perfect example of the reading in each of our lives right now.
I really liked the way you established the premise that first pop culture influences who we are and where we are headed, then discussed the fact that who we are and where we are headed plays such a significant role in leadership. The, just following that line of logic, we can understand how important pop culture is in terms of leadership and how leaders need to grasp the concept of its significance.
Community identity is an important factor in leadership. I also liked the connection to how popular culture shapes identity in the sense of the individual as well as “members of civilization.” I think it’s really interesting to think about how significant an impact pop culture can have on leaders and their followers.