This is a book about the power of the arts to enhance city images, urban economies and communities. Anchored in academic discussion of the Cultural Industries - what they are, how they have emerged, why they matter and how they should be theorized - the book offers a series of case studies drawn from five countries: Australia, Singapore, Spain, the UK and the US to examine how the arts contribute to sustainable urban regeneration.
Social theories of modernity focus on the nineteenth century as the period when Western Europe was transformed by urbanization. Cities became thriving metropolitan centers as a result of economic, political, and social changes wrought by the industrial revolution. In Cultural Capitals, Karen Newman demonstrates that speculation and capital, the commodity, the crowd, traffic, and the street, often thought to be historically specific to nineteenth-century urban culture, were in fact already at work in early modern London and Paris. Newman challenges the notion of a rupture between premodern and modern societies and shows how London and Paris became cultural capitals. Drawing upon poetry, plays, and prose by writers such as Shakespeare, Scudéry, Boileau, and Donne, as well as popular materials including pamphlets, ballads, and broadsides, she examines the impact of rapid urbanization on cultural production. Newman shows how changing demographics and technological development altered these two emerging urban centers in which new forms of cultural capital were produced and new modes of sociability and representation were articulated. Cultural Capitals is a fascinating work of literary and cultural history that redefines our conception of when the modern city came to be and brings early modern London and Paris alive in all their splendor, squalor, and richness.
The book offers an inter-disciplinary study of urban pop cultural imagination in the modern metropolis. The authors engage in discussions on the nature of urban popular cultures and the ways by which we understand and appreciate urban existence.
At a time of increasing city competition, national capitals are at the forefront of efforts to gain competitive advantage for themselves and their nation, to project a distinctive and positive image and to score well in global city league tables. They are frequently their country’s main tourist gateway, and their success in attracting visitors is inextricably linked with that of the nation. They attract not just leisure visitors; they are especially important in other growing tourism markets, for example, as centres of power they feature strongly in business tourism, as academic centres they are important for educational tourism, and they frequently host global events such as the Olympic Games. And there are more of them: first, the number of capitals has grown as the number of nation-states has increased and, secondly, pressures for devolution mean more cities are seeking national capital status, even when they are not at the head of independent states. We need to understand tourism in capitals better – but there has been little research in the past. This book develops new insights as it explores the phenomenon of capital city tourism, and uses recent research to examine the appeal of ‘capitalness’ to tourists, and explore developments in capitals across the world. This book was published as a special issue of Current Issues in Tourism.
Culture now has a prominent place on the urban policy and re-profiling agendas of cities around the world. City-based cultural planning emphasising creativity in all its guises has emerged as a significant local policy initiative, while the notion of the ‘creative city’ has become an urban imaging cliché. The proliferation of local blueprints for cultural planning/creative cities has been remarkable, while supra-state bodies such as the European Union and UNESCO are also fostering the use of culture in strategies to revive cities and urban economies and to brand places as ‘different’. Cities of Culture highlights significant trends in cultural planning since its inception, revealing and analysing key discourses and influential (globally-circulating) manifestos and processes, as well as their interpretation and implementation in specific places. With reference to examples drawn from Europe, Australia, Asia and North America, Cities of Culture provides insights into the application of urban cultural strategies in different local, national and international contexts, highlighting regularities, tensions and intersections as well as core underpinning assumptions. This book explores the now-pervasive expectation that cultural planning is capable of achieving a wide range of social, economic, urban and creative outcomes. It will be of interest for students and scholars of urban sociology, urban studies, cultural policy studies and human geography.
An eternal dilemma for all organizations, and one that a considerable portion of management schools are set up to address, is how to become and stay competitive. Organisational Resilience: Concepts, Integration, and Practice brings together, for the first time, key works that describe the scope and nature of resilience and provides direction to take the field forwards. A response not only to rapidly growing interest in this field, but to the increased importance placed on it, the book presents a broad introduction to research, knowledge, and practice. The book captures the diversity and depth of current thinking about research on organizational-related resilience. The book explains fundamental concepts and clarifies some underlying ideas from diverse fields of resilience-related research. It examines how some of these concepts and ideas have been integrated into specific research activity and used to further develop their respective fields of enquiry. The connecting of concepts and ideas to existing readily helps to progress the development of theory. The book then focuses on aspects of real World practice and experience. However, the central theme about resilience as a concept is that it is not merely concerned with survival pure and simple, but that this survival involves transformation more often than not. Examining resilience at the organizational level, this book clarifies the commonality of concepts and practice that exists among disparate research disciplines and establishes a singular ‘go-to’ work that can be used to develop operational and strategic practices.
The aim of this book is to establish a sociological understanding of dyslexia within adulthood. The research explores the effects dyslexia has on the lives of individuals within an educational and employment context. A feature of the study is that it draws from literature within the social model of disability rather than employing the psycho- educational approach that dominates contemporary research. The study has placed dyslexia within the field of disability studies in an attempt to understand how this syndrome can be interpreted through the concept of disabling barriers. In order to explore dyslexia within the field of disability studies the book employs a biographical narrative approach. The book discusses the importance of identifying and supporting people with dyslexia within education and employment. By acknowledging that dyslexia is affected by issues of socio- economic status, the research has broadened the debate in relation to labelling individuals within education. The study has developed a pro-labelling approach based on evidence from the social and educational perspectives in order to represent the voices of participants within this study.
This book explores stakeholders’ perspectives, their practices, and engagement with enacting the employability agenda in the context of a rapidly changing world. It explains the need for developing graduate employability under socioeconomic, cultural, and political pressure exposed to the higher education sector. Largely framed within Bourdieu’s concepts of social field, habitus, and capital, it explores international stakeholders’ perspectives and experiences with graduate employability agenda in different contexts, which serves as a point of reference for the adoption of such initiatives. Based on empirical evidence, the authors develop a new graduate employability framework seeing it as a lifelong process, denote the relationships between types of employability capital, and shed light on the consequences of different strategies to translate employability capital to employment and career outcomes. Overall, this book generates both theoretical and practical insights which help to advance employability programs, better prepare the future workforce, and anticipate turbulence in the labour markets.
This innovative textbook demystifies the subject of world history through a diverse range of case studies. Each chapter looks at an event, person, or place commonly included in comprehensive textbooks, from prehistory to the present and from across the globe – from the Kennewick Man to gladiators and modern-day soccer and globalization – and digs deeper, examining why historians disagree on the subject and why their debates remain relevant today. By taking the approach of 'unwrapping the textbook,' David Eaton reveals how historians think, making it clear that the past is not nearly as tidy as most textbooks suggest. Provocative questions like whether ancient Greece was shaped by contact with Egypt provide an entry point into how history professors may sharply disagree on even basic narratives, and how historical interpretations can be influenced by contemporary concerns. By illuminating these historiographical debates, and linking them to key skills required by historians, World History through Case Studies shows how the study of history is relevant to a new generation of students and teachers.
