THE ART AND SCIENCE OF PURPOSEFUL CULTURES


Book Description

1.1 An introduction to Workplace Spirituality Spirituality in the workplace has been receiving increasing attention in literature since the 1990’s. Several popular books on spirituality and leadership (Conger, 1994; Bolman & Deal, 1995; Crossman, 2015), spirituality and ethics (Ayoun, Rowe & Yassine, 2015) spirituality and entrepreneurship (Chappell, 1994; Cohen & Greenfield, 1997), spirituality and service (Gatling, 2015) have also been published. In 1999 the Academy of Management established a special interest group ‘Management, Spirituality and Religion’ which subsequently developed a large membership. Several academic journals, such as the Journal of Adult Development (2002), Journal of Organizational Change Management (2003), Journal of Management Inquiry (2005), and The Leadership Quarterly (2005), have dedicated special issues to the theme of spirituality. The Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion was created in 2004, specifically tailored to publishing scholarly work in the area of workplace spirituality, an emerging area in organization and management studies. April 2014, Barcelona, saw a World Congress on Spirituality and Creativity in Management and several organizations are offering corporate workshops, seminars, and culture transformation programs aimed at holistically harnessing both the spirit and the body of employees (ET, 2011; The Telegraph, 2015).Globally, companies are embracing the endeavor to gain competitive advantage through what could be understood as the appropriation of workplace spirituality (Lips-Wiersma et al., 2009). By addressing employees as complete humans, i.e. the recognition of their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs (Dehler &Welsh 2003) organizations can open themselves to transformation. Fry (2003) stated that if organizations are to improve their effectiveness, then, spiritual leadership must be understood for its capability to increase the intrinsic motivation of men by recognizing and incorporating the three elements of humans: body, mind, and spirit. Fry and colleagues, moreover, claim to have established empirically that practitioners of spirituality at the workplace will experience greater psychological and physical well-being (Fry, 2003).




Don't wait


Book Description

Blurb The pursuit of one’s purpose in life and its actual realization have one thing in common and that is time. You can either choose to wait and discover what is at times an elusive mission or instead be intentional about making every moment in life purposeful and to make it count for something. Join me as I wade through the peculiar waters of life in search of my own reason for being. This is an unusual adventure-filled undertaking that capitalizes on the duality of fact and fiction, humor and science, logic and the surreal in order to lay bare the internal choices we make daily. This book is for those who question, “Am I truly fulfilling my purpose in life, that sole reason for my existence?” And as passion and duty collide, my hope is that this incredible journey of self-reflection will impart meaningful lessons that will transform your perspective of life. After all, the journey is as important as the destination!




A Culture of Purpose


Book Description

How innovative leaders create meaningful cultures that attract and retain top talent Building a culture of purpose is one of the greatest challenges facing modern leaders, as today's best minds are looking for meaning, not just jobs. More than any other single factor, cultures of purpose power winning organizations, attracting the smartest, most creative, most passionate talent. For leaders building cultures of purpose, the commercial pursuit of sustainability provides the most reliable blueprint. While sustainability has been commonly misconstrued as a description of a set of problems, Christoph Lueneburger shows that it is really a solution to problems, capable of inspiring people and forging cultures.Sharing his exclusive, in-depth dialogues with chief sustainability officers, CEOs, and board chairmen, Lueneburger reveals how sustainability works at places where it works best, including Chrysler, Unilever, TNT, Walmart, and Bloomberg. Featuring a clear three-phase process that helps leaders assess the talent needed to develop organizations characterized by energy, resilience, and openness, A Culture of Purpose offers leaders the right questions to ask in order to: Tap and Nurture Your Current Corporate Strengths: Learn how to recognize, cultivate, and leverage the competencies of your current talent to develop your leadership team. Hire the Right Team: Ask the right questions to identify the innate personality traits in potential new hires, regardless of level and function, to bring on board those most likely to succeed in and shape your organization. Craft Your Culture: Create an environment that unleashes these competencies and traits and pushes them to the fore. Shape how people relate to one another and collectively go for what would be out of reach to them individually. Many books have described the "what" and the "how" of sustainability, but this is the first to reveal the "who." Lueneburger changes dated preconceptions to show that sustainability is not an ideological mindset but a cultural trait of a resilient business. For leaders ready to build and strengthen a winning business, A Culture of Purpose is an education, a revelation, and an invitation to the next generation of success.




Exploring Cultural Value


Book Description

Exploring Cultural Value presents ground breaking new research on the use of the cultural value lens to explain and investigate those areas of society where art and culture can have an impact or add value, beyond economic measures.




The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures


Book Description

Fans constitute a very special kind of audience. They have been marginalized, ridiculed and stigmatized, yet at the same time they seem to represent the vanguard of new relationships with and within the media. ’Participatory culture’ has become the new normative standard. Concepts derived from early fan studies, such as transmedial storytelling and co-creation, are now the standard fare of journalism and marketing text books alike. Indeed, usage of the word fan has become ubiquitous. The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures problematizes this exaltation of fans and offers a comprehensive examination of the current state of the field. Bringing together the latest international research, it explores the conceptualization of ’the fan’ and the significance of relationships between fans and producers, with particular attention to the intersection between online spaces and offline places. The twenty-two chapters of this volume elucidate the key themes of the fan studies vernacular. As the contributing authors draw from recent empirical work around the globe, the book provides fresh insights and innovative angles on the latest developments within fan cultures, both online and offline. Because the volume is specifically set up as companion for researchers, the chapters include recommendations for the further study of fan cultures. As such, it represents an essential reference volume for researchers and scholars in the fields of cultural and media studies, communication, cultural geography and the sociology of culture.




Mystery Science Theater 3000


Book Description

A fun and fascinating deep dive for "devoted and loyal MST3K fans" (Library Journal) that reveals the impact and creation of the cult-hit television series Mystery Science Theater 3000. Few television shows can boast the long-term cult popularity and cultural influence of Mystery Science Theater 3000—or MST3K to its legions of devoted fans, known collectively as MSTies. Created by quirky standup comic Joel Hodgson and producer Jim Mallon, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a low-budget and altogether unconventional comedy series about a man trapped in space and forced to watch the worst movies ever made alongside a pair of homemade, wisecracking robots named Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot. In Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History, Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson explore the vast cultural influence of the cult television series, charting how the show’s aesthetics, style of humor, and distribution innovations heralded shifts in popular culture and media production and criticism. The show also engaged viewers in the do-it-yourself media subculture of the 1980s that blurred the lines between media producers and consumers and introduced the art of media “riffing” into popular culture. Beginning with the humble origins of MST3K, Foy and Olson dig into everything from the show’s journey across networks to the must-watch episodes. Also discussed are the endeavors of cast members after the show’s cancellation, including RiffTrax, Cinematic Titanic, and the Mads Are Back, as well as the show’s second life through a Kickstarter campaign and a Netflix revival. This is an essential guide to all things MST3K for fans both new and old.




Hollis Frampton


Book Description

Hollis Frampton was an American filmmaker, photographer, and theorist who bridged the experimental film and contemporary art worlds in the 1960s and 1970s. Best known for avant-garde films including Zorns Lemma (1970) and (nostalgia) (1971), Frampton spent his later years working on the unfinished epic Magellan, a monumental cycle that used the metaphor of Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world to rethink the natures and meanings of history, modernity, and cinema. Frampton’s career was cut short by cancer at age 48, with his vast ambitions for the project left incomplete. This book is a groundbreaking and comprehensive account of this remarkable figure’s work in its totality, from Frampton’s earliest films through Magellan. Michael Zryd explores the connections linking Frampton’s art and thought to other media forms, histories, and cultural frameworks. He foregrounds Frampton’s notion of the “infinite cinema,” which redefined the parameters of the medium to encompass all forms of moving image and sound media across the past and future of cinematic possibility. Zryd analyzes Frampton’s ambivalent relationship with modernism and the Enlightenment, showing how the artist navigated between attraction to radical artistic investigation and awareness of this tradition’s implication in colonialism and other oppressive power structures. Shedding new light on Frampton’s project of exploring and critiquing how cinema attempts to capture and understand the world, this book also considers his significance for contemporary art.




Everyday Life and Cultural Theory


Book Description

Everyday Life and Cultural Theory provides a unique critical and historical introduction to theories of everyday life. Ben Highmore traces the development of conceptions of everyday life, from the cultural sociology of Georg Simmel, through the Mass-Observation project of the 1930s to contemporary theorists such as Michel de Certeau.




Education for Purposeful Teaching Around the World


Book Description

Purpose can be seen as a key promoter in both professional growth and resilience for teachers. As a result, in many countries around the world, the purpose of education and the role of schools as supports for purpose development are growing as important topics of scientific research and educational debate. A conceptual shift is occurring in several countries: the purpose of education is becoming an education for purpose. In this book, researchers around the world examine what a shift toward an education for purpose looks like across several cultures. Teachers around the world should be explicitly educated for competencies that make purposeful and purpose-oriented teaching possible. The goal of teacher education is to educate teachers not only to teach knowledge content, but also to reflect on the purposefulness of their teaching: Why do their lessons and activities matter? What immediate impact and long-term effects do their teaching efforts have on the pupils as well as the communities in which pupils interact? This chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education for Teaching.







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