America S Commitment To Culture

Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano are now legendary, as much because of NEA support of their work as for the work itself. This is one example of what can happen when politics meets culture, and it provides an appropriate snapshot of the issues explored in this book. As in other policy areas, cultural policies develop within a particular political context, evolve as a consequence of government action or inattention, and affect a variety of publics and interests. In this volume, the contributors explore the inescapable politics accompanying public culture. Surveying the philosophical, economic, legal, and political underpinnings of cultural assistance, they articulate not only governments role in the support of the arts, but also basic questions for future cultural policy. Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano are now legendary, as much because of NEA support of their work as for the work itself. This is one example of what can happen when politics meets culture, and it provides an appropriate snapshot of the issues explored in this book. As in other policy areas, cultural policies develop within a particular political context, evolve as a consequence of government action or inattention, and affect a variety of publics and interests.Americas Commitment to Culture discusses government support of culture as a public policy area. The book focuses on the rationales underlying public support for the arts and examines the development and practice of government as an arts patron. The contributors explore the inescapable politics accompanying public culture. Surveying the philosophical, economic, legal, and political underpinnings of cultural assistance, they articulate not only governments role in the support of the arts, but also basic questions for future cultural policy.

Psychology of the Americas: Mestizo Perspectives on Personality and Mental Health presents the framework for a personality psychology and psychiatry of the Americas. This framework is based on the mestizo world view, a perspective that emerged from sociopolitical events which are unique to the development of many of the nations of the Americas. The word "mestizo" refers to the synthesis of native American and European people, cultures, and life styles. This book is divided into nine chapters and starts with a discussion of the concepts and principles of developmental, personality, community, and clinical psychology/psychiatry, which are reflected in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of North and South America, as well as the Caribbean. Considerable chapters offer some models that are based on the paradigms of diversity and synthesis, specifically a values/belief systems-cognitive styles framework based on research that has explored the relationship between traditionalism-modernism and cognitive styles. The specific models focus on individual development of pluralistic identities, the mental health of families coping with acculturation stress, person-environment fit of migrating individuals who are mismatched with institutions and agencies of the community, and on intergroup and international relations in situations of conflict. The remaining chapters deal with the tenets and assumptions of a psychology and psychiatry, including theories and approaches which differ in many respects from the European world view-based personality psychology and psychiatry of the past. This book is of value to psychologists, psychiatrists, researchers, and students.

An international line-up of scholars examines the role of the intellectual in the twenty-first century, looking at the gap between contemporary cultural theory and cultural practice, and asking whether knowledge and methodologies in the humanities can intervene in everyday politics and vice-versa.

"Engineering Culture" is an award-winning ethnography of the engineering division of a large American high-tech corporation. Now, this influential book - which has been translated into Japanese, Italian and Hebrew - has been revised to bring it up to date. In "Engineering Culture", Gideon Kunda offers a critical analysis of an American company's well-known and widely emulated "corporate culture." Kunda uses detailed descriptions of everyday interactions and rituals in which the culture is brought to life, excerpts from in-depth interviews and a wide variety of corporate texts to vividly portray managerial attempts to design and impose the culture and the ways in which it is experienced by members of the organization. The company's management, Kunda reveals, uses a variety of methods to promulgate what it claims is a non-authoritarian, informal, and flexible work environment that enhances and rewards individual commitment, initiative, and creativity while promoting personal growth. The author demonstrates, however, that these pervasive efforts mask an elaborate and subtle form of normative control in which the members' minds and hearts become the target of corporate influence. Kunda carefully dissects the impact this form of control has on employees' work behavior and on their sense of self. In the conclusion written especially for this edition, Kunda reviews the company's fortunes in the years that followed publication of the first edition, reevaluates the arguments in the book, and explores the relevance of corporate culture and its management today

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia—unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have “come home” in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own. Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity. A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America’s democratic ideals, this book marks a historic cultural homecoming.

Protestant missionaries in Latin America. Colonial "civilizers" in the Pacific. Peace Corps Volunteers in Africa. Since the 1890s, thousands of American teachers--mostly young, white, middle-class, and inexperienced--have fanned out across the globe. Innocents Abroad tells the story of what they intended to teach and what lessons they learned. Drawing on extensive archives of the teachers' letters and diaries, as well as more recent accounts, Jonathan Zimmerman argues that until the early twentieth century, the teachers assumed their own superiority; they sought to bring civilization, Protestantism, and soap to their host countries. But by the mid-twentieth century, as teachers borrowed the concept of "culture" from influential anthropologists, they became far more self-questioning about their ethical and social assumptions, their educational theories, and the complexity of their role in a foreign society. Filled with anecdotes and dilemmas--often funny, always vivid--Zimmerman's narrative explores the teachers' shifting attitudes about their country and themselves, in a world that was more unexpected and unsettling than they could have imagined.

Formation of company citizenship leads to success for the multinational companies by creating psychological alignments of the employee. This, therefore, should be considered as the international strategy of a multinational firm to create unique resources for competitive success. Successful multinational firms develop a common pattern of business performance by creating company citizenships, which include a primary focus on such values as organizational innovation, and a goal orientation. These values ultimately create commitment of the employees. This book proposes that there are some specific espoused values in every important multinational company, which form their organizational cultures and create values, which in turn may create enhanced performance of the organization. We can call this interrelationship between culture and performance as the company citizenship. This company citizenship can be transmitted from one part of the globe to another through the transmission of its corporate management and operations management system as a strategy of a multinational company.