Performing Culture presents a detailed and probing account of cultural studies' changing fixations with theory, method, policy, text, production, audience and the micro-politics of the everyday. John Tulloch encourages academics and students to take seriously the need to break down the separation between high and low cultural studies. Tulloch's case studies show that the performance of cultural meanings occurs in forms as diverse as The Royal Shakespeare Company's Shakespeare and Chekhov productions and our everyday work and leisure encounters. Drawing upon anthropological and dramatic studies of performance, the book emphasizes that academic research also performs cultural meaning. A central feature of the book is i

Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice is the first book-length ethnography of young people and their uses of hip hop culture. Originally published in 2001, this second edition is newly revised, expanded, and updated to reflect contemporary currents in hip hop culture and critical scholarship, as well as the epochal social, cultural, and economic shifts of the last decade. Drawing together historical work on hip hop and rap music as well as four years of research at a local community center, Greg Dimitriadis argues here that contemporary youth are fashioning notions of self and community outside of school in ways educators have largely ignored. His studies are broad-ranging: how two teenagers constructed notions of a Southern tradition through their use of Southern rap artists like Eightball & MJG and Three 6 Mafia; how young people constructed notions of history through viewing the film Panther, a film they connected to hip hop culture more broadly; and how young people dealt with the life and death of hip hop icon Tupac Shakur, constructing resurrection myths that still resonate and circulate today.

An innovative approach to driving maximum performance at all levels of an organization Peak Performance Culture: The Five Metrics of Operational Excellence is a step-by-step roadmap to achieving optimal organizational development in your company or association. This practical guide helps you accurately evaluate the current state of your company and create a strategy that maximizes its future success. Author Dave Mitchell, building upon concepts introduced in his bestselling books The Power of Understanding People and The Power of Understanding, provides new applications, effective real-world tactics, powerful organizational assessment tools, and much more. The book addresses the five critical factors for organizational success: vertical alignment, horizontal alignment, leadership ideology and corporate culture, employee experience, and customer experience. Each comprehensive chapter introduces a key component to peak performance culture — containing a detailed definition of the component, illustrative examples, expert insights, and practical considerations relevant to a diverse range of real-world situations. This must-have guide: Features exercises and assessments to identify organizational metrics drawn from 25 years of work with client organizations such as Allstate Insurance, Bank of America, Universal Studios, Hilton Worldwide, Walt Disney World, and hundreds more Explores best practices for implementing policies, procedures, and philosophies that align with an organization's mission, values, and strategy Discusses individual characteristics of high performers, how to enhance teamwork, the relationships between functional units within an organization, and employee recruitment, selection, and onboarding Addresses issues surrounding how employees responsible for customer satisfaction are experiencing their organizations Provides tools for continually evaluating and improving customer experience, including a pragmatic model that can be applied to any organization Whether your company needs to correct performance problems, or is already successful but seeking even higher levels of success, Peak Performance Culture: The Five Metrics of Operational Excellence will prove to be an invaluable resource for any organization.

This volume is based on the premise that artistic performance is epistemological, a way of knowing self, culture, and other. The nine essays in this book, based on a broad range of ethnic, racial, and gender groups, share a common interest in exploring how performance reveals, shapes, and sometimes transforms personal and cultural identity. Editors Fine and Speer begin by examining the interdisciplinary roots of performance studies and the role of performance studies in the field of communication. They also discuss the power of performance to shape personal and cultural identity. The first two chapters explore the ritual nature of performance in two different cultural contexts: an African-American church service and an Appalachian storytelling event of the legendary Ray Hicks. In both arenas, the performers act as shamans, transporting the audience from their everyday, secular lives to the higher ground of the mythic spheres of heroic and fantastic events. The next three chapters discuss the notion of place and performance in various landscapes--the English countryside, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the farmland of the Midwest. Through analysis of the speech and songs of a modern Sussex yeoman, the ghost tales of Appalachian storytellers, and the narratives of Midwest farmers coping with hard times, the authors reveal a variety of ways in which narrative performances function to preserve people's relationship with the land. The last four chapters share a focus on women as storytellers. One chapter offers a feminist critique of personal narrative research and challenges normative assumptions about the storytelling behavior of women. Another chapter interprets a narration of a Galician woman's typical day to reveal how the performance expresses deeply held attitudes and beliefs of her cultural community. Words are not the only medium that women use to tell their stories. The next chapter examines the story cloths of Hmong women refugees from Laos as intercultural and dialogical performances. The last chapter explores self-discovery and identity in the storytelling of a woman in the last years of her life. This volume is particularly representative of the ways in which communication scholars approach performance studies, but will also interest researchers and students of folklore, anthropology, sociology, theatre, and related disciplines.

Performed Culture in Chinese Language Education: A Culture-Based Approach for U.S. Collegiate Contexts elaborates on a cultural awareness-oriented, cultural performance-based, and cross-cultural communication-focused foreign language pedagogical paradigm—Performed Culture Approach — in the context of U.S. collegiate Chinese language education. Guangyan Chen draws on the data collected through questionnaires, comparisons between this pedagogy and mainstream pedagogical frameworks, and analyses of curricular development, lesson plans, and classroom discourses. Chen promotes the performed culture approach by delineating the theoretical framework of this pedagogy, reporting studies that empirically support cultural primacy in Chinese language education, and illustrating this pedagogy through analyses of a curricular structure, a lesson plan, and classroom discourses. Chen shows how this pedagogy addresses the gaps between the social need for global citizens and the insufficient integration of culture into foreign language education. The performed culture approach also addresses the overall drop in U.S. collegiate foreign language enrollment as this pedagogy connects foreign language programs to university missions and social needs.

Sportspsychologist and mental trainer Erik Østenkjær has years of experience building cultures that perform in the highest leagues - both in sports and in business. In this book, he will teach you how to build that culture, from laying it's foundation to it's continued maintenance. The minds of your coworkers are valuable assets that create culture and their attitudes and thoughts help shape culture - and you help shape them. Together, you and i will examine obstacles to management and how to handle them, we will look at the right tools for the job and measure your performances. We will look at knowledge and how to make your culture thrive and disseminate information to make you stronger and prepared. We will put the manager under a microscope and examine what to do and what not to do - making you a better manager in the process. The entire book is backed up by cases from both the worlds of sports and business.

As hip-hop artists constantly struggle to "keep it real," this fascinating study examines the debates over the core codes of hip-hop authenticity--as it reflects and reacts to problematic black images in popular culture--placing hip-hop in its proper cultural, political, and social contexts.

The idea of a distinctive and even exceptional character of American society and culture has long enjoyed persuasive power. It has lastingly affected not only the self-images of the United States, but also perceptions from without. Canada as well as further North American cultures and regions, too, sometimes embrace a topos resembling that of the exceptional. This volume employs diverse methodical approaches from the humanities together with the social and geographical sciences to explore the North American contents of the topos of Americanism, which have become decisive for the project of the modern. Transdisciplinary exchange opens an opportunity to re-assess the effects and dynamic metamorphoses of Americanism. The protean shapes of identification with or counter-identification against the United States, and at times Canada, are vital for the acceleration rate of cultural innovation.