Violence and increasing public awareness of violence mark society's contemporary condition. Sept. 11, 2001 made this condition even more indelible. Cultural Shaping of Violence proposes that violence cannot be described, let alone understond or addressed, unless tied to the cultural settings that influence it. The book's 27 chapters, researched and written by 28 scholars of seven nationalities, document violence in 22 distinct cultural settings in 17 nation-states on five continents. Internal to each society, a number of sites of violence may thrive, from the domestic sphere to social institutions and political arenas. In whatever site or guise, violence reverberates throughout the social fabric and beyond.

When the bestselling books Shaping School Culture and The Shaping School Culture Fieldbook were first published, Kent D. Peterson and Terrence E. Deal described the critical elements of school culture the purposes, traditions, norms, and values that guide and glue the community together. The authors showed how a positive culture makes school reform work and the companion Fieldbook included the tools needed to bring out the best in students, teachers, and the surrounding community In today's complex educational environment, new challenges have surfaced for school leaders who must grapple with issues of standards-based testing, school accountability, and student achievement. The second edition of The Shaping School Culture Fieldbook offers a companion to the newly revised edition of Shaping School Culture and includes an expanded version of Peterson and Deal's time-tested model to address the latest thinking on school culture and change. The Fieldbook offers a wealth of new ideas and approaches and includes new material on "toxic" environments with specific action plans. In addition, the book contains powerful new case examples for revitalizing school culture. The Shaping School Culture Fieldbook draws on the authors' extensive research and nationwide school contacts and includes hands-on strategies and exercises for helping school leaders: Uncover a school's hidden values, beliefs, and assumptions Think through and develop a school's mission and purpose Work out appropriate stories, metaphors, and symbols to represent a school Devise rituals and ceremonies for enriching the school experience Rethink leadership practices in light of educational and cultural needs Identify, transform, and heal a "toxic" educational culture This important resource will help school leaders understand, assess, and transform school culture for organizational success.

The most trusted guide to school culture, updated with current challenges and new solutions Shaping School Culture is the classic guide to exceptional school leadership, featuring concrete guidance on influencing the subtle symbolic features of schools that provide meaning, belief, and faith. Written by renowned experts in the area of school culture, this book tackles the increasing challenges facing public schools and provides clear, candid suggestions for more effective symbolic leadership. This new third edition has been revised to reflect the reality of schools today, including the increased emphasis on high-stakes testing, federal reforms such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), state sponsored improvement programs, and other major issues that impact organizational culture and the role of school leaders. Each chapter features new examples and cases that illustrate persistent problems, spelling out key cultural implications and offering concrete examples of overcoming the challenges while maintaining a meaningful learning environment. The chapter on toxic schools continues to provide the field's most trusted advice on navigating this rocky terrain, and the discussion's focus on how to manage negativity remains especially integral to besieged school administrators across the U.S. Recent years have jolted the nation's school system with a number of new developments that spell problems for the cultural tapestry of schools. This book provides expert perspective and sage, doable advice for administrators tending to external pressures while sustainingï¿1⁄2or evolvingï¿1⁄2a more positive school culture. Navigate new challenges including Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and waning confidence and faith Turn around a toxic school culture with confidence and success Foster a culture of passion, purpose, and meaning Adopt a more active form of symbolic leadership to support students, faculty, staff, parents, and community Test scores as the primary metric, relentless reforms, waning public support, and timid initiatives wrapped in bureaucratic packaging: while among the most prominent issues administrators face are only the tip of the iceberg. Shaping School Culture charts a route through competing pressures to help educational leaders hew a positive learning environment for schools.

One of the most fascinating, rapidly developing, and difficult areas of literary and cultural studies today is postcolonialism. Focused on postcolonialism and designed especially for those studying postcolonial studies, Re-Shaping Culture and Identity in postcolonial Fiction: Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah introduces key subject areas of concern such as culture and identity in a clear accessible and organised fashion. It provides an overview of the development of postcolonialism as a discipline and takes a close look at its important authors, Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah, and their selected oeuvres, Fury, Midnight’s Children, By the Sea and Memory of Departure. With a palimpsestic analysis of culture and identity as crucial features of postcolonial texts, Re-Shaping Culture and Identity in postcolonial Fiction: Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah argues how postcolonialism functions in allowing the formation of a new perspective on the contemporary world. Besides, it offers an alternative perspective on their works, one that promotes the importance of the issue of postcolonial agency. This book will prove invaluable to anyone studying English Language and Literature, Migration Studies, and Cultural Studies. Contents Introduction: the borders of culture and identity A critical approach to culture and identity under the light of postcolonial theory The contributons of Abdulrazak Gurnah and Salman Rushdie to postcolonial literature Non- homes in postcolonial culture (Un)belonging postcolonial identity Conclusion: towards a new understanding of culture and identity Bibliography

Increasing globalization, cutthroat competition, recurrent financial crises, and new social media technology provide unimaginable strain on companies to rethink their human resources practices. Such ever-growing business environments particularly call upon companies to develop sustainable leadership practices and create a well-established organizational climate. By promoting an organizational value system, the leader can influence the work behavior and attitudes of the employees and results. Corporate Leadership and Its Role in Shaping Organizational Culture and Performance is an essential reference source that investigates the influence of corporate leadership on the organizational culture and performance of a company and ways in which this understanding can improve firm effectiveness, nurture entrepreneurial behavior and practices, and establish innovative processes. Featuring research on topics such as intellectual capital, job satisfaction, and gender inequality, this book is ideally designed for managers, executives, business leaders, entrepreneurs, researchers, academicians, and students.

The processes and forms of electronic publishing have been changing since the advent of the Web. In recent years, the open access movement has been a major driver of scholarly communication, and change is also evident in other fields such as e-government and e-learning. Whilst many changes are driven by technological advances, an altered social reality is also pushing the boundaries of digital publishing. With 23 articles and 10 posters, Elpub 2012 focuses on the social shaping of digital publishing and explores the interplay between culture and technology. This book contains the proceedings of the conference, consisting of 11 accepted full articles and 12 articles accepted as extended abstracts. The articles are presented in groups, and cover the topics: digital scholarship and publishing; special archives; libraries and repositories; digital texts and readings; and future solutions and innovations. Offering an overview of the current situation and exploring the trends of the future, this book will be of interest to all those whose work involves digital publishing.

In Hollywood, we hear, it’s all about the money. It’s a ready explanation for why so few black films get made—no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff. But what if the money itself is color-coded? What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns? This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case. In a work as revealing about the culture of filmmaking as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films. How does history come into it? Hollywood’s reliance on past performance as a measure of potential success virtually guarantees that historically underrepresented, underfunded, and undersold African American films devalue the future prospects of black films. So the cycle continues as it has for nearly a century. Behind the scenes, the numbers are far from neutral. Analyzing the onscreen narratives and off-screen circumstances behind nearly two thousand films featuring African Americans in leading and supporting roles, including such recent productions as Bamboozled, Beloved, and Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Ndounou exposes the cultural and racial constraints that limit not just the production but also the expression and creative freedom of black films. Her wide-ranging analysis reaches into questions of literature, language, speech and dialect, film images and narrative, acting, theater and film business practices, production history and financing, and organizational history. By uncovering the ideology behind profit-driven industry practices that reshape narratives by, about, and for people of color, this provocative work brings to light existing limitations—and possibilities for reworking stories and business practices in theater, literature, and film.

Shaping Social Justice Leadership: Insights of Women Educators Worldwide contains evocative portraits of twenty-three women educators and leaders from around the world whose actions are shaping social justice leadership. Woven from words of their own narratives, the women’s voices lift off the page into readers’ hearts and minds to inspire and inform. Representing fourteen countries, these members of Women Leading Education Across the Continents (WLE) portray the complexity of twenty-first-century leadership. The variety of continents, countries, personal backgrounds, professional positions, and ages of those who contributed narratives give the book credibility. The portraits are framed with relevant scholarship and grouped thematically. Each carefully crafted portrait highlights an aspect of a chapter theme, followed by practical insights. The chapters develop a range of cultural comparisons, illustrate imperatives for social justice leadership, and examine values, skills, resilience, leadership pathways and actions. The authors invite all educators—both women and men—to shape social justice leadership through collective efforts around the globe that create new possibilities for a more just world. Learn more about Shaping Social Justice Leadershiphere.