Cultural Chaos


Book Description

With examples drawn from media coverage of the War on Terror, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the London underground bombings, Cultural Chaos explores the changing relationship between journalism and power in an increasingly globalised news culture. In this new text, Brian McNair examines the processes of cultural, geographic and political dissolution in the post-Cold War era and the rapid evolution of information and communication technologies. He investigates the impact of these trends on domestic and international journalism and on political processes in democratic and authoritarian societies across the world. Written in a lively and accessible style, Cultural Chaos provides students with an overview of the evolution of the sociology of journalism, a critical review of current thinking within media studies and an argument for a revision and renewal of the paradigms that have dominated the field since the early twentieth century. Separate chapters are devoted to new developments such as the rise of the blogosphere and satellite television news and their impact on journalism more generally. Cultural Chaos will be essential reading for all those interested in the emerging globalised news culture of the twenty-first century.




Cultural Chaos


Book Description

With examples from media coverage of the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the London underground bombings, McNair studies the changing relationship between journalism and power in an increasingly globalized news culture.




Culture in Chaos


Book Description

Fought in the wake of a decade of armed struggle against colonialism, the Mozambican civil war lasted from 1977 to 1992, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives while displacing millions more. As conflicts across the globe span decades and generations, Stephen C. Lubkemann suggests that we need a fresh perspective on war when it becomes the context for normal life rather than an exceptional event that disrupts it. Culture in Chaos calls for a new point of departure in the ethnography of war that investigates how the inhabitants of war zones live under trying new conditions and how culture and social relations are transformed as a result. Lubkemann focuses on how Ndau social networks were fragmented by wartime displacement and the profound effect this had on gender relations. Demonstrating how wartime migration and post-conflict return were shaped by social struggles and interests that had little to do with the larger political reasons for the war, Lubkemann contests the assumption that wartime migration is always involuntary. His critical reexamination of displacement and his engagement with broader theories of agency and social change will be of interest to anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and demographers, and to anyone who works in a war zone or with refugees and migrants.




Chaos in the Contact Zone


Book Description

Cultural encounters are often being stylized not only as experiences of uncontrollability and unpredictability par excellence, but also as challenges to planning and predicting. The history, the different forms and the consequences of this phenomenon are the main issues discussed in this volume. The contributions show that chaos and control are not mutually exclusive in the "contact zone" (Mary Louise Pratt); on the contrary, they stand in relation to each other - be it as a competence or as an interpretive scheme.




Policies of Chaos


Book Description

The tumult of the Cultural Revolution after 1966 is often blamed on a few leaders in Beijing, or on long-term egalitarian ideals, or on communist or Chinese political cultures. Lynn White shows, however, that the chaos resulted mainly from reactions by masses of individuals and small groups to three specific policies of administrative manipulation: labeling groups, designating bosses, and legitimating violence in political campaigns. These habits of local organization were common after 1949 and gave the state success in short-term revolutionary aims, despite scarce resources and staff--but they also drove millions to attack each other later. First, measures accumulated before 1966 to give people bad or good names (such as "rightist" or "worker"); these set a family's access to employment, education, residence, and rations--so they gave interests to potential conflict groups. Second, policies for bossism went far beyond Confucian patronage patterns, making work units tightly dependent on Party monitors--so rational individuals either pandered to local bosses or (when they could) deposed them. Third, the institutionalized violence of political campaigns both mobilized activists and scared others into compliance. These organizational measures were often effective in the short run before 1966 but accumulated social costs that China paid later. The book ends with comparisons to past cases of mass urban ostracism in other countries, and it suggests how such tragedies may be forecast or prevented in the future. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




Leading through Chaos


Book Description

Organizational crisis and chaos create drama that is complicated, layered and difficult to unravel without a roadmap. New leaders, especially those who find themselves in an organization in crisis need to hear how others have experienced that challenge and managed to emerge trusted, supported and having moved the entire organization to a new and better place without losing themselves in the process. This book provides a crisis identification checklist, ten strategies for managing chaos and reflection questions to support the leader’s health and wellness. Utilizing the familiar story of the Wizard of Oz and specifically Dorothy’s experience as a young, female, new leader, anchors the work and provides a familiar and comforting backdrop for managing this extraordinarily difficult and specific leadership challenge.




Our Cultural Agony


Book Description

Cultural twilight means cultural disintegration or death. It means cul tural agony. Such agony gradually fades into the dawn of tomorrow's culture, just as the twilight of a summer's evening proceeds into the daylight of the forthcoming day. Consequently cultural twilight or agony simul taneously is the dawn - the milieu of birth - of future gods. With these words a close interbelonging of the recently published SEARCH FOR GoDS with the present study, OUR CULTURAL AGONY, is stressed. Both of these books belong together and constitute one and the same "story". While SEARCH FOR GODS deals with man of tomorrow in his venture to find the way which would lead him to his dawning gods, OUR CULTURAL AGONY attempts to disclose contemporary man's ways of erring - his stray ing ways. Moreover, just as the way towards man's future gods is simul taneously his way to his true cultural self, so are his straying ways his ways of a lack of self. Man's way to his true self is his authentic, innermost, "bloody" or "ex-istential" way, while the way of his lack of self is his inauthentic way. The inauthentic ways, generally speaking, are "democratic" ways: they are the public and common ways of modem society, most typical or characteristic of it. Accordingly, while SEARCH FOR GODS has an indi vidualistic character, OUR CULTURAL AGONY has a social character.




The Price of the Ticket


Book Description

The works of James Baldwin constitute one of the major contributions to American literature in the twentieth century, and nowhere is this more evident than in The Price of the Ticket, a compendium of nearly fifty years of Baldwin's powerful nonfiction writing. With truth and insight, these personal, prophetic works speak to the heart of the experience of race and identity in the United States. Here are the full texts of Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Devil Finds Work, along with dozens of other pieces, ranging from a 1948 review of Raintree Country to a magnificent introduction to this book that, as so many of Mr. Baldwin's works do, combines his intensely private experience with the deepest examination of social interaction between the races. In a way, The Price of the Ticket is an intellectual history of the twentieth-century American experience; in another, it is autobiography of the highest order.




Social and Cognitive Development in the Context of Individual, Social, and Cultural Processes


Book Description

Several recent analyses have focused on how social and cultural factors shape development, but less well understood are the individual constructive processes involved in this interplay. This volume showcases varied theoretical and empirical approaches to how individual, social and cultural factors shape development, and suggests new directions for future scholarship.




Germany's New Right as Culture and Politics


Book Description

This is the first full-length study in English of the New Right in Germany and it breaks new ground by considering the New Right as a political and a cultural movement. The book examines the often contradictory motives that feed into New Right political pronouncements and explores the cultural thinking that feeds into extreme political commitment.