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The history of aluminum illustrates how the concept of symbolic meanings can help connect culture with business history. Aluminum's symbolic meanings played a crucial role in its industrial history, largely through the enthusiasm that greeted the introduction and diffusion of the metal. Symbolic meanings influence technological innovation through their role in shaping expectations, a role understood by the historical actors who engage in struggles over the meanings of competing innovations. For aluminum, this struggle centered on the conflict between the material's two major meanings: aluminum as modern and aluminum as ersatz. This debate over meanings has played out differently in aviation, electric wiring, and automobiles.

This paper focuses on the understanding of visual rhetorical figures as they appear in today's globalized advertising. A sound theoretical model (i.e., Phillips and McQuarrie 2004) is first reviewed to select a good representative sampling (i.e., 9 advertisements) of the behaviour domain measured. Then, a population of 60 English language students are questioned regarding these 9 advertisements. This study uses a combined methodology, resorting to basic quantitative data to reveal qualitative findings. Our discussion supports prior research (Callister and Stern 2008: 148) indicating that culture is essential for image understanding in a cross-cultural environment and stands in opposition to those who act on the assumption that visuals are universal and therefore understandable in all cultures of the world (Levitt 1983).

With the recent wave of corporate scandals, organizational culture has regained relevance in politics and the media. However, to acquire enduring utility, the concept needs an overhaul to overcome the weaknesses of earlier approaches. As such, this paper reconceptualizes organizational culture as a negotiated order (Strauss 1978) that emerges through interactions between participants, an order influenced by those with the symbolic power to define the situation. I stress the complementary contributions of theorists of practice (Bourdieu and Swidler) and theorists of interaction (Goffman and Strauss), building upward from practice into interaction, symbolic power, and the negotiated order. Using data from initial reports on the fall of Arthur Andersen and Co., I compare this symbolic power approach to other approaches (culture as subjective beliefs and values or as context/public meaning). The symbolic power model has five virtues: an empirically observable object of study; the capacity to explain conflict and integration; the ability to explain stability and change; causal efficacy; and links between the micro-, meso-, and macrolevels of analysis. Though this paper focuses on organizational culture, the symbolic power model provides theoretical leverage for understanding many situated contexts.

The purpose of the work is to determine the specifics of ornament functioning as a symbolic form of culture, its meaning and role in marking the socio-cultural environment. The methodological research consists in the application of analytical, structural, cultural-hermeneutical, axiological, and semiotical methods, which allow us to consider the phenomenon of ornament from different aspects of cultural knowledge. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the discovery of the specifics of human signs and symbolic activities based on the example of ornamental decoration and signification. The ornamental functions, its sign-symbolic and socio-psychological components in the cultural-historical environment are researched. We have proven that the carrier of cultural and historical information is ornament and it is the means of communication between generations in space and time. Conclusions. Self-management of a human in the field of culture is implemented by means of symbols and signs, which are organised in such symbolic forms as language, religion, science, and art. Ornament is an artistic means of shape creation of art. Ornament is a dynamic figurative form that demonstrates the temporal cycles of senses in different artistic genres showing the static of image, the topos. Due to dynamic and temporal component codifies the cultural memory of the community, the ornamental chronotope is a storage of national cultural narratives that are re-actualised during the socio-cultural crises, and during request for deep markers of collective knowledge.
Key words: ornament, sign, symbolic form, culture.

The review of relevant psychoanalytic literature has clarified that the Oedipus complex is considered to be resolved through symbolic castration and symbolic parricide. The author then reviewed the Chinese research papers, and proposed the hypothesis that the Oedipus complex is not absolutely resolved under Chinese culture at the level of symbolism.

The result of thirty-five years of thought and research on culture by one of the best and most literate writers in sociology, this wide-ranging review of the meaning and study of culture is Bennett Berger at his best. Drawing on his unsurpassed knowledge of the scholarly literature and on his wealth of personal experience, Berger reviews and synthesizes recent work in cultural sociology from a materialist perspective. An Essay on Culture culminates in a call for an empirical research program focused on the relation between symbolic choices and social locations, rather than on interpretive accounts of the meanings of texts or performances. Among his unusual insights are a defense of reductionism, sympathetic accounts of peer pressure and special interests, an attempt to restore some dignity to the word "ideology," and a fresh perspective on conspiracy theory. Scholars and students of culture will find here stunning discussions and theoretical insights on ideological work, morality and culture, and on the relations between social structure and cultural structure. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995