Agricultural tenancy reform: the end of law; or a new popular culture?

This paper applies a reading of the postmodernisation of law to the incremental reform of agricultural holdings legislation over the last century. In charting the shifting legal basis of agricultural tenancies, from ‘black letter’ positivism to the cultural contextuality of sumptuary law, the paper theorises that the underlying political imperative has been allied to the changing significance of property ownership and use. Rather than reflecting the long-term official desire to maintain the let sector in British agriculture, however, the paper argues that this process has had other aims. In particular, it has been about an annexation of law to legitimise the retention of landowner power while presenting a rhetorical ‘democratisation’ of farming, away from its plutocratic associations and towards a new narrative of ‘depersonalised’ business.

Chaos, culture and fantasy: The television plays of Howard Schuman

The single plays of American ex-pat playwright Howard Schuman produced for British television between 1973 and 1983 have received little critical attention. Written in a distinctly un-British madcap, non-naturalistic and often pulpy 'B movie' style, they centre around caricatured, hysterical and/or camp characters and make frequent references to popular culture. This article provides a general survey of Schuman's plays and analyses his sensibility as a screenwriter, drawing extensively on material from interviews with the writer. The article's particular focus is how and why different cultural forms including music, film and theatre are used and referred to in Schuman's plays, and how this conditions the plays' narrative content and visual and aural form. It also considers the reception of Schuman's plays and their status as non-naturalistic dramas that engage heavily with American pop culture, within the context of British drama. Finally, it explores the writer's relationship to style and aesthetics, and considers how his written works have been enhanced through creative design decisions, comparing his directions (in one of his scripts) with the realized play to reflect on the use of key devices.

Postmodernism, culture and feminism: the aesthetics of space and performance in Rock Follies and Rock Follies of '77

This article discusses the aesthetic and spatial representational strategies of the popular studio-based musical television drama serials Rock Follies and Rock Follies of ’77. It analyses how the texts’ themes relating to women and the entertainment industry are mediated through their postmodern ironic mode and representation of fantastic spaces. Rock Follies’ distinctive stylised aesthetic and mode of caricature are analysed with reference to the visual intentions and ‘voice’ of the writer, Howard Schuman. Through considering the programmes’ various spatial strategies, the article draws attention to the importance of visual and performance style in their postmodern discourse on culture, fantasy, gender and subjectivity. Analysis of the spaces of musical performance, characters’ domestic environments and simulated entertainment spaces reveals how a dialectic is established between the escapist imaginative pleasures of fantasy and the manipulative and exploitative practices of the culture industry. The shift from the optimism of the first series, when the LittleLadies first form, to the darker mood of the second series, in which they are increasingly divided by industry pressures, is traced through changes in the aesthetics of space and characterisation. As a space of artifice, performance and electronic visual manipulation that facilitates the texts’ reflexive representation of culture and feminised fantasy, the studio’s unique aesthetic strengths emerge through this case study.

Be United, Be Virtuous: Composite Culture and the Growth of Shirdi Sai Baba Devotion

In one popular devotional poster the Indian god-man Shirdi Sai Baba (d. 1918) gazes out at the viewer, his right hand raised in blessing. Behind him are a Hindu temple, a Muslim mosque, a Sikh gurdwara, and a Christian church; above him is the slogan, “Be United, Be Virtuous.” In his lifetime, Shirdi Sai Baba acquired a handful of Hindu and Muslim devotees in western India. Over the past several decades, he has been transformed from a regional figure into a revered persona of pan-Indian significance. While much scholarship on religion in modern India has focused on Hindu nationalist groups, new religious movements seeking to challenge sectarianism have received far less attention. Drawing upon primary devotional materials and ethnographic research, this article argues that one significant reason for the rapid growth of this movement is Shirdi Sai Baba’s composite vision of spiritual unity in diversity, construed by many devotees as a needed corrective to rigid sectarian ideologies.

Electronic dance music culture and religion: An Overview

This article provides a comprehensive and critical overview of existing research that investigates (directly and indirectly) the religio-spiritual dimensions of electronic dance music culture (EDMC) (from disco, through house, to post-rave forms). Studies of the culture and religion of EDMC are explored under four broad groupings: the cultural religion of EDMC expressed through 'ritual' and 'festal'; subjectivity, corporeality and the phenomenological dance experience (especially 'ecstasy' and 'trance'); the dance community and a sense of belonging (the 'vibe' and 'tribes'); and EDMC as a new 'spirituality of life'. Moving beyond the cultural Marxist approaches of the 1970s, which held youth (sub)cultural expressions as 'ineffectual' and 'tragic', and the postmodernist approaches of the early 1990s, which held rave to be an 'implosion of meaning', recent anthropological and sociological approaches recognise that the various manifestations of this youth cultural phenomenon possess meaning, purpose and significance for participants. Contemporary scholarship thus conveys the presence of religiosity and spirituality within contemporary popular cultural formations. In conclusion, I suggest that this and continuing scholarship can offer useful counterpoint to at least one recent account (of clubbing) that overlooks the significance of EDMC through a restricted and prejudiced apprehension of 'religion'.

Vágyott kultúra és reális értékítélet - Tudásmenedzsment-rendszer kiépítésének előfeltétele egy felsőoktatási intézményben (Desired culture and real value judgement – Precondition of development a knowledge management system in a higher education institution)

A tudásmenedzsment-rendszerek kiépítése és működtetése egyre népszerűbb vállalati cél. A legnagyobb igyekezet ellenére is kudarccal végződhet egy ilyen változás megvalósítása, ha a szükséges feltételek nélkül próbálkozunk ezzel a beavatkozással a szervezet életében. Az egyik legfontosabb előfeltétel a bizalomra, közös tanulásra, fejlődésre épülő, nyitott szervezeti kultúra, mely a tanulószervezeti jellemzőkkel írható le. A szerzők kutatásukban arra voltak kíváncsiak, milyen elképzeléseik, vágyaik vannak a felsőoktatásban oktató kollégáknak az ideálisnak nevezett szervezeti kultúráról. Ezeket az elképzeléseket egy külső tanácsadó cég által végzett kérdőíves felmérésen alapuló vizsgálat segítségével tudták meg, melynek kiértékelésére a circumplex-módszer szolgált. Az eredményeket összevetették a tanulószervezeti jellemzőkkel, vizsgálva azt a hipotézist, miszerint az oktató kollégák tudat alatt is olyan ideális szervezetet képzelnek el, mely a tanulószervezeti kultúra jellemzőivel azonos. _________ To create and to operate a knowledge management system is becoming a more and more popular target of the companies. Realizing the changes above can result in a failure – in spite of the biggest will – if organizations lack certain prerequisites which are necessary in companies’ lives. One of the most important prerequisites is organizational culture which can be characterized by confidence, common learning, development and open atmosphere. This is called a learning organizational culture. In their research the authors would have liked to know what kind of dreams the colleagues have about their own organizational culture. They achieve these results from an investigation with questionnaires which were realized by an advisory team. To evaluating the results of this investigation circumplex method was used. These results were compared with the characteristics of learning organization to confirm our hypothesis. According to this idea colleagues have the same images about their successful organization as the characteristics of learning organizations.

The Euro-African Influence in Hispanic Culture and Cuban Music Illustrated, Lecture by Cecilio E. Tieles Ferrer

This flyer promotes the event "The Euro-African Influence in Hispanic Culture and Cuban Music Illustrated, Lecture by Cecilio E. Tieles Ferrer", cosponsored by the FIU Libraries as part of the Viernes de Musicalia series of the Díaz-Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collection.

Questioning the merits and demerits of electronic communication in Social Work

This paper examines the social dynamics of electronic exchanges in the human services, particularly in social work. It focuses on the observable effects that email and texting have on the linguistic, relational and clinical rather than managerial aspects of the profession. It highlights how electronic communication is affecting professionals in their practice and learners as they become acculturated to social work. What are the gains and losses of the broad use of electronic devices in daily lay and professional, verbal and non-verbal communication? Will our current situation be seriously detrimental to the demeanor of future practitioners, their use of language, and their ability to establish close personal relationships? The paper analyzes social work linguistic and behavioral changes in light of the growth of electronic communication and offers a summary of merits and demerits viewed through a prism emerging from Baron’s (2000) analysis of human communication.

Contemporary Transformations of the Relations between Politics, Culture and Religion in Western Europe. Some Notes on the Spanish Case

According to Tilly, two laws shaped the process of transformation undergone by Western European societies since the Peace of Westphalia until the end of the 20th century: their increasing inner homogenisation and their growing heterogeneity between them. Cultural inner homogenisation affected, fi rst, those ethnic groups living within the territories of the said states. The second phase of homogenisation impinged on those groups that immigrated after World War II. This process followed different models according to the country considered, but the 1973 oil crisis revealed their general lack of success. During the last quarter of the 20th century and onwards, these European societies have been altered by two progressive and contradictory global logics: a process of cultural homogenisation at the world level (rather than society level) and a process of cultural re-creation led by those groups with an immigrant background, who have reacted against their integration shortcomings by searching for new sources of social and personal esteem in their respective cultural and religious traditions. This paper seeks to clarify these processes from a social differentiation and political representation theory perspective. The latter becomes indispensable, as the said processes have happened in a context in which the structure of relations (i.e. communication) between civil society and the democratic political sphere have experienced a radical crisis. In this way, the complex relations that exist between civil society, culture, religion and politics in these Western European societies are depicted.

Narratives Around Iberian Culture at Valencia Museums and Archaeological Sites: From Official Discourses to Social Perceptions

Museums and archaeological sites are considered the most authoritative places for talking about the past and the heritage from a scientific perspective. In fact, visitors assume their discourses as reliable and indisputable. In spite of that, professionals of archaeology must critically analyse the production of narratives at heritage sites, since they often reflect social, political and identity issues related to the present-day realities. The aim of this paper is to study official and popular discourses about the Iberian culture (Iron Age) collected in museums and archaeological sites from Valencia region.

Screening Diversity: Women & Work in Twenty-First-Century Popular Culture

Screening Diversity: Women and Work in Twenty-first Century Popular Culture explores contemporary representations of diverse professional women on screen. Audiences are offered successful women with limited concerns for feminism, anti-racism, or economic justice. I introduce the term viewsers to describe a group of movie and television viewers in the context of the online review platform Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Screening Diversity follows their engagement in a representative sample of professional women on film and television produced between 2007 and 2015. The sample includes the television shows, Scandal, Homeland, VEEP, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Wife, as well as the movies, Zero Dark Thirty, The Proposal, The Heat, The Other Woman, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and Temptation. Viewsers appreciated female characters like Olivia (Scandal), and Maya (Zero Dark Thiry) who treated their work as a quasi-religious moral imperative. Producers and viewsers shared the belief that unlimited time commitment and personal identification were vital components of professionalism. However, powerful women, like The Proposal’s Margaret and VEEP’s Selina, were often called bitches. Some viewsers embraced bitch-positive politics in recognition of the struggles of women in power. Women’s disproportionate responsibility for reproductive labor, often compromises their ability to live up to moral standards of work. Unlike producers, viewsers celebrated and valued that labor. However, texts that included serious consideration of women as workers were frequently labelled chick flicks or soap operas. The label suggested that women’s labor issues were not important enough that they could be a topic of quality television or prestigious film, which bolstered the idea that workplace equality for women is not a problem in which the general public is implicated. Emerging discussions of racial injustice on television offered hope that these formations are beginning to shift.

High Culture as Subculture : Brisbane's Contemporary Chamber Music Scene

The aim of the dissertation is to discover the extent to which methodologies and conceptual frameworks used to understand popular culture may also be useful in the attempt to understand contemporary high culture. The dissertation addresses this question through the application of subculture theory to Brisbane’s contemporary chamber music scene, drawing on a detailed case study of the contemporary chamber ensemble Topology and its audiences. The dissertation begins by establishing the logic and necessity of applying cultural studies methodologies to contemporary high culture. This argument is supported by a discussion of the conceptual relationships between cultural studies, high culture, and popular culture, and the methodological consequences of these relationships. In Chapter 2, a brief overview of interdisciplinary approaches to music reveals the central importance of subculture theory, and a detailed survey of the history of cultural studies research into music subcultures follows. Five investigative themes are identified as being crucial to all forms of contemporary subculture theory: the symbolic; the spatial; the social; the temporal; the ideological and political. Chapters 3 and 4 present the findings of the case study as they relate to these five investigative themes of contemporary subculture theory. Chapter 5 synthesises the findings of the previous two chapters, and argues that while participation in contemporary chamber music is not as intense or pervasive as is the case with the most researched street-based youth subcultures, it is nevertheless possible to describe Brisbane’s contemporary chamber music scene as a subculture. The dissertation closes by reflecting on the ways in which the subcultural analysis of contemporary chamber music has yielded some insight into the lived practices of high culture in contemporary urban contexts.