Culture At Crisis Point

"Giles Auty was one of only four outstanding art critics in Britain in the past forty years" -- Paul Johnson, The Spectator, February 17, 1996 When I switched course in mid-career from being a painter to a writer I certainly experienced a few nervous moments. Would I ever feel as confident about writing as I did with a paintbrush in my hands? Then purely by chance, after years of wondering, I met an Italian Professor of English at a cocktail party in Venice. "I can't believe I've met you" he told me "because I am always holding your writing up as a model for my students." How thrilled my late father, a noted English scholar himself, would have been to know that I was at least trying to maintain family standards. "G. K. Chesterton surely had essays such as these in mind when he wrote, 'No criticism of Rembrandt is as good as Rembrandt; but it can be so written as to make a man go back and look at his pictures.' Giles Auty, well-known as art critic and painter, is gifted with a writing style that shuns impenetrability. It challenges us to go back and take a fresh look, not just at Rembrandt, or Signorelli, but at political correctness, global warming, post-modernism, democracy, our education system, Catholicism, the media, and life itself. He does this in an entertaining way, and even dares to suggest answers." -- Fr Paul Stenhouse, Editor of Annals Australia

Since 2011, the art of the Arab uprisings has been the subject of much scholarly and popular attention. Yet the role of artists, writers and filmmakers themselves as social actors working under extraordinary conditions has been relatively neglected. Drawing on critical readings of Bourdieu's Field Theory, this book explores the production of culture in Arab social spaces in 'crisis'. In ten case studies, contributors examine a wide range of countries and conflicts, from Algeria to the Arab countries of the Gulf. They discuss among other things the impact of Western public diplomacy organisations on the arts scene in post-revolutionary Cairo and the consequences of dwindling state support for literary production in Yemen. Providing a valuable source of empirical data for researchers, the book breaks new ground in adapting Bourdieu's theory to the particularities of cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa.

The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Climate and Culture presents the breadth of topics from Industrial and Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior through the lenses of organizational climate and culture. The Handbook reveals in great detail how in both research and practice climate and culture reciprocally influence each other. The details reveal the many practices that organizations use to acquire, develop, manage, motivate, lead, and treat employees both at home and in the multinational settings that characterize contemporary organizations. Chapter authors are both expert in their fields of research and also represent current climate and culture practice in five national and international companies (3M, McDonald's, the Mayo Clinic, PepsiCo and Tata). In addition, new approaches to the collection and analysis of climate and culture data are presented as well as new thinking about organizational change from an integrated climate and culture paradigm. No other compendium integrates climate and culture thinking like this Handbook does and no other compendium presents both an up-to-date review of the theory and research on the many facets of climate and culture as well as contemporary practice. The Handbook takes a climate and culture vantage point on micro approaches to human issues at work (recruitment and hiring, training and performance management, motivation and fairness) as well as organizational processes (teams, leadership, careers, communication), and it also explicates the fact that these are lodged within firms that function in larger national and international contexts.

In Football and Accelerated Culture, Steve Redhead offers a new and challenging theorisation of global football culture, exploring the relationship between sport and culture in a rapidly shifting world. Incorporating cutting-edge concepts, from accelerated culture and claustropolitanism to non-postmodernity, he reflects on the demise of working class football cultures and the rapid media globalisation of ‘the people’s game’. Drawing on international empirical research and a unique and ground-breaking study of football hooligan memoirs, the book delves into a wide array of disciplines, examining fascinating topics such as the relationship between music and football; hooligans and ultras; the rise of social media and anti-modern football movements; and ultra-realist criminology. Football and Accelerated Culture offers a new way of thinking about sporting cultures that expands the boundaries of physical cultural studies. As such, it is important reading for anybody with an interest in the culture of sport and leisure, social theory, communication studies, criminology or socio-legal studies.

Take Your Group to a Place ...Where they can see people’s needs in a new wayWhere they can understand their callingWhere they will learn how their faith can shape cultureThis six-session DVD and corresponding curriculum helps your group experience and envision how followers of Christ can be a counterculture for the common good. Together you’ll experience stories of other believers who changed the culture around them, including Andy Crouch, Mako Fujimara, Rudy Carrasco, Mark Buchanan, Tal James, Frederica Mathewes-Green, and others. You’ll watch how their journeys unfolded, their challenges, and their breakthroughs. Also included on the DVD are insights from trusted pastors and Christian leaders such as Tim Keller, Lauren Winner, James Meeks, Brenda Salter McNeil, and Ken Fong.

With a new afterword on the 2016 election Trent Lott and Tom Daschle, two of the most prominent senators of recent time, served as leaders of their respective parties from the 1990s to the current century. Their congressional tenure saw the Reagan tax cuts, the Clinton impeachment, 9/11, and the Iraq War. Despite stark ideological differences, the two have always maintained a positive working relationship--even a warm friendship--the kind that in today's hyper-partisan climate has become unthinkable. In Crisis Point, Lott and Daschle come together to sound an alarm on the current polarization that has made governing all but impossible; never before has faith in government been so dismally low. The senators itemize damaging forces--the permanent campaign, unprecedented money, the 24/7 news cycle--and offer practical recommendations, pointing the way forward. Most crucially, they recall the American people, especially our leaders, to the principles enshrined in the Constitution, and to the necessity of debate but also the imperative of compromise--which will take vision and courage to bring back. Illustrated with personal stories from their eminent careers and events cited from deeper in American history, Crisis Point is an invaluable work--one of conscience as well as duty, written with passion and eloquence by two men who have dedicated their lives to public service and share the conviction that all is far from lost.

Combining a reexamination of theory with practical tools and approaches, Rethinking Community Practice provides a new framework for community involvement strategies. Gabriel Chanan and Colin Miller show how this innovative but still amorphous movement can become more coherent, both on the ground and in public policy, by reforming community development, building neighborhood partnerships, measuring outcomes objectively, and synthesizing the best innovations of the past three decades. This is an important new perspective for local public service agencies, practitioners working in communities, and academics and students concerned with these fields.

This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.