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Popular culture today manifests itself in a dense network of styles and genres, while the aesthetic preferences of the audience are highly differentiated. Besides, popular culture also implies a diversity of aesthetic strategies, discourses and value systems that traverse the symbolic demarcations between styles and genres and are effective across different artistic fields and individual media. Aesthetic concepts such as camp, retro or trash are expressions of a transgressive mode of production that facilitates a multitude of cross-connections between aesthetic spaces of experience. The volume brings together authors from different disciplines who approach aesthetics concepts in popular culture on a historical, theoretical and methodological level, analyze them on the basis of various aesthetic phenomena, or discuss aspects relevant to their theoretical contextualization, such as the emergence and establisment of artistic practice and aesthetic value systems.

À partir d'entretiens qualitatifs et d'observations in situ réalisés dans la filière française des fruits et légumes, cet article met au jour les tensions entre rationalisations formelle et matérielle au sein de grandes entreprises agricoles. À travers l'exemple des chefs de culture et l'étude d'un outil de gestion, il montre que l'émergence d'une rationalisation formelle, imposée par les acteurs de l'aval, revêt trois formes : une rationalisation du travail de la plante, une rationalisation de la gestion de la main-d'œuvre ainsi qu'une rationalisation par le processus d'intégration de la firme. Celle-ci entraîne alors une transformation des professionnalités des chefs de culture, en allant jusqu'à infléchir leurs pratiques et remettre en question leurs territoires professionnels. Elle conduit à faire du chef de culture un représentant d'une domination rationnelle, similaire à celle exercée par un bureaucrate wébérien.

"This book analyzes the anthropological concept of 'culture' in the development sector of the Kyrgyz Republic. The author calls for a revitalization of the culture concept regarding diversity and social change in order to better inform broader debates about development and well-being"

This collection of essays explores contemporary reflections on interactions between gender and culture. The 11 contributions focus on varied dimensions of popular culture that define, interpret, validate, interrogate and rupture gender conventions. There are discussions on how children react to gender expectations and how this reaction is reflected in their activities like drawing and games. There are also investigations of films, female bodybuilding in the USA, transgender identity in Greek and Indian mythology, and women breaking glass ceilings and pioneering social movements in developing countries like India. Specific chapters are devoted to British TV series and Hindi films that address issues related to masculinity. Essays on challenges that women face in the corporate world and the real world of social inequalities, especially in developing countries, give this volume rich thematic diversity. The collection will be of interest to literary critics, film critics, gender studies scholars, and poets.

United States (U.S.) civilian and military intelligence services increasingly have engaged with local intelligence services, either in an advisory role or direct coordination or liaison. In many cases, the intelligence officers have tended to try to remake the local intelligence services in the image of U.S. intelligence structures and procedures, with these efforts rather futile in most cases. One factor that has led to considerable frustration and potential failure has been a lack of understanding of the culture of local intelligence systems. Understanding both the subtleties of an area's social norms and mores, and the bureaucratic and historical cultures of other intelligence services remain critical factors in long-term success. Using case studies of environments in which established intelligence services have worked with emergent intelligence agencies, this paper examines the requirements for incorporating both larger cultural approaches and detailed knowledge of other intelligence bureaucracies.

AbstractThe Kazakh language is the state language of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Being in colonization for a long time Kazakhstani people had no need and chance to use the Kazakh language freely. With the independence proclaimed the opportunity to use the Kazakh language has increased: from primary schools to the universities. In the frame of European language teaching norms, special standards were developed to teach the Kazakh language in the functional-communicative direction. Its basics cover the national and cognitive directions. In this presentation the author shares the ideas of teaching national-cultural lexis, as well as using the onym units at the lessons. Proper names play a significant role in the Kazakh culture and the national mentality. They describe the long history of the Kazakh people through the centuries. The article considers languages' description and importance of teaching them.
Keywords: Lingua culture, onomastics, methodology.

AbstractThis is an exploratory study of leadership, organizational culture, and organizational innovativeness in a sample of nonprofit human service organizations: Associations of Retarded Citizens. Although leadership has been held out as one of the most important predictors of innovation, this study found it was not correlated with organizational innovativeness. Examination of the relationships between leadership and cultural variables provided some alternative explanations for this finding. Positive relationships among transformational leadership, organizational values, and cultural consensus (degree of agreement among employees on those values) indicate that leadership practices employed in this sample created strong cultural consensus around values that may inhibit innovation. These findings suggest that examining the link between leadership and organizational culture is important for understanding how leadership and innovation are related. This article sets out practical implications, based on the results of the study, that may help nonprofit managers create workplaces supportive of innovation.

There is a great deal of recent interest and debate concerning the linkages between inequality and health cross-nationally. The U.S. National Institutes of Health recommended in 2001 that any new research on health disparities should include social and cultural systems as units of analysis. Nevertheless, many public health interventions and policies continue to decontextualize risk factors from the social environment. Exposures to social and health inequalities probably vary as a consequence of different cultural contexts. To identify the processes that cause social and health inequalities, it is important to understand culture's influence. Navarro's research on political institutions and inequality illustrates the role of cultural context, although indirectly. Policies reflect cultural values because politicians typically translate their constituents' dominant values into policy. Political systems and structural inequality are institutionalized manifestations of cultural differences that intervene between dominant cultural dimensions at the societal level and health. The authors present a theoretical framework that combines constructs from sociological theory and cross-cultural psychology to identify potential pathways leading from culture and social structure to social and health inequalities. Only when all levels are taken into consideration is it possible to come up with effective, sustainable policies and interventions.

This article aims to highlight the impact of strategic culture on Italian attitude to war and peace. The first section shows how both structural interpretations based on the influence of international variables and domestic models that neglect the cultural dimension offer no adequate explanations of Italy's military behaviour. The second section reviews the literature on strategic culture and its usefulness to explain the Italian case. The third section examines the characteristics of Italy's strategic culture through the period of the Republic, and the fourth examines the influence of ideational factors on its military behaviour abroad. In this section, a series of hypotheses derived from structural and cultural models are tested using data from the Correlates of War dataset. The conclusion provides a summary of the research findings that emerged from the empirical analysis. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investment defines the cultures that emerged in response to the democratization of the stock market in nineteenth-century Britain when investing provided access to financial independence for women. Victorian novels represent those economic networks in realistic detail and are preoccupied with the intertwined economic and affective lives of characters. Analyzing evidence about the lives of real investors together with fictional examples, including case studies of four authors who were also investors, Nancy Henry argues that investing was not just something women did in Victorian Britain; it was a distinctly modern way of thinking about independence, risk, global communities and the future in general.

1. Introduction: Juri Lotman's Semiotic Theory of History and Cultural Memory -- 2.Translator's Preface -- Part I Culture -- 3.The Phenomenon of Culture -- 4.The "Contract" and "Self-surrender" as Archetypal Models of Culture -- 5 -- Toward a Theory of Cultural Interaction: The Semiotic Aspect -- 6.Culture as a Subject and its own Object -- 7. On the Dynamics of Culture -- 8. The Role of Art in the Dynamics of Culture -- Part II Memory -- 9. Memory in a Culturological Perspective -- 10. Cultural Memory -- 11. Some Thoughts on Typologies of Culture -- 12. The Symbol in the System of Culture -- Part III History -- 13. Clio at the Crossroads -- 14. A Divine Pronouncement or a Game of Chance? The Law-governed and the Accidental in the Historical Process -- 15. Technological Progress as a Culturological Problem -- 16. The Time of Troubles as a Cultural Mechanism: Toward a Typology of Russian Cultural History -- 17. Afterword: (Re)constructing the Drafts of Past