Leadership through the Lens: Interrogating Production, Presentation, and Power

Television informs our perceptions and expectations of leaders and offers a guide to understanding how we, as organizational actors, should communicate, act, and relate. Because of its pervasiveness as a medium and the impact it can have in influencing expectations of leadership and related behavior within organizational life, television can be understood an important pedagogical tool. Leadership through the Lens: Interrogating Production, Presentation, and Power is an edited collection of 11 chapters that address representations of leadership in scripted and unscripted workplace settings, showcasing the innovative ways in which diverse leadership styles are illustrated in a variety of contexts on television. With a unique approach at the intersection of leadership and mass media studies, this book shows how the two disciplines coexist to inform how leadership culture is produced and transformed via presentation and representations on television.

Mark Ward Sr. is Professor of Communication at the University of Houston - Victoria and serves on the Executive Council of the Religious Communication Association (RCA) and the Editorial Board of The Journal of Communication and Religion. His books include Deadly Documents: Organizational Discourse, Technical Communication, and the Holocaust (2014); Organizational Communication: Theory, Research, and Practice (2015); The Electronic Church in the Digital Age: Cultural Impacts of Evangelical Mass Media, Vol. 1 & 2 (2016); The Lord's Radio: Gospel Music Broadcasting and the Making of Evangelical Culture, 1920-1960 (2017), God Talk: The Problem of Divine-Human Communication (2022), and Inside Evangelicalism: The Culture of Conservative White Christianity (Lexington Books, 2025).