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The Cowboy Way: A Study Of Leadership As Portrayed In Western Film, Ralph L. Turner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study sought to examine leadership through the medium of film, specifically the genre of the western. The western is iconographic; representative of the American ethos, the western embodied the "frontier myth." The purposes of this study were to examine how leadership was portrayed in a selected sample of western films dating from 1945 to 1995, and to categorize and characterize the leadership methods exhibited in each film. Qualitative in design, the study was concerned with broad description and discovery. Using observation as the data collection technique and content analysis as the research method, the study examined a sample of …