Political leadership in France:from Charles de Gaulle to Nicolas Sarkozy

Political Leadership in France analyzes changes which have taken place over the last 50 years in French politics. When Charles de Gaulle came to power in 1958 the drama surrounding the Fourth Republic's collapse and the focus on an exceptional individual meant that he was able to confer a very particular style of leadership on the new Fifth Republic. De Gaulle's 'performance' was such that he transformed the nature of leadership politics in France, increasing the scope for personal leadership and the emphasis upon the exalted leader. This had major implications for the republic's institutions and for the role of political parties. The five Presidents who came after him – Pompidou, Giscard, Mitterrand, Chirac, and Sarkozy, as well as contenders for the presidency such as Segolene Royal and François Hollande – have each capitalized upon their own political 'persona' and their relationship to the French people. Gaffney takes a new approach to the subject, looking at the mythological and cultural as well as institutional conditions of political performance. This paperback edition includes a new preface.

The essentials of teamworking:international perspectives

The team, rather than the individual, is increasingly seen as the building block of organizations and a key source of competitive advantage. Despite this, not enough is understood about how to build successful teams in modern organizations. The Essentials of Teamworking broadens this understanding by offering a selection of key chapters on teamwork from the International Handbook of Organizational Teamwork and Cooperative Working. This concise paperback edition reveals the complexity of teamwork and offers empirically based guidance on how teamwork can be effectively developed in modern organizations. Bringing together leading international scholars, The Essentials of Teamworking offers challenging perspectives on teamwork that will inform future research and practice. It is an invaluable resource for professionals, researchers and students alike.

Review

WHEN MEDIA ARE NEW: UNDERSTANDING THE DYNAMICS OF NEW MEDIA ADOPTION AND USE, JOHN CAREY AND MARTIN C. J. ELTON (2010) Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (374 pp.), ISBN 978-0-472-05085-7, $47.50 (paperback). YOU ARE NOT A GADGET: A MANIFESTO, JARON LANIER (2011) New York: Vintage (240 pp.), ISBN 978-0307389978, $15 (paperback) EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS: MARSHALL McLUHAN, DOUGLAS COUPLAND (2010) Toronto, Canada: Penguin Canada (208 pp.), ISBN 9780670069224, $26 (hardback)

Materialschlacht für eine andere Ordnung der Dinge:Versuch über Marianne Fritz und ihr Momumentalepos 'Festung'

This article is linked to my major study on the Poetik des Extremen by classifying the monstrous works of Marianne Fritz among a genealogy of extremist writing in German-speaking literature. Her literary project Festung, which represents in all likelihood the most extensive ‘novel’ in Western literary history, is first analysed by looking at the exponential growth of its components from a paperback of 108 pages to the not yet completed novel Naturgemäß, which will most probably comprise 15 volumes, mostly of A4 size and a length that should be equivalent to over 20,000 standard pages. In parallel to the quantitative explosion of form, the article also explores the transgression of traditional narration and Fritz’s typographical innovations of text presentation. Using reproductions of the late facsimile volumes, an exemplary ‘close reading’ of one page from Naturgemäß II is undertaken to demonstrate the enormous density of Festung. Finally, the article seeks to differentiate Fritz’s opus magnum from other out-sized works of literature by focussing on the specific interconnection between the quantitative and stylistic explosion of the form of the novel, which makes it incomparable to the major works of writers such as Robert Musil or Arno Schmidt.

Margetinggeschichte:Die Genese einer modernen Sozialtechnik, Hartmut Berghoff

Book revew: Marketinggeschichte: die Genese einer modernen Sozialtechnik [Marketing history: The genesis of a modern social technique], edited by Hartmut Berghoff, Frankfurt/Main, Campus Verlag, 2007, 409 pp., illus., [euro]30.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-3-593-38323-1. This edited volume is the result of a workshop at Göttingen University in 2006 and combines a number of different approaches to the research into the history of marketing in Germany's economy and society. The majority of contributions loosely focus around the occurrence of a ‘marketing revolution’ in the 1970s, which ties in with interpretations of the Americanisation of German business. This revolution replaced the indigenous German idea of Absatzwirtschaft (the economics of sales) with the American-influenced idea of Marketing, which was less functionally oriented and more strategic, and which aimed to connect processes within the firm in order to allow a greater focus on the consumer. The entire volume is framed by Hartmut Berghoff's substantial and informative introduction, which introduces a number of actors and trends beyond the content of the volume. Throughout the various contributions, authors provide explanations of the timing and nature of marketing revolutions. Alexander Engel identifies an earlier revolution in the marketing of dyes, which undergoes major change with the emergence of chemical dyes. While the natural dyestuff had been a commodity, with producers removed from consumers via a global network of traders, chemical dyes were products and were branded at an early stage. This was a fundamental change in the nature of production and sales. As Roman Rossfeld shows in his contribution on the Swiss chocolate industry (which focuses almost exclusively on Suchard), even companies that produced non-essential consumer goods which had always required some measure of labelling grappled for years with the need to develop fewer and higher impact brands, as well as an efficient sales operation. A good example for the classical ‘marketing revolution’ of the 1970s is the German automobile industry. Ingo Köhler convincingly argues that the crisis situation of German car manufacturers – the change from a seller's to a buyer's market, appreciation of the German mark which undermines exports, the oil crises coupled with higher inflation and greater frugality of consumers and the emergence of new competitors – lead companies to refocus from production to the demands of the consumer. While he highlights the role of Ford in responding most rapidly to these problems, he does not address whether the multinational was potentially transferring American knowledge to the German market. Similarly, Paul Erker illustrates that a marketing revolution in transport and logistics happened much later, because the market remained highly regulated until the 1980s. Both Paul Erker and Uwe Spiekermann in their contribution, present comparisons of two different sectors or companies (the tire manufacturer Continental and the logistics company Dachser, and agriculture and trade, respectively). In both cases, however, it remains unclear why these examples were chosen for comparison, as both seem to have little in common and are not always effectively used to demonstrate differences. The weakest section of the book is the development of marketing as an academic discipline. The attempt at sketching the phases in the evolution of marketing as an academic discipline by Ursula Hansen and Matthias Bode opens with an undergraduate-level explanation on the methodology of historical periodisation that seems extraneous. Considerably stronger is the section on the wider societal impact of marketing, and Anja Kruke shows how the new techniques of opinion research was accepted by politics and business – surprisingly more readily by politicians than their commercial counterparts. In terms of contemporary personalities, Hans Domizlaff emerges as one fascinating figure of German marketing history, which several contributors refer to and whose career as the German cigarette manufacturer Reemtsma is critically analysed by Tino Jacobs. Domizlaff was Germany's own ‘marketing guru’, whose successful campaigns led to the wide-ranging reception of his ideas about the nature of good branding and marketing. These are variously described as intuitive, elitist, and sachlich, a German concept of a sober, fact-based, and ‘no frills’ approach. Domizlaff did not believe in market research. Rather, he saw the genius of the individual advertiser as key to intuitively ascertaining the people's moods, wishes, and desires. This seems to have made him peculiarly suited to the tastes of the German middle class, according to Thomas Mergel's contribution on the nature of political marketing in the republic. Especially in politics, any form of hard sales tactics were severely frowned upon and considered to demean the citizen as incapable of making an informed choice, a mentality that he dates back to the traditions of nineteenth-century liberalism. Part of this disdain of ‘selling politics like toothpaste’ was also founded on the highly effective use of branding by the National Socialists, who identified their party through the use of an increasingly standardised image of Adolf Hitler and the swastika. Alexander Schug extends on previous research that criticised the simplistic notion of Hitler's charisma as the only explanation of the popular success and distances his approach from those who see it in terms of propaganda and demagogy. He argues that the NSDAP used the tools of advertising and branding precisely because they had to introduce their new ideology into a political marketplace dominated by more established parties. In this they were undoubtedly successful, more so than they intended: as bakers sold swastika cookies and butchers formed Führer heads out of lard, the NSDAP sought to regain control over the now effectively iconic images that constituted their brand, which was in danger of being trivialised and devalued. Key to understanding the history of marketing in Germany is on the one hand the exchange of ideas with the United States, and on the other the impact of national-socialist policies, and the question whether they were a force of modernisation or retardation. The general argument in the volume appears to favour the latter explanation. In the 1930s, some of the leading marketing experts emigrated to the USA, leaving German academia and business isolated. The aftermath of the Second World War left a country that needed to increase production to satisfy consumer demand, and there was little interest in advanced sales techniques. Although the Nazis were progressive in applying new marketing methods to their political campaign, this retarded the adoption of sales techniques in politics for a long time. Germany saw the development of idiosyncratic approaches by people like Domizlaff in the 1930s and 1940s, when it lost some leading thinkers, and only engaged with American marketing conceptions in the 1960s and 1970s, when consumers eventually became more important than producers.

The failure and the future of accounting: Strategy, stakeholders, and business value

Book Review: The failure and the future of accounting: Strategy, stakeholders, and business value, by David Hatherly, Farnham, Gower Publishing, 2013, 222 pp., £55 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4094-5354-3

Evaluation in translation:critical points of translator decision-making

Book review: Evaluation in Translation: Critical Points of Translator Decision-Making, by Jeremy Munday, London, Routledge, 2012, 194 pp., £95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-57769-4, £26.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-57770-0.