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In this chapter, we examine how the concept of heroism was defined and used during the Covid pandemic in 2020, particularly in connection with the nursing profession. We begin with a sociological examination of heroism and courage. Using textual data from US newspapers, we then compare current constructions of nurses as heroes with views of them during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. The analysis will show that during the earlier pandemic nurses were seen as essential health workers who were in great demand, but there was little reference to them being heroic. However, with Covid, nurses were often presented in the media as heroes. This was largely done by transposing the ‘emotion codes’ (Loseke, 2009) of warfare on the Covid crisis. Emotion codes like ‘fighting the enemy at home’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘bravery’ and ‘service to the country’ were used rhetorically to construct the administration of medical care in the context of a pandemic as inherently courageous and heroic. We end by arguing that the expansion of the concepts of heroism and courage, especially in the context of a profession dominated by women, offers new possibilities for a less masculine orientation toward courage and heroism.

This chapter focuses on spy action as a way to answer the question: where can we find queer female action heroes? The chapter will identify three films – D.E.B.S. (Advocate, 2005), Atomic Blonde (David Leitch, 2017) and The Spy Who Dumped Me (Susanna Fogel, 2018) – worth attention to highlight the potential and problems of the queer female hero in spy action. This chapter examines how each of these spy action films contributes to the ongoing yet uneven development of the female hero as a queer figure in post-millennial action cinema. The chapter will consider to what extent these queer female-led action films may pose a challenge to some of the dominant standards and conventions associated with the action hero, gender roles and the representation of sexuality, but also reinforce others. Some comparisons will be made to James Bond in recognition that the Bond franchise has played an important role in the spy action genre.

Whom should we consider a moral saint or exemplar? This chapter looks at the relationship between the virtue of courage and the concept of a moral saint in an organisational context, apart from war and religion. It seeks to show that careful consideration of the nature of saints and heroes and of the response of the wider population to them will help us to understand the purpose of moral exemplars and the impact they can have on our lives. Thomas Carlyle’s description of the changing relationship between people and hero since the time of the ancient Greek and Scandinavian gods provides a central core for the analysis.

The death of John F. Kennedy (JFK) was one of the most remarkable facts of the second half of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, it was reflected numerous times in popular culture, including in popular music. In this chapter, I discuss songs published in the 1963–1968 period in which the image of JFK was represented as an idea, a cultural motif or a political myth created, transformed and maintained by artistic means. In song lyrics, a real person (who was a genuinely influential politician) was portrayed as a person who acquired a certain mythical status, stemming from JFK's charismatic features and augmented by his tragic death. Thus, separate from the real political career as the president, JFK serves as a kind of mythological structure used by several artists to generate meanings and mirror cultural iconography present in American culture.

This study leads the reader on a learning journey with the heroic metaphors derived from heroic myths of today’s pop culture to the views shared by aspiring administrators. Viewing the students’ leadership vision of self as hero provided insight to guiding students in their personal leadership journey. By naming and describing self as hero, future administrators examined and then revised their own mental models for leadership by translating pop culture characters from Spiderman to McGyver to their own heroic metaphor and vision of school leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of archetypes on collective fantasies and covert ideations and argue that archetypal fantasies, dreams and emotions impact organisational performance all the way down to the bottom line.

The author maintains that role‐figures in fairy tales and mythology can teach us significant lessons about the management of organisations. The impact of the Hero archetype is elaborated in particular.

In order to manage hidden, yet important, dimensions of organisational life, the study of managerial behaviour should focus more on archetypal dimensions of human interaction.

The paper asserts that allowing scholars, management, and leadership practitioners to study organisational behaviour and cultural patterns from an archetypal perspective, offers prospects of more effective leadership and decision making.

The main thesis here is that the stories that some brands tell to consumers enable consumers to achieve archetypal experiences. Examining the stories consumers tell in natural contexts involving shopping for and using brands informs explanations of associations of archetypes, brands, and consumers. The study advances the use of degrees-of-freedom analysis (DFA) and creating visual narrative art (VNA) as useful steps for confirming or disconfirming whether or not the stories consumers tell have themes, events, and outcomes that match with the core storylines told by brands. As a proposal, an extension of thematic apperception tests (TATs) is relevant in applying the DFA to brand-consumer storytelling research. The study includes a review of early work on TATs, DFA, archetypal theory, and how brands become icons. The study's theory, method, and findings provide useful tools for brand managers and researchers on issues that relate to psychology and marketing.

The iconic vigilante Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) returned to cinema screens via Death Wish 2 (Michael Winner) in 1982 and vigilantism would remain a key theme in American urban action films throughout the 1980s. Susan Jeffords subsequently argued that Hollywood's ‘hard bodied’ male action heroes of the period were reflective of the social and political thematics that distinguished Ronald Reagan's tenure as America's President (1994, p. 22). But while Jeffords' arguments are convincing, they overlook contemporaneous films featuring female and ‘soft’ bodied urban action heroes.

The Angel trilogy (Angel, 1984; Avenging Angel, 1985; and Angel III: The Final Chapter, 1988) features three such understudied examples. Indeed, the films' diverse and atypical range of action heroes demand that they are interrogated in terms of their protagonists' gender, sexual orientation, lifestyle choices and age. Featuring narratives about the prostitutes and street folk who frequent Los Angeles' Hollywood Boulevard, the films' key characters are a teenage prostitute and her guardians: a transvestite prostitute, a lesbian hotelier and an elderly cowboy. All three films feature narratives that revolve around acts of vengeance and vigilantism.

This chapter will critically discuss the striking ways in which the films' ‘soft’ bodied and atypical protagonists are presented as convincing action heroes who subvert contemporaneous ‘hard’ bodied norms. It will also consider to what extent their subversive rewriting of typical urban action film narratives and character relations might be understood to critique and deconstruct the themes and concerns that usually characterized such films during the Reagan era.

For centuries, death has proved itself a well-spring of inspiration for artists and musicians. In particular, an artist's own experiences with death and bereavement often overflow into their creative process, giving birth to artworks which channel grief and embodied experience. Morning Heroes by the British composer Sir Arthur Bliss (1891–1975) is a paradigm of such praxis.

Morning Heroes (1930) was written in memory of Bliss's brother, Kennard, who was killed in action during the First World War. Using an anthology of texts, the work aims to enshrine a universal experience of war for both soldier and civilian and maintains its connection with the British War Requiem through its use of musico-funerary rhetoric. Bliss, who converted to Catholicism during the war, wrote several times in his later life about the spiritual nature of music, specifically its ability to heal and bring peace. It is significant, therefore, that Morning Heroes was to act as a catharsis for Bliss, sublimating his recurring nightmares of the war.

Adopting Douglas Davies' (2017) ‘words against death’ idea, this chapter considers Sir Arthur Bliss's Morning Heroes as ‘music against death’ through an examination of Bliss's use of text and music to craft a requiem in sound. It explores Bliss's use of death rhetoric and embodied experience to create a vehicle for grief and situates this process within the context of his own spiritual philosophies.