Advertising and common sense -- Advertising agencies: mediation and the creative process -- Advertising: marketing, media and communication -- Analysing and historicising advertising -- Advertising and culture -- Advertising: signs and textualities -- Advertising: new forms and intimacies -- Advertising: audiences and psychologies bibliography
First paragraph: In 2007, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published the following '5 legacy promises'. The 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games aim to do the following: • To make the UK a world-class sporting nation, in terms of elite success, mass participation and school sport. • To transform the heart of East London. • To inspire a new generation of young people to take part in local volunteering, cultural and physical activity. • To make the Olympic Park a blueprint for sustainable living. • To demonstrate that the UK is a creative, inclusive and welcoming place to live in, to visit and for business. These promises underpin a more detailed document forming a part of the UK government's 'Legacy action plan' (DCMS, 2008). Each promise serves as a 'headline' for a programme of projected events and initiatives. Notwithstanding the content of the outline plan there are indignant voices which argue that this is where serious commitment ends: as mere headlines. Critics proffer an understanding of 'legacy-talk' as a smokescreen for wasteful and opportunistic expenditures on a 'white elephant' mega-event—and little else.1 Even Olympic Minister Tessa Jowell acknowledges that 'legacy' has become something of a watchword. However, Jowell's counter-suggestion is that there is a once-in-a-generation opportunity 'to turn the rhetoric of Olympic legacy into fact'. The DCMS action plan document purports to be a key to the delivery of these legacy outcomes (DCMS, 2008, p. 2).
The Brexit referendum produced a tumultuous reminder of the emotional-affective dimensions of political life in the UK. This article attends to affective dimensions in political experience, the fantasies and identifications that shape engagement within the shifting landscapes of politics and the structures of feeling that underpin them. The article reflects on a project undertaken between 2016–2019 in which we convened eight groups of 'Leavers' and 'Remainers' with an explicit questioning of the place and possibility of 'empathy' in the small spaces of a widening political fray. Through detailed thematic analysis of the group experiences and discourses, including personal-reflective accounts from the group conductor, we discuss 'clusters of preoccupation' characteristic of these groups and the challenges of researching empathy within the turbulent psycho-political mood of a Brexit landscape.
This article explores the problems associated with 'national identity' in the UK and examines the tensions arising between the international and local dimensions of the games through examples of domestic (UK) and international (Brazil, Chicago) media coverage of the key debates relating to London's period of preparation. The chapter proposes a conception of London 2012 as exemplar of an event poised to generate insights and experiences connected to a new politics of 'cosmopolitan' identity; insights central to grasping the cultural politics of contemporary urban development – and the paradoxes of national identity in current discourses of Olympism.
This paper considers contradictions between two concurrent and tacit conceptions of the Olympic 'legacy', setting out one conception that understands the games and their legacies as gifts alongside and as counterpoint to the prevailing discourse, which conceives Olympic assets as commodities. The paper critically examines press and governmental discussion of legacy, in order to locate these in the context of a wider perspective contrasting 'gift' and 'commodity' Olympics – setting anthropological conceptions of gift-based sociality as a necessary supplement to contractual and dis-embedded socio-economic organizational assumptions underpinning the commodity Olympics. Cost-benefit planning is central to modern city building and mega-event delivery. The paper considers the insufficiency of this approach as the exclusive paradigm within which to frame and manage a dynamic socio-economic and cultural legacy arising from the 2012 games.
This book examines the impact of the recession and discusses London's future trajectory as an entrepreneurial city and capital of the United Kingdom. While recognising the enduring capacity of London to 'reinvent' itself, contributors evaluate different dimensions of the city's current and future development through analyses derived from sociological, economic, cultural and urban studies perspectives.