Download or read book Public Relations Capitalism written by Anne M. Cronin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-24 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that we are witnessing the emergence of ‘commercial democracy’ in which public relations, promotional culture and the media play a new, central role. As the conventional democratic promise of political representation loses traction with the public in many countries, commercial culture steps into this vacuum by offering mirror forms of democracy. Commercial democracy promises representation, voice and agency to the public and in doing so creates new forms of social contract. Based on empirical material, this book examines the Public Relations (PR) produced by corporations and communications produced by charities in an intensely mediatized society. It presents a novel analysis of the shifting significance of brand and reputation. It analyses the ascendancy of commercial speech, PRs’ relationship to post-truth politics, and the transformation of cultural intermediaries into ‘social brokers’. As PR and promotional culture come to inhabit the realm of the social contract and new forms of politics, ‘the public’ and the very idea of ‘publicity’ are transformed.

Download or read book Courteous Capitalism written by Daniel Robert and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-11-28 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative history of how corporate titans in the 1920s used a massive public relations campaign to transform public opinion on big business. In the early twentieth century, as Americans erupted in righteous indignation over the flagrant abuses of big business, utility executives faced an existential crisis. With calls for strict regulation or outright government ownership of utilities, how could streetcar, electricity, and telephone executives thwart municipal ownership, rein in regulation, and secure huge profits? In Courteous Capitalism, Daniel Robert reveals how utility executives answered this question by launching the largest nongovernmental public relations campaign the nation had ever seen. In part, this campaign encouraged managers to compel their clerks to exude "courtesy," "sunshine," and "patience" toward customers. Rather than bribe the few, executives would convert the many using a combination of emotional labor and improved customer service. At the same time, executives organized the widespread manipulation of the press, schools, radio, and movies. At once a labor history of clerks and a social history of consumers, Courteous Capitalism offers an intriguing new argument for why a major reform goal of Progressives faded and why Americans changed their minds regarding corporate monopolies.

Download or read book Media Capitalism written by Thomas Klikauer and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that media and capitalism no longer exist as separated entities, and posits three reasons why one can no longer exist without the other. Firstly, mass media have become indispensable to capitalism due to the media’s ability to sell the commodities of mass consumerism. Media capitalism also creates pro-capital attitudes among a target population and establishes an ideological hegemony. Thirdly, media capitalism provides mass deception to hide the pathologies of capitalism, which include mass poverty, rising inequalities, and the acceleration of global warming. To illuminate this, the book’s historical chapter traces the emergence of media capitalism. Its subsequent chapters show how media capitalism has infiltrated the public sphere, society, schools, universities, the world of work and finally, democracy. The book concludes by outlining how societies can transition from media capitalism to a post-media- capitalist society.

Download or read book Accounting for Capitalism written by Michael Zakim and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and of a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In Accounting for Capitalism, Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the “bottom line” became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of absolutes, grafted onto our very sense of reason and trust. This is a big story, told through an ostensibly marginal event: the birth of a class of “merchant clerks” in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The personal trajectory of these young men from farm to metropolis, homestead to boarding house, and, most significantly, from growing things to selling them exemplified the enormous social effort required to domesticate the profit motive and turn it into the practical foundation of civic life. As Zakim reveals in his highly original study, there was nothing natural or preordained about the stunning ascendance of this capitalism and its radical transformation of the relationship between “Man and Mammon.”

Download or read book Digital Capitalism written by Christian Fuchs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This third volume in Christian Fuchs’s Media, Communication and Society book series illuminates what it means to live in an age of digital capitalism, analysing its various aspects, and engaging with a variety of critical thinkers whose theories and approaches enable a critical understanding of digital capitalism for media and communication. Each chapter focuses on a particular dimension of digital capitalism or a critical theorist whose work helps us to illuminate how digital capitalism works. Subjects covered include: digital positivism; administrative big data analytics; the role and relations of patriarchy, slavery, and racism in the context of digital labour; digital alienation; the role of social media in the capitalist crisis; the relationship between imperialism and digital labour; alternatives such as trade unions and class struggles in the digital age; platform co-operatives; digital commons; and public service Internet platforms. It also considers specific examples, including the digital labour of Foxconn and Pegatron workers, software engineers at Google, and online freelancers, as well as considering the political economy of targeted-advertising-based Internet platforms such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Instagram. Digital Capitalism illuminates how a digital capitalist society’s economy, politics, and culture work and interact, making it essential reading for both students and researchers in media, culture, and communication studies, as well as related disciplines.

Download or read book Carbon Capitalism and Communication written by Benedetta Brevini and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the role of communication in contributing to and contesting the current climate crisis. There is now widespread agreement that even if increases in carbon emissions are kept to the current international target the climate crisis will continue to intensify. This book brings together, for the first time, state-of-the-art research with activists’ interventions to place debate around climate crisis within the wider conversation about the changing relations between communications and contemporary capitalism. Contributors include; Naomi Klein, Michael Mann, Alan Rusbridger, Vincent Mosco, Jodi Dean, and leading figures in Greenpeace and 350.org.

Download or read book Capitalism and Communication written by Nicholas Garnham and published by Sage Publications (CA). This book was released on 1990 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading exponent of the political economy approach to mass communication poses an intellectual challenge to the currently dominant postmodernist and information-society theories. His essays investigate the role of the media and cultural institutions in contemporary capitalist societies.

Download or read book Secrecy in Public Relations Mediation and News Cultures written by Anne M. Cronin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-01-19 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the relationship of secrecy as a social practice to contemporary media, news cultures and public relations. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s theorisation of how secrecy produces a ‘second world’ alongside the ‘obvious world’ and creates and reshapes social relations, Anne Cronin argues for close analysis of the PR industry as a powerful vector of secrecy and an examination of its relationship to news cultures. Using case studies and in-depth interviews, as well as recent research in media and cultural studies, sociology, journalism studies and communication studies, the book analyses how PR practices generate a second, shadow world of the media sphere which has a profound impact on the ‘obvious world’. It interrogates both the PR industry’s and news culture’s role in shaping social relations for a digital media landscape, and those initiatives promoting transparency of data and decision-making processes. An insightful, interdisciplinary approach to debates on media and power, this book will appeal to students of public relations, sociology, media studies, cultural studies and communication studies. It will also be of interest to scholars and practitioners working at the intersections of media, social relations and public trust.

Download or read book The Dark Side of Marketing Communications written by Tim Hill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-28 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What fuels capitalism and what stops it from collapsing? Does marketing communications support and sustain the economic and political status quo? This book is not about describing the ways in which businesses can optimize the messages they put across or about adding to the marketing communicator’s toolkit. This book argues that marketing communications plays an increasingly important role in bolstering contemporary capitalism. Drawing on conceptualizations of the ‘market’ from political economy and sociology, it focusses on five logics that underpin and sustain the form of capitalism in which we live: the logic of competition, the logic of sustainability, the logic of individualism, the logic of objectivity, and the logic of distraction. It does this by exploring those arenas which are increasingly dominated by the communicative activities of business: sport, CSR, social media, statistics, and entertainment. Bringing theories from marketing and consumer research, sociology, cultural studies, technology and media studies to bear on marketing communications, this book is necessary reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students and academics who wish to understand the broader role of marketing communications in the reproduction of contemporary capitalism.

Download or read book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism written by Shoshana Zuboff and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Download or read book Communism Capitalism and the Mass Media written by Colin Sparks and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1997-12-08 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colin Sparks provides a challenging reassessment of the impact of the collapse of communism on the media systems of Eastern Europe. He analyzes both the changes themselves and their implications for the ways in which we think about the mass media, while also demonstrating that most of the orthodox accounts of the end of communism are seriously flawed. There are much greater continuities between the old system and the new than are captured by the theories that argue that there has been a radical and fundamental change. Instead of marking the end of critical inquiry or the end of history, as some have suggested, Sparks argues that the collapse of the communist systems demonstrates how very limited and frequently incorrect the main ways of discussing the mass media are. He concludes with a provocative discussion of the ways in which we need to modify our thinking in the light of these developments.

Download or read book Marx and the Political Economy of the Media written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 130 years after Karl Marx’s death and 150 years after the publication of his opus magnum Capital: Critique of Political Economy, capitalism keeps being haunted by period crises. The most recent capitalist crisis has brought back attention to Marx’s works. This volume presents 18 contributions that show how Marx’s analyses of capitalism, the commodity, class, labour, work, exploitation, surplus-value, dialectics, crises, ideology, class struggles, and communism help us to understand media, cultural and communications in 21st century informational capitalism. Marx is back! This book is a key resource on the foundations of Marxist Media, Cultural and Communication Studies.

Download or read book New Capitalism in Turkey written by Ayşe Buğra and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2014-04-25 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Capitalism in Turkey explores the changing relationship between politics, religion and business through an analysis of the contemporary Turkish business environment.

Download or read book Handbook of Research on the Political Economy of Communications and Media written by Karlidag, Serpil and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The political economy deals with the structure of production and the social relations of people in production. With its focus on structures and practices, the political economy also analyzes the contradictions of capitalism and suggests resistance and intervention strategies using methods from history, economics, sociology, and political science. The dominant commercial media in capitalism operates both as a product of economic and political structure and as an industrial institution with economic and political functions. Current Theories and Practice in the Political Economy of Communications and Media is a collection of innovative research on new approaches in the political economy of communication in the process of globalization. While highlighting topics including consumer behavior, news production, and public relations, this book is ideally designed for newscasters, broadcasters, journalists, marketers, advertisers, production managers, researchers, industry professionals, academics, and students seeking to extend the border of standard political economy of communication studies into relatively undiscovered areas.

Download or read book Vendors Capitalism written by Ingrid Bleynat and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mexico City's public markets were integral to the country's economic development, bolstering the expansion of capitalism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. These publicly owned and operated markets supplied households with everyday necessities and generated revenue for local authorities. At the same time, they were embedded in a wider network of economic and social relations that gave market vendors an influence far beyond the running of their stalls. As they fed the capital's population, these vendors fought to protect their own livelihoods, shaping the public sphere and broadening the scope of popular politics. Vendors' Capitalism argues for the centrality of Mexico City's public markets to the political economy of the city from the restoration of the Republic in 1867 to the heyday of the Mexican miracle and the PRI in the 1960s. Each day vendors interacted with customers, suppliers, government officials, and politicians, and the multiple conflicts that arose repeatedly tested the institutional capacity of the state. Through a close reading of the archives and an analysis of vendors' intersecting economic and political lives, Ingrid Bleynat explores the dynamics, as well as the limits, of capitalist development in Mexico.

Download or read book Beyond Consumer Capitalism written by Justin Lewis and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-01-24 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consumer capitalism dominates our economy, our politics and our culture. Yet there is a growing body of research from a range of disciplines that suggests that consumer capitalism may be past its sell-by date. Beyond Consumer Capitalism begins by showing how, for people in the developed world, consumer capitalism has become economically and environmentally unsustainable and is no longer able to deliver its abiding promise of enhancing quality of life . This cutting-edge book then asks why we devote so little time and effort to imagining other forms of human progress. The answer, Lewis suggests, is that our cultural and information industries limit rather than stimulate critical thinking, keeping us on the treadmill of consumption and narrowing our vision of what constitutes progress. If we are to find a way out of this cul de sac, Lewis argues, we must begin by analysing the role of media in consumer capitalism and changing the way we organize media and communications. We need a cultural environment that encourages rather than stifles new ideas about what guides our economy and our society. Timely and compelling, Beyond Consumer Capitalism will have strong appeal to students and scholars of media studies, cultural studies and consumer culture.

Download or read book Toward a Political Economy of Culture written by Andrew Calabrese and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2003-11-22 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Several of the most important and influential political economists of communication working today explore a rich mix of topics and issues that link work, policy studies, and research and theory about the public sphere to the heritage of political economy. Familiar but still exceedingly important topics in critical political economy studies are well represented here: market structures and media concentration, regulation and policy, technological impacts on particular media sectors, information poverty, and media access. The book also features new topics for political economy study, including racism in audience research, the value and need for feminist approaches to political economy studies, and the relationship between the discourse of media finance and the behavior of markets.