Culture Conglomerates


Book Description

Explains conglomeration and regulation in the film and television industries, covering its history as well as the contemporary scene. Useful as a supplement for a variety of media courses, this text includes synopses of key media regulations and policies, discussion questions, a glossary, and entertaining boxed features.




Corporate Culture


Book Description

Organizational culture is a quiet, but driving, influence on our perception of a company, whether as a consumer or as an employee. For instance, we know Southwest Airlines as laid back and friendly. We think of Google as innovative. To almost every well-known company we can assign a character. It is now well recognized that corporate culture has a significant impact on organizational health and performance. Yet, the concept of corporate culture and culture management is too often tantalizingly elusive. In this book, Flamholtz and Randle define culture, identifying and explaining the five key dimensions that determine it: a customer orientation; a people orientation; a process orientation; strong standards of performance and accountability; innovation and openness to change. They explain why culture is a critical factor in organizational success and failure—a key determinant of financial performance. Then, they provide a theoretically sound, highly practical, and field-tested method for managing corporate culture—presenting a set of international and domestic cases that show how actual companies have leveraged culture as the ultimate source of sustainable competitive advantage. In addition to well-known companies such as Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, American Express, IBM, and Toyota, the text presents lesser known culture stars, such as Smartmatic and Infogix. While other titles on culture have focused too heavily on the organization as a psychological being, or on academic studies of culture as a business lever, Corporate Culture draws on empirics to present a go-to, must-read guide for leveraging corporate culture as a source of competitive advantage and as a means of impacting the bottom line.




Conglomerates and the Media


Book Description

An examination of the effects on increasing conglomerate control of news and culture, by nine leading insiders and critics. What are the effects of increasing conglomerate ownership on the creation and dissemination of news and culture? Available for the first time in paperback, these nine essays by leading media insiders and critics take probing, critical looks at the dramatic changes of recent years. Opening with a fascinating overview of radio and television history by Erik Barnouw, the "dean of American media critics," the first part of the book features longtime media insiders such as Richard M. Cohen (former CBS Evening News senior producer) and Gene Roberts (managing editor of the New York Times), writing candidly on the effects of increasing profit expectations in the newsroom. In the second part of the book, prominent media analysts, such as Mark Crispin Miller (author of Boxed In), Thomas Schatz (author of The Genius of the System), David Lieberman (USA Today), and Patricia Aufderheide (In These Times), discuss the dumbing-down of the publishing industry, the transformation of Hollywood the increasing importance of merchandising and foreign rights in all media, and the false promise of the digital age. Finally, Thomas Frank (The Baffler) examines advertising and the possibility of resistance to conglomerate control of the media. Contributors include: Patricia Aufderheide, professor of communication at American University; Erik Barnouw, author of A History of Broadcasting in the United States; Richard Cohen, former senior producer of the CBS Evening News; Thomas Frank, editor-in-chief of The Baffier; Todd Gitlin, author of The Twilight of Common Dreams; David Lieberman, media analyst at USA Today; Mark Crispin Miller, author of Boxed In; Gene Roberts, managing editor of the New York Times; and Tom Schatz, author of The Genius of the System.




Corporate Cultures 2000 Edition


Book Description

A reissue of the classic best-seller that coined the term 'corporate culture' In the early 1980s, Terry Deal and Allan Kennedy launched a new field of inquiry and practice with the publication of their landmark book, Corporate Cultures, in which they argued that distinct types of cultures evolve within companies, with a direct and measurable impact on strategy and performance. Despite the dramatic evolution of the business landscape over the last twenty years, the basic principles of the book remain as fresh and relevant as they did when it was first published; that organizations, by their very nature, are social enterprises, with tribal habits, well-defined cultural roles for individuals, and various strategies for determining inclusion, reinforcing identity, and adapting to change. In the new introduction, the authors reflect on the enduring lessons of their investigation into the life of organizations. Allan A. Kennedy is a Boston-based writer and management consultant whose new book, The End of Shareholder Value, will be published by Perseus in April.




Markets from Culture


Book Description

Institutional logics, the underlying governing principles of societal sectors, strongly influence organizational decision making. Any shift in institutional logics results in a similar shift in attention to alternative problems and solutions and in new determinants for executive decisions. Examining changes in institutional logics in higher-education publishing, this book links cultural analysis with organizational decision making to develop a theory of attention and explain how executives concentrate on certain market characteristics to the exclusion of others. Analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data from the 1950s to the 1990s, the author shows how higher education publishing moved from a culture of independent domestic publishers focused on creating markets for books based on personal, relational networks to a culture of international conglomerates that create markets from corporate hierarchies. This book offers broader lessons beyond publishing--its theory is applicable to explaining institutional changes in organizational leadership, strategy, and structure occurring in all professional services industries.




Merchants of Culture


Book Description

These are turbulent times in the world of book publishing. For nearly five centuries the methods and practices of book publishing remained largely unchanged, but at the dawn of the twenty-first century the industry finds itself faced with perhaps the greatest challenges since Gutenberg. A combination of economic pressures and technological change is forcing publishers to alter their practices and think hard about the future of the books in the digital age. In this book - the first major study of trade publishing for more than 30 years - Thompson situates the current challenges facing the industry in an historical context, analysing the transformation of trade publishing in the United States and Britain since the 1960s. He gives a detailed account of how the world of trade publishing really works, dissecting the roles of publishers, agents and booksellers and showing how their practices are shaped by a field that has a distinctive structure and dynamic. This new paperback edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to take account of the most recent developments, including the dramatic increase in ebook sales and its implications for the publishing industry and its future.




The Business of Books


Book Description

Part-memoir, part-history, The Business of Books is an irascible, acute and often passionate account of the collapsing standards of contemporary book publishing. It has appeared throughout the world in seventeen different editions. Book jacket.




Making Capitalism


Book Description

This pathbreaking work extends the boundaries of contemporary anthropological research by presenting in one cohesive, meticulously researched work: an original theoretical perspective on the relationships between the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of a large modern business organization; the first anthropological work on South Korean management and its white-collar workers, in a case study of one of South Korea's "big four" conglomerates; and an innovative delineation of how modern business practices are enmeshed in past and present, structure and agency, and local and international systems." "Based largely on the author's nine months of participant-observation in the offices of one of South Korea's largest conglomerates (with annual sales of about $15 billion and approximately 80,000 employees), the book is also enriched by the author's previous fieldwork in rural Korea, where many of the conglomerate's white-collar personnel spent their formative years. These vantage points are used to explore constructions of "traditional" Korean culture and transformations of cultural knowledge prompted by new political-economic conditions, and how both inform practices prevailing in the large conglomerates - and ultimately shape South Korea's capitalism." "The work focuses on South Korea's new middle class. It explains how office workers' identities and often contradictory interests present them with choices between alternative interpretations and actions affecting both themselves and their conglomerates. Much attention is paid to ideological and more coercive means of controlling white-collar employees, to subordinates' strategies of resistance, and to ways in which cultural understandings and moral claims inform the assessment and pursuit of material advantage.




Record Cultures


Book Description

Record Cultures tells the story of how early U.S. commercial recording companies captured American musical culture in a key period in both music and media history. Amid dramatic technological and cultural changes of the 1920s and 1930s, small recording companies in the United States began to explore the genres that would later be known as jazz, blues, and country. Smaller record labels, many based in rural or out of the way Midwestern and Southern towns, were willing to take risks on the country’s regional vernacular music as a way to compete with more established recording labels. Recording companies’ relationship with radio grew closer as both industries were on the rise, propelled by new technologies. Radio, which had become immensely popular, began broadcasting more recorded music in place of live performances, and this created profitable symbiosis. With the advent of the talkies, the film industry completed the media trifecta. The novelty of recorded sound was replacing film accompanists, and the popularity of movie musicals solidified film’s connections with the radio and recording industries. By the early 1930s, the recording industry had gone from being part of the largely autonomous phonograph industry to being major media industry of its own, albeit deeply tied to—and, in some cases, owned by—the radio and film industries. The triangular relationships between these media industries marked the first major entertainment and media conglomerates in U.S. history. Through an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach to recording industry history, Record Cultures creates new connections between different strands of media research. It will be of interest to scholars of popular music, media studies, sound studies, American culture, and the history of film, television, and radio.




The ICCA Handbook on Corporate Social Responsibility


Book Description

The world's leading companies have realized that success in the long term requires them not only to make an economic profit, but also to contribute to the societies in which they operate. As a result Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has moved to the top of the business agenda. Yet questions remain. Sceptics ask whether, provided an organization's activities conform to legislation, there is a business case for going beyond this. This unique Handbook from the Institute for Corporate Culture Affairs (ICCA) offers an invaluable combination of lessons learned and best practice for the future. It explores the general concept of CSR, investigates approaches to implementation and provides first-hand insights from well-known CEOs, academics and organizations. Above all it stresses the fact that CSR must spring from a corporate culture, implying values and norms which in themselves endorse sustainable ways of doing business. Without this shift of emphasis from shareholder returns to sustainable value, CSR can never be more than a diversion. Featuring contributions from Ben Verwaayen (CEO, BT Group), Fujio Mitarai (President and CEO, Canon), Sir Geoffrey Chandler (Founder, Amnesty International Business Group) and Yoshio Shirai (Managing Director, Toyota), as well as experiences from inside leading organizations like Volkswagen, Credit Suisse, The Body Shop and the UK Government, The ICCA Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility showcases CEOs and companies that have seized the opportunities offered by CSR. It is intended to stimulate further exchange and development in the field. For now, it captures the state of the CSR art. The Board of Editors who have worked on this book include Katja Böhmer, Aron Ghebremariam, Judith Hennigfeld, Sandra S. Huble, Dirk Matten, Manfred Pohl, Nick Tolhurst & Wayne Visser