Corporate Catharsis

The pandemic came and the world changed. Lives have changed; work has changed. The boundaries between reality and fantasy have become as blurred as those between life and work. Corporate Catharsis: The Work From Home Edition explores the impact of the COVID pandemic on everyone's personal and professional lives through speculative fiction. With stories by Alicia Adams, Antaeus, Pauline Barmby, Steven D. Brewer, Dominick Cancilla, Adrienne Canino, Graham J. Darling, Derek Des Anges, Manny Frishberg, Alex Grehy, Jon Hansen, Alexa Kellow, Jack Nash, Helen Obermeier, Frank Sawielijew, William Shaw, Steve Soult, N.L. Sweeney, Kimberley Wall, and Richard Zaric.

This is the anthology we all need — one that can help us survive our corporate servitude with our hearts and souls intact. We’ve all been there: standing behind a desk or a counter for ridiculously long hours, letting the movie of our imagination roll behind our eyes. We’re certain that you can, far too easily, find inspiration from your workplace. Magic, mayhem, revenge — and, yes, perhaps even redemption — can all be found here.

Refiguring Identity in Corporate Times is aimed as a response to the narcissistic life-strategies promoted by the marketplace. It introduces an identity model that ensures a more inclusive, ethical, and authentic way of living ones own life-script. We live in a culture that requires us to create our own self-interpretation. Claiming to assist us in this mission are self-professed experts and the public media that offer life-strategies for adoption, to which it is all too easy to conform to in hyper-capitalized and consumerist societies. Among the most popular are fashion, entrepreneurship, travel, fitness, and self-spirituality, which are designed by corporate companies for instant appeal and feelgood results, expressing the consumerist religion of hedonistic narcissism and status. The possibility of an alternative identity for todays society that is based on the experience of conscience, sees our self-realization as intimately related to care for others and the advancement of political and civic institutions. To aspire for this identity model is to move from the distorted values of commercial life-strategies to five virtues. The virtues enable us to attune to what is singularly foreign in any experience, signalling ways how our worldview can become more inclusive, ethical, and insightful in its comprehension of existence. This key reading in Identity Studies provides insight into the psychology and behaviour endorsed by consumer culture; charts out a new understanding of virtue ethics; and promotes life-choices that steers consumers away from conformity in its capacity to stimulate the creation of a personal and authentic vision of life that involves others and societal institutions.

Through a series of studies of aspects of CSR from around the world, this book re-examines the topic though the lenses of various disciplines and cultures. It shows that the subject is much wider than is generally perceived and that CSR is evolving in a way which has not been generally recognized within the academic community.

Short tales to get you through the long winter months Featuring stories by Warren Benedetto, John M. Campbell, Brandon Case, Ryan A. Cole, Marc A. Criley, Sarina Dorie, Louis Evans, Evangeline Giaconia, Jon Hansen, Michel Harvey Hanson, N.V. Haskell, Alexander Hay, David A. Hewitt, Liam Hogan, Chris Kuriata, Hugh McCormack, L.P. Melling, Chaitanya Murali, Lena Ng, Stetson Ray, Cynthia C. Scott, Joseph Sidari, Jeff Stehman, Catherine Tavares, Xauri'EL Zwaan, and Richard Zwicker

Wahl’ter Dinsdale has been the master accountant for the tribe of the break-room for many seasons. He has secured the sacred vending machines against all attackers. He has skinned the mighty naugahyde sofa. He has mastered the art of the spreadsheet. But even he is not prepared when strange rumors reach the tribe of an unsettling phenomenon - a window, opened to another world outside the office. Now, with his friends: vicious administrative warrior Jo’see, and Bertram the Train-or, he sets out on a quest to find the source of the unrest. But Wahl’ter will have to make his way through all the tribes in the building first, from the HR wraiths to the sorcerers of marketing, and this office meeting will not end with cake and coffee, but with violence.

Embark on adventures to discover stories about science, magic, the tarot, Haitian vodou, the clash of epistemologies, and addiction. These stories are about people trying to control their environment, their sense of self, even the smallest of things within their power… …and failing.

This book is an interdisciplinary study of Japan during the socially euphoric years of the Bubble Economy in the 1980s. Shedding light on consumer experiences, this study explores the socio-cultural landscape of Japan, the nation that boasted the second largest economy in the late twentieth century. Drawing its analysis from various media sources, popular literary works, and public reports, the book articulates how the late 1980s calibrated consumer demands, lifestyles, and perceptions of wealth. Through an examination of the qualitative effects of ‘Bubble money’ on consumers, the book disentangles the anatomy of the festive ambience in the economic phase, closely reading fictional and non-fictional literary works that play the role of reportage, critique, and satire. Through observations of human behaviours in consumption, the book reveals psychosomatic experiences and self-consciousness. Featuring a wide range of sources from Japanese media and literary works which have yet to be translated for an English audience, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of modern Japanese culture and literature who are interested in the socio-economic landscape of late-twentieth-century Japan.