This book is about advertising and culture. Advertising is a significant aspect of modern societies and plays an important part in economic activity. It is a highly visible component of everyday life and increasingly of contemporary culture. The book considers culture as a broad category of human endeavour and experience. It takes a multidisciplinary approach drawing on media and cultural studies and the study of history and of art history, sociology, politics and political economy for ideas and explanations that can be applied to advertising and culture. Indeed, the book’s contributors are drawn from each of these areas of academic enquiry. Their contributions represent strands and tensions in the relationship between different aspects of culture, such as fashion, art, popular music, politics and media and the world of advertising.

The book raises the question of how, to what effect and with what intensity, advertising features – as the Advertising Standards Authority, the UK’s advertising regulator, recently put it – as a ‘common subject’ in our cultural lives. The book deals with advertising and culture primarily within a British context, but in an increasingly globalised world many of its themes and issues are relevant to societies where advertising is a growing presence. This book explores the relationship between advertising and culture and this introduction outlines the book’s scope, content and themes.

This book deals with the economic and developmental challenges facing contemporary society. The social structures, the political institutions, the movements and ideologies, as well as cultural dilemmas, are considered in depth to give the fullest picture of the twenty-first century development.

The contributors represent a range of expertise in economics, business management, sociology, linguistics, political science and cultural studies. Their diverse backgrounds and perspectives permit this publication to explore new avenues of debate, which represent a significant contribution to the understanding of the present problems and solutions.

Sport occupies a key position in the cultural profile of a nation. This study forms a comparative guide to sport across Europe, in terms of its relative political and social status, its development, and the ways in which it has contributed to national achievement. Covering sport in ten major European states, each native contributor to the study presents: • a brief historical background: major sports successes, Olympic positions, sporting traditions, • organisation of sport: its structure and financing, • elite sport: how talent is spotted, nurtured and remunerated, sports academies, national qualification schemes, • the role of science and medicine in sport,

As European business ties develop, how are they reflected in the way companies promote themselves? And as our sense of group identity is broken down by global communications technologies, how do adverts continue to target mass audiences? This volume stands alone as the first structured assessment of the impact of advertising, in terms of both culture and business across the national boundaries of Europe. It considers the successes and failures of several strategic marketing plans from across Europe, and describes stylistic and persuasive qualities of specific promotional texts. Advertisers have long been aware of the need to target specific groups of consumers and to appeal to them precisely in terms of their sense of membership to groups. Our post-industrial society is characterized by greatly altered work and leisure patterns as well as a weakening of national and communal frameworks for collective identity. Theories relating to identity not only reflect, but actively make use of such concerns. As a part of our everyday lives, the advertising considered looks at – but is not limited to – explicit inducements to buy products. Rather it considers all promotional texts designed to inform and persuade. With examples from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, the contributors also explore the different constructions of regional, national, social and sexual identities exploited by advertisers to render their messages effective. As a result, the book will be of relevance not only to those concerned with marketing but to all scholars of media studies, language, cultural and gender studies.

Media Governance today is shifting media rules and regulations from national government policies to local, regional, national, multinational and international ones and away from exclusively governmental domains to others, such as market, professional and public interest/pressure groups. Many media-related civil society organisations are based in Brussels, operate at a European level and influence exactly the part of Media Governance that has escaped the national shackles of the member states. But which are those organizations and who do they represent? Which are the relevant EU regulations for the different media industries that they try to influence? How do they participate in the media related debates in the different EU institutions? What are their major position papers? What is the current state of affairs in the European Media Governance relevant to their industry and what are the future issues that they are trying to tackle early enough at a European level? Finally, how are their lobbying efforts coordinated with other political, professional and public interest groups? 

This book presents the work of ten of these European organizations from a variety of media sectors, as well as the relevant work of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Consumers Association.

The title of this book, Refugee Performance, suggests there is a constituency of practices that might be unified under a definite term or god forbid to propose a new field of study. This is far from the intentions of the collection. This collection has grown out of an interest in performance and theatre in sites of war and the impact of conflict on diasporic communities. The chapters represent stories from a range of countries and war contexts, including Iraq, Thailand, Burma, Uganda, Palestine, Croatia, Serbia, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.