The Clubcultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies

This reader in popular cultural studies meets the need for an up-to-date collection of readings on contemporary youth cultures and youth music. Table of Content: Introduction: Reading Pop(ular) Cult(ural) Stud(ie)s: Steve Redhead. Part I: Theory I:. 1. Pearls and Swine: Intellectuals and the Mass Media: Simon Frith and Jon Savage. 2. Over-the-Counter Culture: Retheorising Resistance in Popular Culture: Beverly Best. Part II: Commentaries. 3. Organised Disorder: The Changing Space of the Record Shop: Will Straw. 4. Spatial Politics: A Gendered Sense of Place: Cressida Miles. 5. Let's All Have a Disco? Football, Popular Music and Democratisation: Adam Brown. 6. Rave Culture: Living Dream or Living Death?: Simon Reynolds. 7. Fear and Lothing in Wisconsin: Sarah Champion. 8. The House Sound of Chicago: Hillegonda Rietveld. 9. Cocaine Girls: Marek Kohn. 10. In the Supermarket of Style: Ted Polhemus. 11. Love Factory: The Sites, Practices and Media Relationships of Northern Soul: Kate Milestone. 12. DJ Culture: Dave Haslam. Plates: Patrick Henry. Part III: Theory II: . 13. The Post-Subculturalist: David Muggleton. 14. Reading Pop: The Press, the Scholar and the Consequences of Popular Cultural Studies: Steve Jones. 15. Re-placing Popular Culture: Lawrence Grossberg. Index.

Teaching and Learning Entrepreneurship for Micro and Small Businesses in the Cultural Industries Sector

Reports on an ESRC-funded, in-depth qualitative research project into 50 micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in the cultural industries. Our evidence sheds light on the extent to which the teaching and learning strategies adopted by higher education, further education and other VET providers are effective in providing entrepreneurship education and training for this innovative, high skill sector. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurs in this sector learn best by being able to experiment with ideas, by “doing” and networking with others and by working with more experienced mentors in their sector. The article concludes by suggesting a more “naturalistic” approach to teaching and learning entrepreneurship for micro and small businesses in the cultural industries sector.

Modernist 16-19 Business Education in a Postmodern world - critical evidence of business practice and business education in the cultural industries

This article examines the continued relevance of the 16-19 business education curriculum in the UK, stimulated by doubts expressed by Thomas (1996), over its continued relevance. We express a concern that business education needs, but is struggling, to respond to significant societal shifts in consumption and production strategies that do not sit easily within traditional theories of business practice currently underpinning 16-19 business education. We examine firstly, the extent to which a formal body of knowledge couched in a modernist discourse of facts and objectivity can cope with the changing and fluid developments in much current business practice that is rooted in the cultural and symbolic. Secondly, the extent to which both academic and vocational competences provide the means for students to develop a framework of critical understanding that can respond effectively to rapidly changing business environments.Findings are based on research conducted jointly by the University of Manchester and the Manchester Institute for Popular Culture at Manchester Metropolitan University. The growth of dynamism of the cultural industries sector - largely micro-businesses and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) -encapsulates forms of business knowledge, business language and business practice which may not immediately fit with the models provided within business education. Results suggest increasingly reflexive forms of consumption being met by similarly reflexive and flexible modes of production.Our evidence suggests that whilst modernist business knowledge is often the foundation for many 16-19 business education courses, these programmes of study/training do not usually reflect the activities of SME and micro-business practitioners in the cultural industries. Given the importance of cultural industries in terms of the production strategies required to meet increasingly reflexive markets, it is suggested that there may be a need to incorporate a postmodern approach to the current content and pedagogy; one that is contextual, cultural and discursive.

Attitudes to Formal Business Training and Learning amongst Entrepreneurs in the Cultural Industries: Situated Business Learning through "Doing with Others."

Presents arguments supporting a social model of learning linked to situated learning and cultural capital. Critiques training methods used in cultural industries (arts, publishing, broadcasting, design, fashion, restaurants). Uses case study evidence to demonstrates inadequacies of formal training in this sector. (Contains 49 references.)

A Cultural Science Manifesto (in Mandarin)

We propose that a general analytic framework for cultural science can be constructed as a generalization of the generic micro meso macro framework proposed by Dopfer and Potts (2008). This paper outlines this argument along with some implications for the creative industries research agenda.

Are country and cultural values interchangeable? : a case example using occupational stress and coping

Cross-cultural research in occupational stress and coping has produced a wealth of knowledge. Although advancement has been made, there are still problems to be solved. One of these problems is the confusion generated in the literature by researchers claiming nation or country as representing cultural values, and the use of the two terms interchangeably. It remains unclear whether this practice is correct. The present paper reported on this by using 511 full time employees from Australia, Singapore and Sri Lanka to study occupational stress and coping. Results revealed that cultural value paradigm (i.e., Individualism-Collectivism) was distributed across the three nations, such that over 60% of participants across the three nations were either high or low in both I-C paradigms. The findings also indicated that the relationship between cultural value paradigm and country impacted on stress and coping differently. The study shows that significant differences exist within country, as well as between countries, such that any attempt to equate ‘culture’ with ‘country’ becomes problematic. Therefore, these findings establish that country or nation was not the same as culture values and could not be used interchangeably.

Creating cultural change in education : A proposal for a continuum for evaluating the effectiveness of sustainable schools implementation strategies in Australia

Networks are increasingly recognised as advantageous when creating and embedding cultural change within organisations. This paper explores andproblematises ideas around networks for education for sustainability (EfS), Australian Sustainable Schools Initiative (AuSSI), a national, whole-school approach to EfS. In three Australian states - New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland – AuSSI has been implemented in different ways. In examining the use of products, facilitators and networks to embed initiatives such as AuSSI in Australian schools, we propose a “continuum of cultural change strategies” as a framework for thinking about each of these approaches to creating organisational and cultural change for sustainability. We anticipate that such a framework may assist where choices need to be made in relation to the kinds of capacity building processes that might best achieve “deep and wide” change within schools hoping to engender significant cultural change.

Structuring free-form tagging in online news

Tagging has become one of the key activities in next generation websites which allow users selecting short labels to annotate, manage, and share multimedia information such as photos, videos and bookmarks. Tagging does not require users any prior training before participating in the annotation activities as they can freely choose any terms which best represent the semantic of contents without worrying about any formal structure or ontology. However, the practice of free-form tagging can lead to several problems, such as synonymy, polysemy and ambiguity, which potentially increase the complexity of managing the tags and retrieving information. To solve these problems, this research aims to construct a lightweight indexing scheme to structure tags by identifying and disambiguating the meaning of terms and construct a knowledge base or dictionary. News has been chosen as the primary domain of application to demonstrate the benefits of using structured tags for managing the rapidly changing and dynamic nature of news information. One of the main outcomes of this work is an automatically constructed vocabulary that defines the meaning of each named entity tag, which can be extracted from a news article (including person, location and organisation), based on experts suggestions from major search engines and the knowledge from public database such as Wikipedia. To demonstrate the potential applications of the vocabulary, we have used it to provide more functionalities in an online news website, including topic-based news reading, intuitive tagging, clipping and sharing of interesting news, as well as news filtering or searching based on named entity tags. The evaluation results on the impact of disambiguating tags have shown that the vocabulary can help to significantly improve news searching performance. The preliminary results from our user study have demonstrated that users can benefit from the additional functionalities on the news websites as they are able to retrieve more relevant news, clip and share news with friends and families effectively.

Developing authentic achievement for disengaged young people using an electronic portfolio system

Credentials are a salient form of cultural capital and if a student’s learning and productions are not assessed, they are invisible in current social systems of education and employment. In this field, invisible equals non-existent. This paper arises from the context of an alternative education institution where conventional educational assessment techniques currently fail to recognise the creativity and skills of a cohort of marginalised young people. In order to facilitate a new assessment model an electronic portfolio system (EPS) is being developed and trialled to capture evidence of students’ learning and their productions. In so doing a dynamic system of arranging, exhibiting, exploiting and disseminating assessment data in the form of coherent, meaningful and valuable reports will be maintained. The paper investigates the notion of assessing development of creative thinking and skills through the means of a computerised system that operates in an area described as the efield. A model of the efield is delineated and is explained as a zone existing within the internet where free users exploit the cloud and cultivate social and cultural capital. Drawing largely on sociocultural theory and Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capitals, the article positions the efield as a potentially productive instrument in assessment for learning practices. An important aspect of the dynamics of this instrument is the recognition of teachers as learners. This is seen as an integral factor in the sociocultural approach to assessment for learning practices that will be deployed with the EPS. What actually takes place is argued to be assessment for learning as a field of exchange. The model produced in this research is aimed at delivering visibility and recognition through an engaging instrument that will enhance the prospects of marginalised young people and shift the paradigm for assessment in a creative world.

Translation and news making : a study of contemporary arabic television

Arabic satellite television has recently attracted tremendous attention in both the academic and professional worlds, with a special interest in Aljazeera as a curious phenomenon in the Arab region. Having made a household name for itself worldwide with the airing of the Bin Laden tapes, Aljazeera has set out to deliberately change the culture of Arabic journalism, as it has been repeatedly stated by its current General Manager Waddah Khanfar, and to shake up the Arab society by raising awareness to issues never discussed on television before and challenging long-established social and cultural values and norms while promoting, as it claims, Arab issues from a presumably Arab perspective. Working within the meta-frame of democracy, this Qatari-based network station has been received with mixed reactions ranging from complete support to utter rejection in both the west and the Arab world. This research examines the social semiotics of Arabic television and the socio-cultural impact of translation-mediated news in Arabic satellite television, with the aim to carry out a qualitative content analysis, informed by framing theory, critical linguistic analysis, social semiotics and translation theory, within a re-mediation framework which rests on the assumption that a medium “appropriates the techniques, forms and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real" (Bolter and Grusin, 2000: 66). This is a multilayered research into how translation operates at two different yet interwoven levels: translation proper, that is the rendition of discourse from one language into another at the text level, and translation as a broader process of interpretation of social behaviour that is driven by linguistic and cultural forms of another medium resulting in new social signs generated from source meaning reproduced as target meaning that is bound to be different in many respects. The research primarily focuses on the news media, news making and reporting at Arabic satellite television and looks at translation as a reframing process of news stories in terms of content and cultural values. This notion is based on the premise that by its very nature, news reporting is a framing process, which involves a reconstruction of reality into actualities in presenting the news and providing the context for it. In other words, the mediation of perceived reality through a media form, such as television, actually modifies the mind’s ordering and internal representation of the reality that is presented. The research examines the process of reframing through translation news already framed or actualized in another language and argues that in submitting framed news reports to the translation process several alterations take place, driven by the linguistic and cultural constraints and shaped by the context in which the content is presented. These alterations, which involve recontextualizations, may be intentional or unintentional, motivated or unmotivated. Generally, they are the product of lack of awareness of the dynamics and intricacies of turning a message from one language form into another. More specifically, they are the result of a synthesis process that consciously or subconsciously conforms to editorial policy and cultural interpretive frameworks. In either case, the original message is reproduced and the news is reframed. For the case study, this research examines news broadcasts by the now world-renowned Arabic satellite television station Aljazeera, and to a lesser extent the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) and Al- Arabiya where access is feasible, for comparison and crosschecking purposes. As a new phenomenon in the Arab world, Arabic satellite television, especially 24-hour news and current affairs, provides an interesting area worthy of study, not only for its immediate socio-cultural and professional and ethical implications for the Arabic media in particular, but also for news and current affairs production in the western media that rely on foreign language sources and translation mediation for international stories.

Closed-form design equations for decoupling networks of small arrays

Small element spacing in compact arrays results in strong mutual coupling between the array elements. A decoupling network consisting of reactive cross-coupling elements can alleviate problems associated with the coupling. Closed-form design equations for the decoupling networks of symmetrical arrays with two or three elements are presented.