Iraq and Syria are now suffering unprecedented plunder and outright destruction of their heritage from armed conflict. Facing the largest cultural emergency since World War II, the global community stands at a crossroads. Violent extremist organizations like Daesh (also known as ISIL or ISIS) are arming their cause through antiquities looting and trafficking, while also deliberately and systematically destroying heritage as a weapon of war. The cultural crisis has become inseparable from the humanitarian crisis.
This book provides an analysis on the impact of culture on crisis management, exploring how different cultural types are reflected in crisis-related decision making patterns. Providing an interdisciplinary and international perspective with a rich research and practical outlook, this work is an important contribution to the field of crisis management and decision making. Offering essential understanding to how countries, organizations, groups and individuals prepare for and respond to crises thus combining research across several disciplines, offering theoretical development, empirical testing and reporting on the testing of a large number of hypotheses across several frameworks. The novelty of this book lies in its presentation of the quantitative testing of the relationship between cultural theory and crisis management, drawing on data from cases that cross continents and crises types. The book also includes a review of cases from South Korea and suggests a number of ways in which practitioners at various levels of government can prepare their organizations to cope better with the introduction of cultural bias into the decision making process. Those with an interest in risk management, disaster management and crisis management will value this pioneering work as it reveals the influence of cultural bias in decision making processes. This work offers important insights for practice as well as for theory-building, scholars and practitioners of public administration, management, political, and international relations, organizational, social and cultural psychology, amongst others, will all gain from reading this work.
Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture. The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it. The concept of 'domicide' or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology.
A collection of case studies from nonwestern countries that offers an analysis of the significant role culture plays in crisis communication Culture and Crisis Communication presents an examination of how politics, culture, religion, and other social issues affect crisis communication and management in nonwestern countries. From intense human tragedy to the follies of the rich, the chapters examine how companies, organizations, news outlets, health organizations, technical experts, politicians, and local communities communicate in crisis situations. Taking a wider view than a single country’s perspective, the text contains a cross-cultural and cross-country approach. In addition, the case studies offer valuable lessons that organizations that wish to operate or are operating in those cultures can adopt in preparing and managing crises. The book highlights recent crisis events such as Syria’s civil war, missing Malaysia Flight MH370, andJapan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster. Each of the case studies examines how culture impacts communication and responses to crises. Authoritative, insightful, and instructive, this important resource: Analyzes how nonwestern cultures respond to crises Covers the role of culture in crisis communication in recent news events Includes contributions from 18 international authors who provide insight on nonwestern culture and crisis communication Written for communication professionals, academics, and students, Culture and Crisis Communication presents an insightful introduction to the topic of culture and crisis communication and then delves into illustrative case studies that explore intra-cultural and trans-boundary crisis communication.
Foreword by Marcello Pera Written by Joseph Ratzinger shortly before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures looks at the growing conflict of cultures evident in the Western world. The West faces a deadly contradiction of its own making, he contends. Terrorism is on the rise. Technological advances of the West, employed by people who have cut themselves off from the moral wisdom of the past, threaten to abolish man (as C.S. Lewis put it)whether through genetic manipulation or physical annihilation. In short, the West is at war-with itself. Its scientific outlook has brought material progress. The Enlightenment's appeal to reason has achieved a measure of freedom. But contrary to what many people suppose, both of these accomplishments depend on Judeo-Christian foundations, including the moral worldview that created Western culture. More than anything else, argues Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, the important contributions of the West are threatened today by an exaggerated scientific outlook and by moral relativism-what Benedict XVI calls "the dictatorship of relativism"-in the name of freedom. Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures is no mere tirade against the moral decline of the West. Razinger challenges the West to return to its roots by finding a place for God in modern culture. He argues that both Christian culture and the Enlightenment formed the West, and that both hold the keys to human life and freedom as well as to domination and destruction. Ratzinger challenges non-believer and believer alike. "Both parties," he writes, "must reflect on their own selves and be ready to accept correction." He challenges secularized, unbelieving people to open themselves to God as the ground of true rationality and freedom. He calls on believers to "make God credible in this world by means of the enlightened faith they live." Topics include: Reflections on the Cultures in Conflict Today The Significance and Limits of Today's Rationalistic Culture The Permanent Significance of the Christian Faith Why We Must Not Give Up the Fight The Law of the Jungle, the Rule of Law We Must Use Our Eyes! Faith and Everyday Life Can Agnosticism Be a Solution? The Natural Knowledge of God "Supernatural" Faith and Its Origins
Since the infamous events of 9/11, the fear of terrorism and the determination to strike back against it has become a topic of enormous public debate. The 'war on terror' discourse has developed not only through American politics but via other channels including the media, the church, music, novels, films and television, and therefore permeates many aspects of American life. Stuart Croft suggests that the process of this production of knowledge has created a very particular form of common sense which shapes relationships, jokes and even forms of tattoos. Understanding how a social process of crisis can be mapped out and how that process creates assumptions allows policy-making in America's war on terror to be examined from new perspectives. Using IR approaches together with insights from cultural studies, this book develops a dynamic model of crisis which seeks to understand the war on terror as a cultural phenomenon.
Jim Black deftly illustrates ten key problems facing America today and uses striking cross-cultural examples to show that every great civilization--from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Soviet Union--has faced the same problems.
"[A] tremendous new book." —The Boston Globe "Carney and Miklian write vividly in the fashion of a cinematic disaster flick." —The Washington Post The deadliest storm in modern history ripped Pakistan in two and led the world to the brink of nuclear war when American and Soviet forces converged in the Bay of Bengal In November 1970, a storm set a collision course with the most densely populated coastline on Earth. Over the course of just a few hours, the Great Bhola Cyclone would kill 500,000 people and begin a chain reaction of turmoil, genocide, and war. The Vortex is the dramatic story of how that storm sparked a country to revolution. Bhola made landfall during a fragile time, when Pakistan was on the brink of a historic election. The fallout ignited a conflagration of political intrigue, corruption, violence, idealism, and bravery that played out in the lives of tens of millions of Bangladeshis. Authors Scott Carney and Jason Miklian take us deep into the story of the cyclone and its aftermath, told through the eyes of the men and women who lived through it, including the infamous president of Pakistan, General Yahya Khan, and his close friend Richard Nixon; American expats Jon and Candy Rhode; soccer star-turned-soldier Hafiz Uddin Ahmad; and a young Bengali revolutionary, Mohammed Hai. Thrillingly paced and written with incredible detail, The Vortex is not just a story about the painful birth of a new nation but also a universal tale of resilience and liberation in the face of climate emergency that affects every single person on the planet.
The concept of Identity Crisis came into usage in the 1940s and it has continued to dominate the cultural zeitgeist ever since. In his exploration of the historical origins of this development, Frank Furedi argues that the principal driver of the ‘crisis of identity’ was and continues to be the conflict surrounding the socialisation of young people. In turn, the politicisation of this conflict provides a terrain on which the Culture Wars and the politicisation of identity can flourish. Through exploring the interaction between the problems of socialisation and identity, this study offers a unique account of the origins and rise of the Culture Wars.
The recent financial crisis exposed both a naïve faith in mathematical models to manage risk and a crude culture of greed that embraces risk. This book explores cultures of finance in sites such as corporate governance, hedge funds, central banks, the City of London and Wall Street, and small and medium enterprises. It uses different methods to explore these cultures and their interaction with different financial orders to improve our understanding of financial crisis dynamics. The introduction identifies types of cultural turn in studies of finance. Part I outlines relevant research methods, including comparison of national cultures viewed as independent variables, cultural political economy, and critical discourse and narrative policy analysis. Part II examines different institutional cultures of finance and the cult of entrepreneurship. Part III offers historical, comparative, and contemporary analyses of financial regimes and their significance for crisis dynamics. Part IV explores organizational cultures, modes of calculation, and financial practices and how they shape economic performance and guide crisis management. Part V considers crisis construals and responses in the European Union and China. This book’s great strength is its multi-faceted approach to cultures of finance. Contributors deploy the cultural turn creatively to enhance comparative and historical analysis of financial regimes, institutions, organizations, and practices as well as their roles in crisis generation, construal, and management. Developing different paradigms and methods and elaborating diverse case studies, the authors illustrate not only how and why ‘culture matters’ but also how its significance is shaped by different financial regimes and contexts.
