Culture Matters

Prominent scholars and journalists ponder the question of why, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world is more divided than ever between the rich and the poor, between those living in freedom and those under oppression.

Introduction -- The cultural commons -- Culture as moral beliefs -- Culture as instrument -- The rise of flourishing societies -- The free market democracy dilemma -- The fall of flourishing societies -- Family, religion, government, and civilization -- Conclusion

Talk of love surrounds us, and romance is a constant concern of popular culture. Ann Swidler's Talk of Love is an attempt to discover how people find and sustain real love in the midst of that talk, and how that culture of love shapes their expectations and behavior in the process. To this end, Swidler conducted extensive interviews with Middle Americans and wound up offering us something more than an insightful exploration of love: Talk of Love is also a compelling study of how much culture affects even the most personal of our everyday experiences.

T. M. Moore provides a Reformed perspective on how to understand culture and engage it.

Global virtual teams (GVTs) have evolved as a common work structure in multinational corporations due to their efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The cultural differences can produce great benefits in terms of perspective, creativity, and innovation, but can also exacerbate interpersonal tensions, miscommunications, and clashing decision-making behaviors. This book outlines cultural competencies specific to GVTs and sheds light on management strategies for creating an optimal inter-cultural GVT environment. It covers theory, decision making strategies, and activities for cultural competence and problem resolution, all told through vignettes and lessons-learned.

WINNER OF THE T S ELIOT PRIZE 2021 WINNER OF THE POLARI PRIZE 2022 'Visionary and powerful. I loved it.' Hollie McNish The female body is a political space. C+nto enters the private lives of women from the butch counterculture, telling the inside story of the protests they led in the '90s to reclaim their bodies as their own – their difficult balance between survival and self-expression. History, magic, rebellion, party and sermon vibrate through Joelle Taylor's cantos to uncover these underground communities forged by women. Part-memoir and part-conjecture, Taylor explores sexuality and gender in poetry that is lyrical, expansive, imagistic, epic and intimate. C+nto is a love poem, a riot, a late night, and an honouring. minds. Here is poetry that defends our right to walk without fear, wear what we choose, be who we uniquely are." - - Diana Souhami

Culture Matters explores the role of political culture studies as one of the major investigative fields in contemporary political science. Cultural theory was the focal point of the late Aaron Wildavsky’s teaching and research for the last decade of his life, a life that profoundly affected many fields of political science, from the study of the presidency to public budgeting. In this volume, original essays prepared in Wildavsky’s honor examine the areas of rational choice, institutions, theories of change, political risk, the environment, and practical politics.

We immerse ourselves daily in expressions of popular culture—YouTube videos, hip hop music, movies, adverts, greeting cards, videogames, and comics, to name just a few possibilities—and far too often we pay only scant critical attention to them. The essays in this collection redress this situation by probing a wide range of topics within the field of popular culture studies. Written in engaging and jargon-free prose, contributions critically examine various offerings in film, television, social media, music, literature, sports, and related areas. Moreover, they often pay special attention to the ways in which these pop culture artefacts intersect with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ability. Providing a rich mixture of broad perspectives and intriguing case studies, the essays form a compelling mosaic of findings and viewpoints on popular culture. Exploring everything from toxic masculinity in twenty-first century television programmes to gendered greeting cards and adult colouring books, this provocative volume is essential reading for anyone interested in that fabricated and all-pervasive environment we call popular culture.