Anthony Browne and the cultural capital of classic fairy tales

Prolific British author/illustrator Anthony Browne both participates in the classic fairy-tale tradition and appropriates its cultural capital, ultimately undertaking a process of self-canonisation alongside the dissemination of fairy tales. In reading Browne’s Hansel and Gretel (1981), The Tunnel (1989) and Into the Forest (2004), a trajectory emerges that moves from broadly intertextual to more exclusively self-referential modes of representation which reward readers of “Anthony Browne”, rather than readers of “fairy tales”. All three books depict ‘babes in the woods’ stories wherein child characters must negotiate some form of threat outside the home in order to return home safely. Thus, they represent childhood agency. However, these visions of agency are ultimately subordinated to logics of capital, which means that child readers of Browne’s fairy-tale books are overtly invited to identify with children who act, but are interpellated as privileged if they ‘know’. Bourdieu’s model of ‘cultural capital’ offers a lens for considering Browne’s production of ‘value’ for his own works within a broader cultural landscape which privileges literary fairy tales as a register of juvenile cultural competency. If cultural capital can be formulated most simply as the symbolic exchange value of approved modes of knowing and being, it is clearly helpful when trying to unpack logics of meaning within heavily intertextual or citational texts. It is also helpful thinking about what kinds of stories we as a culture choose to disseminate, choose to privilege, or choose to suppress. Zipes notes of fairy tales that, “the genre itself becomes a kind of institute that is involved in the socialization and acculturation of readers” (22). He elaborates that, “We initiate readers and expect them to learn the fairy-tale code as part of our responsibility in the civilizing process” (Zipes 29), so it is little wonder that Tatar describes fairy tales as “a vital part of our cultural capital” (xix). Although Browne is clearly interested in literary fairy tales, the most obvious strategies of self-canonisation take place in Browne’s work not in words but in pictures: hidden in plain sight, as illustration becomes self-reflexive citation.

Proactive communication management beats hostile media exposure : training for multi-cultural community leaders in living with mass media

Proactive communication management instead of mortification in the glare of hostile media attention became the theme of a four-day training program for multi-cultural community leaders, the object of this research. The program in Brisbane from December 2009 through to February this year was conducted under auspices of a Community Media Link grant program shared by Griffith University and the Queensland Ethnic Communities Council, together with Journalism academics from the Queensland University of Technology. Twenty-eight participants from 23 organisations took part, with a team of nine facilitators from the host organisations, and guest presenters from the news media. This paper reviews the process, taking into account: its objectives, to empower participants by showing how Australian media operate and introducing participants to journalists; pedagogical thrust, where overview talks, with role play seminars with guest presenters from the media, were combined with practice in interviews and writing for media; and outcomes, assessed on the basis of participants’ responses. The research methodology is qualitative, in that the study is based on discussions to review the planning and experience of sessions, and anonymous, informal feed-back questionnaires distributed to the participants. Background literature on multiculturalism and community media was referred to in the study. The findings indicate positive outcomes for participants from this approach to protection of persons unversed in living in the Australian “mediatised” environment. Most affirmed that the “production side” perspective of the exercise had informed and motivated them effectively, such that henceforth they would venture far more into media management, in their community leadership roles.

The first global entertainment company : explaining Pathe's dominance in the pre-Hollywood film industry

For almost a decade before Hollywood existed, French firm Pathe towered over the early film industry with estimates of its share of all films sold around the world varying between 50-70%. Pathe was the first global entertainment company. This paper analyses its rise to market leadership by applying a theoretical framework drawn from the business literature on causes of industry dominance, which provides insights into how firms acquire and maintain market dominance and in this case the film industry. This paper uses evidence presented by film historians to argue that Pathe "fits" the expected theoretical model of a dominant firm because it had a marketing orientation, used an effective quality-based competitive strategy and possessed the six critical marketing capabilities that business research shows enable the best performing firms to consistently outperform rivals.

Cultural economic geography and global media studies : the rise of asian media capitals?

This paper considers the scope to develop an approach to the spatial dimensions of media and culture that is informed by cultural-economic geography. I refer to cultural-economic geography as that strand of research in the field of geography that has been informed on the one hand by the ‘cultural turn’ in both geographical and economic thought, and which focuses on the relationship between, space, knowledge and identity in the spheres of production and consumption, and on the other to work by geographers that has sought to map the scale and significance of the cultural or creative industries as new drivers of the global economy. The paper considers the extent to which this work enables those engaged with urban cultural policy to get beyond some of the impasses that have arisen with the development of “creative cities” policies derived from the work of authors such as Richard Florida as well as the business management literature on clusters. It will frame these debates in the context of recent work by Michael Curtin on media capitals, and the question of whether cities in East Asia can emerge as media capitals from outside of the US-Europe-dominated transnational cultural axis.

Toward a cultural economic geography of creative industries and urban development : introduction to the special issue on creative industries and urban development

The connections between the development of creative industries and the growth of cities was noted by several sources over the 2000s, but explanations relating to the nature of the link have thus far provide to be insufficient. The two dominant ‘scripts’ were those of ‘creative clusters’ and ‘creative/cities/creative class’ theories, but both have proved to be insufficient, not least because they privilege amenities-led, supply-drive accounts of urban development that fail to adequately situate cities in wider global circuits of culture and economic production. It is proposed that the emergent field of cultural economic geography provides some insights into redressing these lacunae, particularly in the possibilities for an original synthesis of cultural and economic geography, cultural studies and new strands of economic theory.

The cultural economy moment?

This paper explores the rise of cultural economy as a key organising concept over the 2000s. While it has intellectual precursors in political economy, sociology and postmodernism, it has been work undertaken in the fields of cultural economic geography, creative industries, the culture of service industries and cultural policy where it has come to the forefront, particularly around whether we are now in a ‘creative economy’. While work undertaken in cultural studies has contributed to these developments, the development of neo-liberalism as a meta-concept in critical theory constitutes a substantive barrier to more sustained engagement between cultural studies and economics, as it rests upon a caricature of economic discourse. The paper draws upon Michel Foucault’s lectures on neo-liberalism to indicate that there are significant problems with the neo-Marxist account hat became hegemonic over the 2000s. The paper concludes by identifying areas such as the value of information, the value of networks, motivations for participation in online social networks, and the impact of business cycles on cultural sectors as areas of potentially fruitful inter-disciplinary engagement around the nature of cultural economy.

Cultural and creative industries

This chapter evaluates the rise of creative industries from four standpoints: the growing interest in creativity in the early 21st century; the 'culturalisation' of economic life with the rise of service industries; clustering and uneven development in the cultural economic geography of the creative industries; and the future of arts and cultural policy.

Aligning communication, cultural and media studies research and scholarship with industry and policy : Australian instances

This article reflects on aspects of what is claimed to be the distinctiveness of Australian communication, cultural and media studies, focusing on two cases – the cultural policy debate in the 1990s, and the concept of creative industries in the 2000s – and the relations between them, which highlight the alignment of research and scholarship with industry and policy and with which the author has been directly involved. Both ‘moments’ have been controversial; the three main lines of critique of such alignment of research and scholarship with industry and policy (its untoward proximity to tenets of the dominant neo-liberal ideology; the evacuation of cultural value by the economic; and the possible loss of critical vocation of the humanities scholar) are debated.

Research-led educational renewal and economic-cultural convergence

The 'Queensland Model' grew out of three convergent agendas: educational renewal, urban redevelopment, and the Queensland state government's 'Smart State' strategy.

The effect of red blood cell orientation on the electrical impedance of pulsatile blood with implications for impedance cardiography

Impedance cardiography is an application of bioimpedance analysis primarily used in a research setting to determine cardiac output. It is a non invasive technique that measures the change in the impedance of the thorax which is attributed to the ejection of a volume of blood from the heart. The cardiac output is calculated from the measured impedance using the parallel conductor theory and a constant value for the resistivity of blood. However, the resistivity of blood has been shown to be velocity dependent due to changes in the orientation of red blood cells induced by changing shear forces during flow. The overall goal of this thesis was to study the effect that flow deviations have on the electrical impedance of blood, both experimentally and theoretically, and to apply the results to a clinical setting. The resistivity of stationary blood is isotropic as the red blood cells are randomly orientated due to Brownian motion. In the case of blood flowing through rigid tubes, the resistivity is anisotropic due to the biconcave discoidal shape and orientation of the cells. The generation of shear forces across the width of the tube during flow causes the cells to align with the minimal cross sectional area facing the direction of flow. This is in order to minimise the shear stress experienced by the cells. This in turn results in a larger cross sectional area of plasma and a reduction in the resistivity of the blood as the flow increases. Understanding the contribution of this effect on the thoracic impedance change is a vital step in achieving clinical acceptance of impedance cardiography. Published literature investigates the resistivity variations for constant blood flow. In this case, the shear forces are constant and the impedance remains constant during flow at a magnitude which is less than that for stationary blood. The research presented in this thesis, however, investigates the variations in resistivity of blood during pulsataile flow through rigid tubes and the relationship between impedance, velocity and acceleration. Using rigid tubes isolates the impedance change to variations associated with changes in cell orientation only. The implications of red blood cell orientation changes for clinical impedance cardiography were also explored. This was achieved through measurement and analysis of the experimental impedance of pulsatile blood flowing through rigid tubes in a mock circulatory system. A novel theoretical model including cell orientation dynamics was developed for the impedance of pulsatile blood through rigid tubes. The impedance of flowing blood was theoretically calculated using analytical methods for flow through straight tubes and the numerical Lattice Boltzmann method for flow through complex geometries such as aortic valve stenosis. The result of the analytical theoretical model was compared to the experimental impedance measurements through rigid tubes. The impedance calculated for flow through a stenosis using the Lattice Boltzmann method provides results for comparison with impedance cardiography measurements collected as part of a pilot clinical trial to assess the suitability of using bioimpedance techniques to assess the presence of aortic stenosis. The experimental and theoretical impedance of blood was shown to inversely follow the blood velocity during pulsatile flow with a correlation of -0.72 and -0.74 respectively. The results for both the experimental and theoretical investigations demonstrate that the acceleration of the blood is an important factor in determining the impedance, in addition to the velocity. During acceleration, the relationship between impedance and velocity is linear (r2 = 0.98, experimental and r2 = 0.94, theoretical). The relationship between the impedance and velocity during the deceleration phase is characterised by a time decay constant, ô , ranging from 10 to 50 s. The high level of agreement between the experimental and theoretically modelled impedance demonstrates the accuracy of the model developed here. An increase in the haematocrit of the blood resulted in an increase in the magnitude of the impedance change due to changes in the orientation of red blood cells. The time decay constant was shown to decrease linearly with the haematocrit for both experimental and theoretical results, although the slope of this decrease was larger in the experimental case. The radius of the tube influences the experimental and theoretical impedance given the same velocity of flow. However, when the velocity was divided by the radius of the tube (labelled the reduced average velocity) the impedance response was the same for two experimental tubes with equivalent reduced average velocity but with different radii. The temperature of the blood was also shown to affect the impedance with the impedance decreasing as the temperature increased. These results are the first published for the impedance of pulsatile blood. The experimental impedance change measured orthogonal to the direction of flow is in the opposite direction to that measured in the direction of flow. These results indicate that the impedance of blood flowing through rigid cylindrical tubes is axisymmetric along the radius. This has not previously been verified experimentally. Time frequency analysis of the experimental results demonstrated that the measured impedance contains the same frequency components occuring at the same time point in the cycle as the velocity signal contains. This suggests that the impedance contains many of the fluctuations of the velocity signal. Application of a theoretical steady flow model to pulsatile flow presented here has verified that the steady flow model is not adequate in calculating the impedance of pulsatile blood flow. The success of the new theoretical model over the steady flow model demonstrates that the velocity profile is important in determining the impedance of pulsatile blood. The clinical application of the impedance of blood flow through a stenosis was theoretically modelled using the Lattice Boltzman method (LBM) for fluid flow through complex geometeries. The impedance of blood exiting a narrow orifice was calculated for varying degrees of stenosis. Clincial impedance cardiography measurements were also recorded for both aortic valvular stenosis patients (n = 4) and control subjects (n = 4) with structurally normal hearts. This pilot trial was used to corroborate the results of the LBM. Results from both investigations showed that the decay time constant for impedance has potential in the assessment of aortic valve stenosis. In the theoretically modelled case (LBM results), the decay time constant increased with an increase in the degree of stenosis. The clinical results also showed a statistically significant difference in time decay constant between control and test subjects (P = 0.03). The time decay constant calculated for test subjects (ô = 180 - 250 s) is consistently larger than that determined for control subjects (ô = 50 - 130 s). This difference is thought to be due to difference in the orientation response of the cells as blood flows through the stenosis. Such a non-invasive technique using the time decay constant for screening of aortic stenosis provides additional information to that currently given by impedance cardiography techniques and improves the value of the device to practitioners. However, the results still need to be verified in a larger study. While impedance cardiography has not been widely adopted clinically, it is research such as this that will enable future acceptance of the method.

Internal market orientation and market-oriented behaviours

Purpose: The purpose of this empirical paper is to investigate internal marketing from a behavioural perspective. The impact of internal marketing behaviours, operationalised as an internal market orientation (IMO), on employees’ marketing and other in-role behaviours (IRB) were examined. ---------- Design/methodology/approach: Survey data measuring IMO, market orientation and a range of constructs relevant to the nomological network in which they are embedded were collected from the UK retail managers. These were tested to establish their psychometric properties and the conceptual model was analysed using structural equations modelling, employing a partial least squares methodology. ---------- Findings: IMO has positive consequences for employees’ market-oriented and other IRB. These, in turn, influence marketing success. Research limitations/implications – The paper provides empirical support for the long-held assumption that internal and external marketing are related and that organisations should balance their external focus with some attention to employees. Future research could measure the attitudes and behaviours of managers, employees and customers directly and explore the relationships between them. ---------- Practical implications: Firm must ensure that they do not put the needs of their employees second to those of managers and shareholders; managers must develop their listening skills and organisations must become more responsive to the needs of their employees. ---------- Originality/value: The paper contributes to the scarce body of empirical support for the role of internal marketing in services organisations. For researchers, this paper legitimises the study of internal marketing as a route to external market success; for managers, the study provides quantifiable evidence that focusing on employees’ wants and needs impacts their behaviours towards the market.

Connected Communities and Creative Economy; Clash, cluster, complexity, creativity

After a brief personal orientation, this presentation offers an opening section on „clash, cluster, complexity, cities‟ – making the case that innovation (both creative and economic) proceeds not only from incremental improvements within an expert-pipeline process, but also from the clash of different systems, generations, and cultures. The argument is that cultural complexity arises from such clashes, and that clustering is the solution to problems of complexity. The classic, 10,000-year-old, institutional form taken by such clusters is … cities. Hence, a creative city is one where clashing and competitive complexity is clustered… and, latterly, networked.

Government, citizenship and cultural policy : expertise and participation in Australian media policy

The study of institutions and policy processes in the formation of culture have been a major concern of the "cultural policy debate", which has been a major debate in Australian cultural studies in the 1990s (Bennett 1992a; Cunningham 1992; O'Regan 1993; cf. McGuigan 1996). Bennett (1992) argues that culture in modern societies is defined less by a distinct series of artistic and intellectual practices, the ways of life of distinctive communities or social groups, or as a system for the structuring of meaning in a society, but rather in terms of "the specificity of the governmental tasks and programmes in which those practices come to be inscribed." (Bennett 1992a: 397) Within such a framework, policy becomes "not... an optional add-on but... central to the definition and constitution of culture" (Bennett 1992a: 397). This understanding of culture as "intrinsically governmental" has in turn been linked to an increasingly strategic role for discourses of citizenship as a basis for the engagement of cultural studies intellectuals with the political sphere...

Assessment of the influence of cultural barriers to HDR supervision of non-English speaking background (NESD) students in engineering and information technology (IT) disciplines

The paper details the results of the first phase of an on-going research into the sociocultural factors that influence the supervision of higher degrees research (HDR) engineering students in the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering (BEE) and Faculty of Science and Technology (FaST) at Queensland University of Technology. A quantitative analysis was performed on the results from an online survey that was administered to 179 engineering students. The study reveals that cultural barriers impact their progression and developing confidence in their research programs. We argue that in order to assist international and non-English speaking background (NESB) research students to triumph over such culturally embedded challenges in engineering research, it is important for supervisors to understand this cohort's unique pedagogical needs and develop intercultural sensitivity in their pedagogical practice in postgraduate research supervision. To facilitate this, the governing body (Office of Research) can play a vital role in not only creating the required support structures but also their uniform implementation across the board.

Paradigm shifters : tricksters and cultural science

This paper seeks to link anthropological and economic treatments of the process of innovation and change, not only within a given ‘complex system’ (e.g. a cosmology; an industry) but also between systems (e.g. cultural and economic systems; but also divine and human systems). The role of the ‘Go-Between’ is considered, both in the anthropological figure of the Trickster (Hyde 1998) and in the Schumpeterian entrepreneur. Both figures parlay appetite (economic wants) into meaning (cultural signs). Both practice a form of creativity based on deception, ‘creative destruction’; renewal by disruption and needs-must adaptation. The disciplinary purpose of the paper is to try to bridge two otherwise disconnected domains – cultural studies and evolutionary economics – by showing that the traditional methods of the humanities (e.g. anthropological, textual and historical analysis) have explanatory force in the context of economic actions and complex-system evolutionary dynamics. The objective is to understand creative innovation as a general cultural attribute rather than one restricted only to accredited experts such as artists; thus to theorise creativity as a form of emergence for dynamic adaptive systems. In this context, change is led by ‘paradigm shifters’ – tricksters and entrepreneurs who create new meanings out of the clash of difference, including the clash of mutually untranslatable communication systems (language, media, culture).