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This book offers a critical analysis of the spread of branding discourse and practice to new "objects"-from the individual, to the city, region, and nation-state. It offers a novel perspective on the development and function of neoliberalism and globalization in Latin America, as well as the relationship between culture, identity, and markets.

What happens to the nation when it is reconceived as a brand? How does nation branding change the terms of politics and culture in a globalized world? This book offers a unique critical perspective on the power of brands to affect how we think about space, value, and identity.

AbstractThis article examines the contemporary discourse of eco‐nationalism and its promotion of national sovereignty and belonging. I consider some of the strategies, symbols and narratives by which nationalist movements and political leaders have evoked environmental problems and particularly the global threat of climate change to justify excluding populations from 'native' lands, erect walls or other physical boundaries around national territories, and limit international traffic of people and goods. This promotion of nation seizes on concerns for continued collective existence, turning away from participation in global networks of culture, capital and cosmopolitanism to act as a bulwark against these networks. As such, it presents a mirror image of global nationalism: whereas the aim is still to take heed of global phenomena, these phenomena now appear as dark clouds on the horizon, from which national citizens must take cover.

This article examines the case of U.S. corporate environmentalism as a dramatic instance of issue management over four decades. Drawing on administrative and trade publications, archival sources, and personal interviews, the article tracks the gradual adoption of issue management and strategic planning techniques by the environmental public relations industry, demonstrating the increasingly powerful role of PR in influencing environmental policy making in the United States. By tracing its origins in the realm of environmental issues, the article argues that issue management became, over a forty-year period, a key strategy to define, limit, and control the concept of the environment in American society. The issue management tactics deployed by public relations actors to counter environmental activism and regulation offer a paradigmatic example from which to derive critical insights about the twin evolution of American social movements and the public relations industry.

This article traces international conflicts over the making and operation of the first global environmental information system, Infoterra (1972–2003). By studying the negotiations among international actors over what kinds of information, expertise, and technological infrastructure were deemed appropriate to constitute Infoterra, we gain insight into what was made to count as environmental information, and how "the environment" was communicated to multiple audiences in the early decades of the global environmental movement. The article argues that the struggles around Infoterra demonstrate the key role attributed to information systems for global environmental communication, with lasting impacts on pragmatic responses to environmental problems today.

This article is an overture to political communication researchers to broaden their categories and contexts of analysis when assessing the role of promotional practices in political life. It aims to make both methodological and empirical contributions to qualitative political communication research. Drawing on ongoing research into the proliferation of political communication strategies around the exploitation of oil in Canada and the United States, the article analyzes efforts by promotional intermediaries to achieve legitimacy for their clients in three sites: Montreal, Canada; Houston, Texas; and Fort McMurray, Alberta. Bringing to light the tools, techniques, and claims to authority of promotional actors and their practices, the article demonstrates the importance of field research to the analysis of political communication. By getting inside the social worlds of the actors and processes involved, researchers can make sense of the ways that political communication is defined, understood, and acted upon by interlocutors and audiences. The article also addresses specific methodological challenges of undertaking this research.

In October 2012, the Canadian Heritage Minister announced that the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the country's largest and most popular museum, would be renamed the Canadian Museum of History. In addition to the new name, three strategies—a strategy of engagement, a strategy of authority, and a strategy of expansion—were elaborated by museum and government officials as part of the transformation. We examine these three strategies as an example of the Harper government's attempt to "brand" Canadian identity and history in its own image, arguing that the strategies were designed expressly to paper over near-unilateral changes in the museum's mandate and transformation. Ultimately, these changes have problematic implications for the democratic management of cultural production in Canada.

"This edited volume seeks to redress the lack of scholarly work that takes promotion seriously as a form of social, cultural, political, and economic exchange. It unpacks the vernacular, the institutional structures, and the practices and performances that make up promotional culture in everyday life, offering diverse critical perspectives on how, as citizens, consumers, and users, we absorb, navigate, confront, and resist its influence. Contributions from both renowned scholars and emerging intellectuals make this book a timely and valuable contribution to the fields of media and communication studies, political science, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology." --BOOK JACKET

Publicity and transparency are two foundational ideas about the proper structure of democratic communication. In a context of utterly transformed public discourse, it is time to rethink the value of these concepts and especially their relationship to one another. This special issue aims to test prevailing assumptions about these terms as they are reshaped in the present era of organized promotional culture. To begin, the present introduction recasts the concepts of publicity and transparency as tools for analyzing and organizing communicative power rather than as normative ideals in their own right. To this end, we present three core arguments for rethinking transparency and publicity today. First, all acts of transparency entail a redistribution of communicative power but not an inherently egalitarian or democratic one. Second, publicity is the central means by which transparency distributes communicative power. And third, scholars must analyze transparency, like publicity, as a professionalized and industrialized field. By centering questions of power and practice, this special issue aims to animate a research agenda attentive to the relational character of both transparency and publicity in hopes of foregrounding the ways the concepts might be used in service of more equitable political alignments.