Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Winning power in Westeros is hard, but holding power is much harder. The book analyzes strategies of leadership in the popular television series as an inspiration for today's uncertain times and our corporate world, bringing together research on TV series with management studies. The medieval fantasy world presents emotional and larger-than-life leadership archetypes: charismatic, authentic, privileged, masculine, female, motherly, lonely, romantic and disabled leaders. They are constructed and deconstructed. Hands, penises, and heads are chopped off. In this way, the series also celebrates the power of those who follow or resist, and always influence their leaders. Dr. Brigitte Biehl (Biehl-Missal) is Professor for Media and Communication Management at the SRH Berlin University of Applied Sciences, School of Popular Arts in Berlin, acting as Head of Studies B.A. Creative Industries Management, M.A. International Management Focus on Creative Leadership, and director of the Institutefor Professional Development (IWK). Her background is in theater, film and media studies and business studies; she has published widely on art, aesthetics and management. 

This book is a translation of the original German 1^st edition Leadership in Game of Throne by Brigitte Biehl, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

The multimodal study on the experience of suspense and fear in horror films is part of a collaborative project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), involving Film Studies (University of Mainz) and Computer Science (University of Hanover). The project aims to expand the digital research infrastructure through the development of a software platform that enables researchers to extract data from audiovisual material both automatically and manually. In this initial case study, a corpus of 20 slasher films—a subgenre of horror—was analyzed. The system was equipped with tools for manual annotation and basic algorithmic procedures to capture shot lengths, shot sizes, brightness and volume levels, and face recognition. Assuming that triggering fear is a functional core of suspense in horror films, the study uses exploratory statistical methods to identify patterns in the structure of relevant content. Ultimately, the research shows that slasher films simulate features of dangerous situations through their cinematic staging—situations to which human perception is evolutionarily attuned.