Richard Maxwell (ed.): Culture Works: The Political Economy of Culture (2001)

Tears down the imaginary walls separating culture, economics, and politics.

When we read best-selling books, go to movies, visit art museums, go dancing, take in a game, we customarily ignore the political economy that hammers these features of culture into shape; normally, at such times, we’re not thinking about corporate board room votes, lobbyists, public funding for the arts, the end of the Cold War, stock swaps, intellectual property, or the class divisions of public space. This book aims to change that by offering readers a number of ways to link cultural experience to political economy—to become aware of the ways in which political and economic realities and decisions determine the outlines of spaces and activities in everyday life.

Unsettling and provocative, Culture Works tears down the imaginary walls separating culture, economics, and politics. Writing across the established borders between anthropology, sociology, art history, economics, communication and media studies, political theory, and performance, the authors seek to show how particular economies and power relations work in familiar and central cultural experiences: art, beer, advertising, dance, sport, shopping, the Web, and media. Their essays provide a series of lucid, critical accounts of various aspects of the political economy of culture and its attendant issues of production, consumption, corporatization, and the struggle for meaning. A refreshing example of a politics of writing and critical thinking that cultural studies and political economic analysis can produce when working together, the result will change the ways in which readers experience, consider, and understand culture works.

Contributors: David L. Andrews, Michael Curtin, Susan G. Davis, Danielle Fox, Chad Raphael, Anna Beatrice Scott, Ben Scott, Inger L. Stole, Thomas Streeter.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2001
ISBN 081663601X, 9780816636013
Length 259 pages

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Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

The book originated with Postman’s delivering a talk to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell’s 1984 and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book Postman said that reality was reflected more by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where the public was oppressed by pleasure than Orwell’s 1984 where they were oppressed by pain.

Television has conditioned us to tolerate visually entertaining material measured out in spoonfuls of time, to the detriment of rational public discourse and reasoned public affairs. Neil Postman alerts us to the real and present dangers of this state of affairs, and offers compelling suggestions as to how to withstand the media onslaught. Before we hand over politics, education, religion, and journalism to the show business demands of the television age, we must recognize the ways in which the media shape our lives and the ways we can, in turn, shape them to serve out highest goals.

Publisher Penguin Books, 1985
ISBN 0140094385, 9780140094381
Length 184 pages

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Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot: On Justification: Economies of Worth (1991/2006)

A vital and underappreciated dimension of social interaction is the way individuals justify their actions to others, instinctively drawing on their experience to appeal to principles they hope will command respect. Individuals, however, often misread situations, and many disagreements can be explained by people appealing, knowingly and unknowingly, to different principles. On Justification is the first English translation of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s ambitious theoretical examination of these phenomena, a book that has already had a huge impact on French sociology and is likely to have a similar influence in the English-speaking world.

In this foundational work of post-Bourdieu sociology, the authors examine a wide range of situations where people justify their actions. The authors argue that justifications fall into six main logics exemplified by six authors: civic (Rousseau), market (Adam Smith), industrial (Saint-Simon), domestic (Bossuet), inspiration (Augustine), and fame (Hobbes). The authors show how these justifications conflict, as people compete to legitimize their views of a situation.

On Justification is likely to spark important debates across the social sciences.

Keywords and phrases
political philosophy, civic world, Saint-Simon, world of fame, Durkheim, city of God, relativism, Social Contract, market world, Rousseau, domestic world, However, different worlds, higher common principle, inspired world, sociology, Jansenist, cial, Aristotle, metaphysics

Originally published in French as De la Justification: Les Economies de la Grandeur by Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1991
Translated by Catherine Porter
Publisher Princeton University Press, 2006
ISBN 0691125163, 9780691125169
389 pages

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Luc Boltanski: Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics (1993/1999)

Distant Suffering examines the moral and political implications for a spectator of the distant suffering of others as presented through the media. What are the morally acceptable responses to the sight of suffering on television, for example, when the viewer cannot act directly to affect the circumstances in which the suffering takes place? Luc Boltanski argues that spectators can actively involve themselves and others by speaking about what they have seen and how they were affected by it. Developing ideas in Adam Smith’s moral theory, he examines three rhetorical ‘topics’ available for the expression of the spectator’s response to suffering: the topics of denunciation and of sentiment and the aesthetic topic. The book concludes with a discussion of a ‘crisis of pity’ in relation to modern forms of humanitarianism. A possible way out of this crisis is suggested which involves an emphasis and focus on present suffering.

• Insightful and scholarly sociological analysis of role of media in our lives • Examines rise of ‘new humanitarianism’ and charity actions in contemporary society • Puts very modern phenomena in context of history of political intervention and moral sensitivity

Keywords and phrases
Bernard Kouchner, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Marxism, Adam Smith, Hannah Arendt, However, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Klossowski, mediatisation, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Genealogy of Morality, Marquis de Sade, spectator, Pierre Favre, sentimental literature, Paris, USSR

Originally published in French as La Souffrance à Distance by Editions Métailié, 1993
Translated by Graham D. Burchell
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1999
ISBN 0521659531, 9780521659536
246 pages

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William W Braham, Jonathan A Hale (eds.): Rethinking Technology. A Reader in Architectural Theory (2006)

This essential reference for all students of architecture, design and the built environment provides a convenient single source for all the key texts in the recent literature on architecture and technology.

The book contains over fifty carefully selected essays, manifestoes, reflections and theories by architects and architectural writers from 1900 to 2004. This mapping out of a century of architectural technology reveals the discipline’s long and close attention to the experience and effects of new technologies, and provides a broad picture of the shift from the ‘age of tools’ to the ‘age of systems’.

Chronological arrangement and cross-referencing of the articles enable both a thematic and historically contextual understanding of the topic and highlight important thematic connections across time.

With the ever increasing pace of technological change, this Reader presents a clear understanding of the context in which it has and does affect architecture.

Published by: Routledge, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-415-34654-2
Pages: 488

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Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Douglas Kellner (eds.): Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (2006)

Bringing together a range of core texts into one volume, this acclaimed anthology offers the definitive resource in culture, media, and communication.

* A fully revised new edition of the bestselling anthology in this dynamic and multidisciplinary field.
* New contributions include essays from Althusser through to Henry Jenkins, and a completely new section on Globalization and Social Movements.
* Retains important emphasis on the giant thinkers and “makers” of the field: Gramsci on hegemony; Althusser on ideology; Horkheimer and Adorno on the culture industry; Raymond Williams on Marxist cultural theory; Habermas on the public sphere; McLuhan on media; Chomsky on propaganda; hooks and Mulvey on the subjects of visual pleasure and oppositional gazes.
* Features a substantial critical introduction, short section introductions and full bibliographic citations.

Keywords and phrases
postmodern, mass media, cultural studies, Star Wars, culture industry, feminism, Marxist, Frankfurt school, third world, hyperreal, Stuart Hall, hegemony, cultural imperialism, deterritorialization, labour power, Ideological State Apparatuses, simulacrum, television, media imperialism

Publisher Wiley-Blackwell, 2006
ISBN 1405132582, 9781405132589
755 pages

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Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990)

The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr. Ostrom first describes three models most frequently used as the foundation for recommending state or market solutions. She then outlines theoretical and empirical alternatives to these models in order to illustrate the diversity of possible solutions. In the following chapters she uses institutional analysis to examine different ways–both successful and unsuccessful–of governing the commons. In contrast to the proposition of the tragedy of the commons argument, common pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisheries.

Contents
Series editors; preface; Preface; 1. Reflections on the commons; 2. An institutional approach to the study of self-organization and self-governance in CPR situations; 3. Analyzing long-enduring, self-organized and self-governed CPRs; 4. Analyzing institutional change; 5. Analyzing institutional failures and fragilities; 6. A framework for analysis of self-organizing and self-governing CPRs; Notes; References; Index.

Keywords and phrases
Alanya, Gal Oya, irrigation, acre-feet, prisoner’s dilemma, Alicante, Orihuela, Bodrum, acre-foot, common-pool resources, Turia River, Izmir, Sri Lanka, Valencia, water rights, saltwater intrusion, WBWA, zanjera, self-organization, Murcia

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1990
ISBN 0521405998, 9780521405997
Length 280 pages

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