Policy And The Popular

The book is an interdisciplinary exploration of the complexities of ‘popular’ culture as a category of public policy. It approaches the notions of ‘cultural policy’ and ‘popular culture’ flexibly, examining what each comes to mean, explicitly or implicitly, in relation to the other. This generates a rich variety of approaches, but also a number of identifiable commonalities. We start from the proposition that 'popular culture' is largely absent as an explicit category of arts policy and debate today. The ‘arts’ are still, in practice, construed in terms of elite culture (despite claims to the contrary), while artefacts such as popular music, television, fashion, and so on are assumed to figure among the cultural or creative ‘industries’, giving the popular a set of narrowly economic, professional and commodity connotations. And yet, the popular is, in a range of ways, powerfully present as an implicit dimension of public policy and as a catalyst of cultural practices and attitudes. This apparent paradox underpins the proposal. The book is a collaboration between two UK-based institutions: the University of Leeds’s Popular Cultures Research Network and the well established Centre for Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. This book was originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Cultural Policy.

Popular music is increasingly visible in government strategies and policies. While much has been written about the expanding flow of music products and music creativity in emphasising the global nature of popular music, little attention has been paid to the flow of ideas about policy formation and debates between regions and nations. This book examines specific regional and national histories, and the different cultural values placed on popular music. The state emerges as a key site of tension between high and low culture, music as art versus music as commerce, public versus private interests, the right to make noisy art versus the right to a good night’s sleep. The political economy of urban popular music is a strong focus, examining attempts to combine and complement arts and cultural policies with ‘creative city’ and ‘creative industries’ strategies. The Anglophone case studies of policy contexts within in Canada, Britain, the US and Australia reveal how the everyday influence and use of popular music is also about questions of aesthetics, funding and power. This book was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Cultural Policy.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy is the first thorough analysis of how policy frames the behavior of audiences, industries, and governments in the production and consumption of popular music. Covering a range of industrial and national contexts, this collection assesses how music policy has become an important arm of government, and a contentious arena of global debate across areas of cultural trade, intellectual property, and mediacultural content. It brings together a diverse range of researchers to reveal how histories of music policy development continue to inform contemporary policy and industry practice. The Handbook maps individual nation case studies with detailed assessment of music industry sectors. Drawing on international experts, the volume offers insight into global debates about popular music within broader social, economic, and geopolitical contexts.

Popular Culture and Foreign Policy: The Case of Turkey and the Valley of the Wolves: Ambush analyzes Turkish Foreign Policy from an interdisciplinary perspective. It seeks to understand and discuss how foreign policy discourses can be reproduced by a popular television series and consequently produce consent for certain foreign policies.

Rock and Popular Music examines the relations between the policies and institutions which regulate contemporary popular music and the political debates, contradictions and struggles in which those musics are involved. International in its scope and conception, this innovative collection explores the reasons for and ways in which governments have sought either to support or prohibit popular music in Canada, Australia and Europe as well as the impact of broadcasting policies in forming and shaping different musical communities. Rock and Popular Music is a unique collection suggesting significant new directions for the study of contemporary popular musics.

Tomorrow morning in thousands of newspapers around the country, opinion editorials (or "op-eds") will appear by well-paid columnists like George Will, Michael Barone, Linda Chavez, and many others. Their sharply tuned vocabularies and finely crafted articles serve an important function in shaping public opinion on politics, social issues, and more. But they ain't the only ones. The Internet has made publishing and widespread distribution available to a new brand of opinion writers. They are teachers, lawyers, construction workers and parents with plenty of insightful things to say. And they're saying them at OpinionEditorials.com. OpinionEditorials.com is the only online editorial site that publishes op-eds from writers of all levels and backgrounds-from seasoned columnists to everyday Americans-on a wide variety of topics. The popular web site has become the only resource for what "the rest of America is saying." Americans on Politics, Policy, and Pop Culture contains 101 of the best op-eds published to date at OpinionEditorials.com. In it you'll find a wide variety of short pieces on everyone from President George W. Bush to John Kerry. You'll also find opinions both poignant and humorous on: Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction CBS' newsroom malfunction Howard Dean's brain malfunction What other book offers you that?

This volume studies the relationships between government and the popular music industries, comparing three Anglophone nations: Scotland, New Zealand and Australia. At a time when issues of globalization and locality are seldom out of the news, musicians, fans, governments, and industries are forced to reconsider older certainties about popular music activity and their roles in production and consumption circuits. The decline of multinational recording companies, and the accompanying rise of promotion firms such as Live Nation, exemplifies global shifts in infrastructure, profits and power. Popular music provides a focus for many of these topics—and popular music policy a lens through which to view them. The book has four central themes: the (changing) role of states and industries in popular music activity; assessment of the central challenges facing smaller nations competing within larger, global music-media markets; comparative analysis of music policies and debates between nations (and also between organizations and popular music sectors); analysis of where and why the state intervenes in popular music activity; and how (and whether) music fits within the ‘turn to culture’ in policy-making over the last twenty years. Where appropriate, brief nation-specific case studies are highlighted as a means of illuminating broader global debates.

Richardson et al.’s respected and seminal Policy Styles in Western Europe (1982) shed valuable light on how countries tend to establish long-term and distinctive ways to make policies that transcend short-term imperatives and issues. This follow-up volume updates those arguments and significantly expands the coverage, consisting of 16 carefully selected country-level case studies from around the world. Furthermore, it includes different types of political regimes and developmental levels to test more widely the robustness of the patterns and variables highlighted in the original book. The case studies – covering countries from the United States, Canada, Germany and the UK to Russia, Togo and Vietnam – follow a uniform structure, combining theoretical considerations and the presentation of empirical material to reveal how the distinct cultural and institutional features of modern states continue to have implications for the making and implementation of public policy decisions within them. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of public policy, public administration, comparative politics and development studies.