Product Description: Unprecedented worldwide distribution of books, television programs, and other cultural products would seem to augur well for the diversity of ideas. Yet a dwindling number of media conglomerates — significantly American controlled — are increasingly herding consumers toward very profitable “blockbuster” films, books, and recordings at the expense of independent and alternative works...read more

Product Description: Creative Industries is a daring collection of essays that charts the noisy revolution that is transforming the production, consumption, and understanding of culture in the all-wired era. It brings together seminal essays written across traditional and new media, industry sectors, and national contexts to demonstrate that content still drives a value-neutral, knowledge economy...read more

Debate about trade and culture has a long history, but the application of WTO rules to cultural products such as films, radio, and books remains one of the most divisive issues in the organization. After assessing the economic and social arguments for treating cultural products differently from things like steel or wheat, this 2007 book explains how the vastly different views of WTO members in earlier negotiations led to an outcome that is disappointing for all. It goes on to provide a comprehensive evaluation of possible solutions, including evolution of the law through WTO dispute settlement, an agreement outside the WTO, and reforms to improve the balance between trade liberalization and cultural policy objectives.

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Product Description: A Culturematic is a little machine for making culture. It’s an ingenuity engine. Once wound up and released, the Culturematic acts as a probe into the often-alien world of contemporary culture, to test the atmosphere, to see what life it can sustain, to see who responds and how...read more

Product Description: A Culturematic is a little machine for making culture. It’s an ingenuity engine. Once wound up and released, the Culturematic acts as a probe into the often-alien world of contemporary culture, to test the atmosphere, to see what life it can sustain, to see who responds and how...read more

"This guide to the emerging language of creative industries field is a valuable resource for researchers and students alike. Concise, extensively referenced, and accessible, this this is an exceptionally useful reference work." - Gauti Sigthorsson, Greenwich University "There could be no better guides to the conceptual map of the creative industries than John Hartley and his colleagues, pioneers in the field. This book is a clear, comprehensive and accessible tool-kit of ideas, concepts, questions and discussions which will be invaluable to students and practitioners alike. Key Concepts in Creative Industries is set to become the corner stone of an expanding and exciting field of study" - Chris Barker, University of Wollongong Creativity is an attribute of individual people, but also a feature of organizations like firms, cultural institutions and social networks. In the knowledge economy of today, creativity is of increasing value, for developing, emergent and advanced countries, and for competing cities. This book is the first to present an organized study of the key concepts that underlie and motivate the field of creative industries. Written by a world-leading team of experts, it presents readers with compact accounts of the history of terms, the debates and tensions associated with their usage, and examples of how they apply to the creative industries around the world. Crisp and relevant, this is an invaluable text for students of the creative industries across a range of disciplines, especially media, communication, economics, sociology, creative and performing arts and regional studies.

Jerusalem currently stands at the center of a violent controversy that threatens the stability of both the Middle East and the world. This volatility, observes Annabel Jane Wharton, is only the most recent manifestation of a centuries-old obsession with the control of the Holy City—military occupation and pilgrimage being two familiar forms of “ownership.” Wharton makes the innovative argument here that the West has also sought to possess Jerusalem by acquiring its representations. From relics of the True Cross and Templar replicas of the Holy Sepulchre to Franciscan recreations of the Passion to nineteenth-century mass-produced prints and contemporary theme parks, Wharton describes the evolving forms by which the city has been possessed in the West. She also maps those changing embodiments of the Holy City against shifts in the western market. From the gift-and-barter economy of the early Middle Ages to contemporary globalization, both money and the representations of Jerusalem have become progressively incorporeal, abstract, illusionistic, and virtual. Selling Jerusalem offers a penetrating introduction to the explosive combination of piety and capital at work in religious objects and global politics. It is sure to interest students and scholars of art history, economic history, popular culture, religion, and architecture, as well as those who want to better understand Jerusalem’s problematic place in history.