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This article focuses on how the film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Columbus, 2001; Rowling, 1998), can be used to teach the concepts related to team leadership. In addition, the article offers a discussion of the student and professor perspectives on using film in the classroom and provides recommendations for implementation.

We applied Tuckman and Jensen’s (1977) stages of small group development to frame a vicarious learning experience utilizing the movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This approach is grounded in experiential learning, guiding learners through a shared experience, reflection, conceptualization, and experimentation.

Popular culture artifacts (PCA) can be used to transport learners to a context within which they can vicariously experience leadership concepts that might otherwise be abstract.

Intentional preparation and facilitation can result in engaged, effective leadership learning through film.

Surveys a 50 per cent sample of Scottish practices (stratified by health board area), concerning whether they had a practice manager and who had responsibility for practice management tasks. The overall response rate was 73 per cent, with 63 per cent of responding practices employed a practice manager. Reports the findings from practices employing a manager, and reveals marked variations in levels of managers pay and responsibility. The development of practice management structures varied with only 85 per cent of practices holding regular practice management meetings. The results suggest that practices which previously coped without a manager have recognized the need for one as the complexity of practice administration increases and that the traditional career path of managers involving internal promotion is changing.

Andrew Greeley draws a distinction between serious literature and popular literature, and locates theological and moral insight in the latter rather than the former. An overview of modern writing leads him to conclude that, while “‘serious’ literature realizes that life is pointless and absurd…popular fiction or fairy stories…reassure their readers that there is meaning and purpose in life” (Greeley, 1988, p. 11). He readily acknowledges that this has not always been the case. However, to find “happy endings” revealing “paradigms of meaning” and hopeful, encouraging answers to the important questions of life the contemporary reader turns to popular literature (Greeley, 1988, p. 11).

How do you get people – particularly young people – to engage with social and political issues? Activists and academics alike have been plagued by this question for some time, and answers to it have ranged from greater organizational involvement to framing. Another possibility is meeting youth where they are at; that is, connecting youth’s existing interests in popular culture with broader social problems and issues. A group that is doing just that is the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), a story-fueled nonprofit organization that turns fans into heroes. In this chapter, we trace the development of the Harry Potter fan community, the stories’ resonance with fans, and how the HPA has drawn on the community and the story for mobilization. We argue that the HPA leverages culture in two ways that are relevant for social movements and political communication scholars. The HPA is able to tap into the fan community for bloc recruitment using its ties and connections to media – in this case, the fictional story – as a point of mobilization. Additionally, the HPA is able to bloc recruit from mass society – a process they refer to as “cultural acupuncture” – by strategically connecting the story with social justice issues when cultural attention is at its peak. We conclude with a discussion of the HPA’s impact on its members and how bloc recruitment and cultural acupuncture may be relevant for other fan communities.

This paper aims to understand how young people manage the dramaturgical dilemmas related to drinking alcohol and performing multiple identities.

Drawing on qualitative data collected with 16-18-year olds, the authors adopt Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective to examine youth alcohol consumption in relation to multiple identities.

Young people continuously and skilfully juggle multiple identities across multiple contexts, where identities overflow and audiences and interactions overlap. Techniques of audience segregation, mystification and misrepresentation and justification are used to perform and manage multiple identities in a risky health behaviour context.

The approach may facilitate some over- and under-claiming. Future studies could observe young people’s performances of self across multiple contexts, paying particular attention to how alcohol features in these performances.

Social marketing campaigns should demonstrate an understanding of how alcohol relates to the contexts of youth lives beyond the “night out” and engage more directly with young peoples’ navigation between different identities, contexts and audiences. Campaigns could tap into the secretive nature of youth alcohol consumption and discourage youth from prioritising audience segregation and mystification above their own safety.

Extant work has argued that consumers find multiplicity unmanageable or manage multiple identities through internal dialogue. Instead, this paper demonstrates how young people manage multiple identities through interaction and performance. This study challenges the neat compartmentalisation of identities identified in prior literature and Goffman’s clear-cut division of performances into front and back stage.

This paper explores how consumers use the media products of mass culture to co-create the meanings of popular culture. Specifically, we examine both why and how Harry Potter fans utilize the primary texts written by J. K. Rowling to co-create their own fan fiction. Towards this end, we utilize Kenneth Burke's dramatistic method to explore the pattern of literary elements in both the original texts and the fan fiction. We argue that the primary impetus for consumers to engage in the co-creation of these texts is found in their ability to emphasize different ratios of literary elements in order to express their individual and collective desires. Through this process, fans utilize and contribute to the meta-textual meaning surrounding these primary focal texts and propel the original products of mass culture to the cultural texts of popular culture.

Harry Potter is one of the world's most remarkable marketing phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to reveal that consumers interact with the Potter brand in a variety of ways, ways that parallel the four archetypal houses at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The paper interrogates Pottermania by means of a longitudinal qualitative study of fans, non‐fans and neutrals.

The paper finds that, just as pupils at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and wizardly are many and varied, so too Rowling's readers come in several distinctive forms. In keeping with the prototypical characteristics of the Hogwarts houses, four Rowling reading archetypes can be tentatively identified: Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, Ravenclaws, and Slytherins.

This paper shows, contrary to the stereotype, that there is much more to Harry Potter consumers than the long lines of enthusiastic fans standing outside bookstores at midnight.

In a world where brands are narratives and consumers are readers, this paper shows that there are several distinctive modes of “reading a brand” and evaluates their implications for the future of the Harry Potter franchise.

THE new library building has been open for six months now. It is pleasantly situated in an area of new buildings, and occupies a prominent island site just on the edge of the shopping centre. The old library was in the middle of a shopping area, and it has been interesting to note that our removal from that site has had a more considerable effect on the traffic pattern than one would have thought.