Deciphering Culture

Representation, subjectivity and sexuality continue to be central to scholarly inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Deciphering Culture explores their relationship, each author taking a distinct approach to the concept of 'curiosity' as a way of deciphering the working of particular cultural formations. In the process they address a variety of topics including: * the historical formation of subjectivities, identities and differences * cultural conduct and habits of the self * everyday cultures and negotiation * consumption and the body * memory, history and autobiography * the ethics of critical and textual inquiry. This fascinating book will appeal to students and academics from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds in the social sciences and cultural studies.

Richard Conrad grew up in Washington, D.C., studied engineering and economics at Vanderbilt University, earned a master's degree in Economics as a local student at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and later earned an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Richard worked for the last sixteen years for a large U.S. money management firm researching, analyzing, and investing in Chinese and Japanese equities. Richard is fluent in Chinese and Japanese and continues to live in Asia with his family.

Representation, subjectivity and sexuality continue to be central to scholarly inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Deciphering Culture explores their relationship, each author taking a distinct approach to the concept of 'curiosity' as a way of deciphering the working of particular cultural formations. In the process they address a variety of topics including: * the historical formation of subjectivities, identities and differences * cultural conduct and habits of the self * everyday cultures and negotiation * consumption and the body * memory, history and autobiography * the ethics of critical and textual inquiry. This fascinating book will appeal to students and academics from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds in the social sciences and cultural studies.

Understanding Culture offers an accessible and comprehensive overview of the field of cultural studies whilst also proposing a different way of `doing' cultural studies. It focuses on the ways in which cultural objects and practices serve as both a means of ordering people's lives and as markers of that ordering. The book reviews the state of the discipline of cultural studies and suggests a new theoretical and methodological orientation drawing on the work of: Foucault; scepticism, Wittgenstein; Harvey Sacks and John Law; uses insights from a variety of sources to examine the complex ways in which meanings are manufactured as lives are ordered in particular social settings: personal life, education, health, the city and law; and pre

The concept of culture is a key issue within management and organization studies. Understanding Organizational Culture provides a useful and comprehensive guide to understanding organizational culture, from a range of angles, contexts and sectors. The book answers questions of definition, explores alternative perspectives, and expands on substantive issues (such as leadership and change), before discussing key issues of research and providing a new framework for this topic. Mats Alvesson synthesizes for students the advances in the field of organizational culture, drawing upon the range of relevant literature within Organization Studies. The author also uses examples to develop and illustrate ideas on how cultural

`This book represents a significant intervention and, as such, should be used on numerous cultural studies courses. In its intellectual honesty and clarity Tudor's book will stand as an authoritative basis for further developments in the coming years' - David Chaney Decoding Culture offers a concise and accessible account of the development of cultural studies from the late 1950s to the 1990s. Focusing on the significant theoretical and methodological assumptions that have informed the cultural studies project - the text: covers the key thinkers and key perspectives including, structuralism and post-structuralism, Screen theory, the Birmingham School, and audience analysis; offers a timely corrective t

This volume constitutes a first step towards an ever-deferred interdisciplinary dialogue on cultural traits. It offers a way to enter a representative sample of the intellectual diversity that surrounds this topic, and a means to stimulate innovative avenues of research. It stimulates critical thinking and awareness in the disciplines that need to conceptualize and study culture, cultural traits, and cultural diversity. Culture is often defined and studied with an emphasis on cultural features. For UNESCO, “culture should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group”. But the very possibility of assuming the existence of cultural traits is not granted, and any serious evaluation of the notion of “cultural trait” requires the interrogation of several disciplines from cultural anthropology to linguistics, from psychology to sociology to musicology, and all areas of knowledge on culture. This book presents a strong multidisciplinary perspective that can help clarify the problems about cultural traits.

This volume contains contributions from 24 internationally known scholars covering a broad spectrum of interests in cross-cultural theory and research. This breadth is reflected in the diversity of the topics covered in the volume, which include theoretical approaches to cross-cultural research, the dimensions of national cultures and their measurement, ecological and economic foundations of culture, cognitive, perceptual and emotional manifestations of culture, and bicultural and intercultural processes. In addition to the individual chapters, the volume contains a dialog among 14 experts in the field on a number of issues of concern in cross-cultural research, including the relation of psychological studies of culture to national development and national policies, the relationship between macro structures of a society and shared cognitions, the integration of structural and process models into a coherent theory of culture, how personal experiences and cultural traditions give rise to intra-cultural variation, whether culture can be validly measured by self-reports, the new challenges that confront cultural psychology, and whether psychology should strive to eliminate culture as an explanatory variable.