A charmingly illustrated history of midcentury instructional records and their untold contribution to the American narrative of self-improvement, aspiration, and success.For the midcentury Americans who wished to better their golf game through hypnosis, teach their parakeet to talk, or achieve sexual harmony in their marriage, the answers lay no further than the record player. In Designed for Success, Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder shed light on th...

August Strindberg and Visual Culture addresses the multiplicity of Strindberg's artistic and literary output. The book charts the vital intersections between theatre, aesthetic theory, and visual elements in his work that have been left largely unexplored. Rather than following traditional genre-bound critical approaches, this book focuses on the intermediality of individual works, the corpus as a whole, and their connections to a wide array of historical and contemporary artists,...

Consumption studies has grown tremendously in the past decade. Researchers in sociology, geography, anthropology, history, marketing, management, organization and even art history have embraced consumption as a key institution of our era, and are eager for ideas and insights. Conversations on Consumption makes an important contribution to the growing field of consumption studies by offering readers a lively introduction to debates and dialogues that have shaped the field, in the f...

This fascinating book shows that neither managers nor consumers completely control branding processes – cultural codes constrain how brands work to produce meaning. Placing brands firmly within the context of culture, it investigates these complex foundations. Topics covered include:the role of consumptionbrand managementcorporate brandingbranding ethicsthe role of advertising.This excellent text includes case studies of ...

A key characteristic of the twenty-first century economy is 'the image'. Brand development is based on image, products are advertised via images, and corporate image is critical for economic success. This book draws from art history, photography and visual studies to develop an interdisciplinary, image-based approach to understanding consumer behaviour.Focusing on four themes: representation, photography, images and identity, it presents a theoretical perspective on visual consumpt...

I Remember, one of French writer Georges Perec's most famous pieces, consists of 480 numbered paragraphs—each just a few short lines recalling a memory from his childhood. The work has neither a beginning nor an end. Nor does it contain any analysis. But it nonetheless reveals profound truths about French society during the 1940s and 50s.Taking Perec's book as its cue, Telling About Society explores the unconventional ways we communicate what we know about society ...

The Second Edition of Cunliffe′s Management covers topics that are central to management, organizational behaviour or leadership courses, with updated international content referring to current issues such as the economic crisis and unemployment.Conceived by Chris Grey as an antidote to conventional textbooks, each book in the ‘Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap’ series takes a core area of the curriculum and turns it on its head ...

The Philosophy of Design is an introduction to the fundamental philosophical issues raised by the contemporary practice of design. The first book to systematically examine design from the perspective of contemporary philosophy, it offers a broad perspective, ranging across key philosophical areas such as aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics and ethics.The first part of the book explores central issues about the nature of design and its products, and the rationality of des...

"Boje does not reflect trends, he is among those who set them" - Hervé Corvellec, Department of Service Management, Lund University"How can I know what I think until I see what David Boje says? What he says about storytelling will forever change what we thought we knew about stories. With remarkable control over a complex argument, Boje recovers, re-punctuates, and re-animates a world of narrative and sensemaking that we have previously taken for granted!" - Karl E. Wei...

Brands are a fait accompli: they represent a mountain range of evidence in search of a theory. They are much exploited, but little explored. In this book, Martin Kornberger sets out to rectify the ratio between exploiting and exploring through sketching out a theory of the Brand Society. Most attempts to explain the role of brands focus on brands either as marketing and management tools (business perspective) or a symptoms of consumerism (sociological perspective). Brand Society combines t...

While most people work ever-longer hours, international statistics suggest that the average time spent on non-work activities per employee is around two hours a day. How is this possible, and what are the reasons behind employees withdrawing from work? In this thought-provoking book, Roland Paulsen examines organizational misbehavior, specifically the phenomenon of 'empty labor', defined as the time during which employees engage in private activities during the working day. This study expl...

Advertising, once seen as 'the official art of capitalist society' is an increasingly commonplace component of a characteristically promotional culture. Iain MacRury's Advertising offers the means to explore and evaluate this transition with an introduction to advertising for the contemporary reader.Advertising provides a clear and easy guide to a