Search results for ""author chris rojek""

Edited by a leading scholar in the field, this new title from Routledge's Critical Perspectives on Business and Management series is a four-volume collection of canonical and cutting-edge research in Event Management.The origins of the serious study of Event Management are comparatively recent, but the subject has evolved rapidly, often drawing on scholarship, research, and practice from a number of other disciplines and cognate areasprimarily, Sports Studies, Leisure Studies, and Hospitality Studies, but also Business Studies, Organization Studies, Management Studies, Political Science, and Sociology. Event Management is now a vibrant and dynamic field of study and research, and the sheer scale of the growth in its output makes this collection especially timely. A wide range of social-science journals have published Event Management-related material and this collection makes readily available foundational pieces of scholarshipas well as cutting-edge researchfrom these dispar

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What has the death of Corporal Patrick D. Tillman of the US Army Rangers in an incident of friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004 got to do with culture? How has the study of ideology, coding, theming and representation by Cultural Studies helped us to understand Reality TV, the Internet, mobile phones, the iPod and leading brands in neat capitalism like Virgin, The Body Shop and Apple? This lively and assured book provides a concise and authoritative critical guide to Cultural Studies. It demonstrates that the field has moved through four moments': the National/Popular, the Textual/Representational, Global/Post Essentialism and Governmentality/Policy. It illustrates the meaning of each of these moments by a discussion of representative texts and concrete examples from popular culture. As such, it achieves a novel and accessible account of the origins and development of the field. The book also shows how the readers personal experience can be systematically situated in cultural forces and used as a resource to clarify how culture works, through the analysis of on-location practice, embodiment, emplacement and context. Packed with illuminating examples, and a clear and compelling prose style, the book is the antidote to abstract, hazy accounts of the meaning and value of Cultural Studies. It is the ideal text for readers new to the field, but it will also be appreciated by established practitioners as good to think with.

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Stuart Hall is the leading figure in cultural studies today – no one else has had the same influence in the shaping of the field. This book is the first full-length study of Hall's work. It examines every aspect of his work and constitutes a major critical introduction and appraisal of Hall's contribution. The book guides the reader through Hall's formative experience in Jamaica and Oxford. It examines the increasing politicization of his thought and his identification with emancipatory, socialist politics. In Birmingham, during his Directorship of the seminal Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Hall created a genuinely collaborative approach to the study of culture. In a series of dazzling publications in the 1970s, the Birmingham Centre changed the way in which social scientists think about culture. The book provides a complete guide to the debates and contribution of the Birmingham School. It explores Hall's relation with Marx, Gramsci, Althusser and a variety of traditions in continental sociology and philosophy. In the 1980s Hall occupied the vanguard of criticism against Thatcherism and Reaganism. His passionate, principled attack on the New Right and his critique of authoritarian populism reached a readership well beyond the confines of the academy. His later work has moved on to the terrain of hybridity, identity, Occidentalism, race relations. multiculturalism and the politics of difference. All of these areas are methodically explored in the book, making it the most complete study of Hall's work and significance. It will be required reading by students and lecturers in cultural studies, media studies and sociology.

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‘Presumed intimacy’ refers to a relationship that requires instant trust, confidence, disclosure and the recognition of vulnerability. Chris Rojek investigates the impact of relationships of ‘presumed intimacy’, where audiences form strong identifications with mediated others, whether they be celebrities, political personae or online friends. Arguing that the way the media are able to manage these relationships is a significant aspect of their power structure, the core of the book is an investigation into the complicity of the media in encouraging presumed intimacy and the cultural, social and political consequences arising from this. Beyond this, it examines how intimacy is performed as a masquerade in many social settings – the scripts we follow in social settings that try to manufacture a shortcut to intimacy.A compelling look into mediated relationships in the network society, Presumed Intimacy will be a key contribution to the critical analysis of society, media and culture.

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In recent years, the study of celebrity has developed and cohered into a flourishing field of social and cultural analysis. There is huge interest in topics such as the politics and logic of glamour; the role of the public-relations industry in manipulating television audiences; the relationship between fame and social control; and the economics of the so-called celebrity industry. And as interest in celebrity continues to explode, a variety of forerunners to its studydrawing on materials from a wide range of disciplines including sociology, cultural studies, history, psychology, organization studies, politics, film, and literary studieshave been rediscovered and reformulated. Among the lines of enquiry and critical tools that have been recuperated as pertinent to the study of celebrity are leadership, charisma, role models, heroes, role sets, ideology, manipulation, commodification, interpellation, narcissism, signification and individuality.The sheer scale of the ava

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Frank Sinatra was only one of a handful of popular entertainers who dominated Western popular culture for six decades. From his early fame as 'the Voice' in the early 1940s, through to the high rolling, fast living 'Rat Pack' era, to the protracted Lear-like farewell tours of his twilight years, Sinatra was the epitome of cool. This compelling, consistently insightful book portrays Sinatra in his many contradictory hues of ambition, generosity, menace and vituperation. The book asks why Sinatra's public character which mixed insufferable hauteur with soapy populism and nobility with the lowest kind of vindictive violence proved so enduring with the Western public? What model of masculinity was Sinatra projecting? Why did his recordings, concert performances and film work persuade audiences that he was really talking to them alone? What does his career tell us about the relationship between celebrity and popular culture? Sinatra may not have found his Boswell with this study, but our understanding of him will never be the same again. Rojek's is the first book to take Sinatra's cultural significance seriously. It is a landmark work in our understanding of celebrity and popular culture. The book will be of interest to students of Cultural, Media and Communication Studies, Sociology and, most of all, anyone who has bought a Sinatra recording or seen a Sinatra film.

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‘Presumed intimacy’ refers to a relationship that requires instant trust, confidence, disclosure and the recognition of vulnerability. Chris Rojek investigates the impact of relationships of ‘presumed intimacy’, where audiences form strong identifications with mediated others, whether they be celebrities, political personae or online friends. Arguing that the way the media are able to manage these relationships is a significant aspect of their power structure, the core of the book is an investigation into the complicity of the media in encouraging presumed intimacy and the cultural, social and political consequences arising from this. Beyond this, it examines how intimacy is performed as a masquerade in many social settings – the scripts we follow in social settings that try to manufacture a shortcut to intimacy.A compelling look into mediated relationships in the network society, Presumed Intimacy will be a key contribution to the critical analysis of society, media and culture.

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Frank Sinatra was only one of a handful of popular entertainers who dominated Western popular culture for six decades. From his early fame as 'the Voice' in the early 1940s, through to the high rolling, fast living 'Rat Pack' era, to the protracted Lear-like farewell tours of his twilight years, Sinatra was the epitome of cool. This compelling, consistently insightful book portrays Sinatra in his many contradictory hues of ambition, generosity, menace and vituperation. The book asks why Sinatra's public character which mixed insufferable hauteur with soapy populism and nobility with the lowest kind of vindictive violence proved so enduring with the Western public? What model of masculinity was Sinatra projecting? Why did his recordings, concert performances and film work persuade audiences that he was really talking to them alone? What does his career tell us about the relationship between celebrity and popular culture? Sinatra may not have found his Boswell with this study, but our understanding of him will never be the same again. Rojek's is the first book to take Sinatra's cultural significance seriously. It is a landmark work in our understanding of celebrity and popular culture. The book will be of interest to students of Cultural, Media and Communication Studies, Sociology and, most of all, anyone who has bought a Sinatra recording or seen a Sinatra film.

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The rise of blogs and social media provide a public platform for people to share information online. This trend has facilitated an industry of self-appointed ‘lifestyle gurus’ who have become instrumental in the management of intimacy and social relations. Advice on health, wealth creation, relationships and well-being is rising to challenge the authority of experts and professionals. Pitched as ‘authentic’, ‘accessible’ and ‘outside of the system’, this information has produced an unprecedented sense of empowerment and sharing. However, new problems have arisen in its wake. In Lifestyle Gurus, Baker and Rojek explore how authority and influence are achieved online. They trace the rise of lifestyle influencers in the digital age, relating this development to the erosion of trust in the expert-professional power bloc. The moral contradictions of lifestyle websites are richly explored, demonstrating how these technologies encourage a preoccupation with the very commercial and corporate hierarchies they seek to challenge. A timely account of how lifestyle issues are being packaged and transacted in a wired-up world, this book is important reading for students and scholars of media, communication, sociology and related disciplines.

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The rise of blogs and social media provide a public platform for people to share information online. This trend has facilitated an industry of self-appointed ‘lifestyle gurus’ who have become instrumental in the management of intimacy and social relations. Advice on health, wealth creation, relationships and well-being is rising to challenge the authority of experts and professionals. Pitched as ‘authentic’, ‘accessible’ and ‘outside of the system’, this information has produced an unprecedented sense of empowerment and sharing. However, new problems have arisen in its wake. In Lifestyle Gurus, Baker and Rojek explore how authority and influence are achieved online. They trace the rise of lifestyle influencers in the digital age, relating this development to the erosion of trust in the expert-professional power bloc. The moral contradictions of lifestyle websites are richly explored, demonstrating how these technologies encourage a preoccupation with the very commercial and corporate hierarchies they seek to challenge. A timely account of how lifestyle issues are being packaged and transacted in a wired-up world, this book is important reading for students and scholars of media, communication, sociology and related disciplines.

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