The first ever culinary guide to the Canberra region, this unique book includes anything and everything to do with food and wine. Whatever you're after, whether it's kaffir lime leaves or kosher foods, bush tucker or brie, Capital Taste will show you where to find it.

Culinary Taste: Consumer Behaviour in the International Restaurant Sector looks at the factors that influence our culinary tastes and dining behaviour, illustrating how they can translate into successful business in industry. With a foreword from Prue Leith, restaurateur, author, teacher, and prolific cookery writer and novelist, and a list of well-known and respected international contributors from the UK, France, Australia and Hong Kong, this text discusses the issues involved from a multitude of angles.

It’s a new world online, where consumers can publish their writing and gain a public presence, even a mass audience. This book links together blogging, writing reviews for Yelp, and creating pinboards for Pinterest, all of which provide ordinary people the opportunity to display their tastes to strangers. Edward McQuarrie expertly analyzes how the operation of taste in consumption has been changed by the Internet and offers a fresh perspective on why websites like Yelp and Pinterest have become so successful.

Examines differences in taste between modern French classes, discusses the relationship between culture and politics, and outlines the strategies of pretension.

Reading the Social in American Studies offers a unique exploration of the advantages and benefits in using sociological terms and concepts in American literary and cultural studies and, conversely, in using literature—understood broadly—to uncover a microlevel of the social. Its temporal scope ranges from the early 19th to the 21st century, providing a historical dimension that is otherwise often missing from studies on the conjunction of literature and sociology. The contributors’ approaches include genre reflections as well as close readings, theoretical discussions of crucial sociological terms, and literary observations backed up by empirical sociological studies. The book will familiarize international readers with ideas on the social from both sides of the Atlantic, including scholarship of such figures as John Dewey, Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, and Pierre Bourdieu.

An accessible and engaging introduction to the critical study of popular culture, which provides students with the tools they need to make sense of the popular culture that inundates their everyday lives. This textbook centers on media ecology and equipment for living to introduce students to important theories and debates in the field. Each chapter engages an important facet of popular culture, ranging from the business of popular culture to communities, stories, and identities, to the simulation and sensation of pop culture. The text explains key terms and features contemporary case studies throughout, examining aspects such as memes and trends on social media, cancel culture, celebrities as influencers, gamification, "meta" pop culture, and personalized on-demand music. The book enables students to understand the complexity of power and influence, providing a better understanding of the ways pop culture is embedded in a wide range of everyday activities. Students are encouraged to reflect on how they consume and produce popular culture and understand how that shapes their sense of self and connections to others. Essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, popular culture, and other related subjects.

This book introduces the critical concepts and debates that are shaping the emerging field of game studies. Exploring games in the context of cultural studies and media studies, it analyses computer games as the most popular contemporary form of new media production and consumption. This is key reading for students, academics and industry practitioners in the fields of cultural studies, new media, media studies and game studies, as well as human-computer interaction and cyberculture.

Art and Value is the first comprehensive analysis of art's political economy throughout classical, neoclassical and Marxist economics. It provides a critical-historical survey of the theories of art's economic exceptionalism, of art as a merit good, and of the theories of art's commodification, the culture industry and real subsumption. Key debates on the economics of art, from the high prices artworks fetch at auction, to the controversies over public subsidy of the arts, the 'cost disease' of artistic production, and neoliberal and post-Marxist theories of art's incorporation into capitalism, are examined in detail. Subjecting mainstream and Marxist theories of art's economics to an exacting critique, the book concludes with a new Marxist theory of art's economic exceptionalism.

The three-volume Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture covers consuming societies around the world, from the Age of Enlightenment to the present, and shows how consumption has become intrinsic to the world′s social, economic, political, and cultural landscapes. Offering an invaluable interdisciplinary approach, this reference work is a useful resource for researchers in sociology, political science, consumer science, global studies, comparative studies, business and management, human geography, economics, history, anthropology, and psychology. The first encyclopedia to outline the parameters of consumer culture, the Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture provides a critical, scholarly resource on consumption and consumerism over time. Some of the topics included are: Theories and concepts Socio-economic change (i.e. social mobility) Socio-demographic change (i.e. immigration, aging) Identity and social differentiation (i.e. social networks) Media (i.e. broadcast media) Style and taste (i.e. fashion, youth culture) Mass consumptions (i.e. retail culture) Ethical Consumption (i.e. social movements) Civil society (i.e. consumer advocacy) Environment (i.e. sustainability) Domestic consumption (i.e. childhood, supermarkets) Leisure (i.e. sport, tourism) Technology (i.e. planned obsolescence) Work (i.e. post industrial society) Production (i.e. post fordism, global economy) Markets (i.e. branding) Institutions (i.e. religion) Welfare (i.e. reform, distribution of resources) Urban life (i.e. suburbs)

This book was shortlisted for the 2015 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize. Comedy is currently enjoying unprecedented growth within the British culture industries. Defying the recent economic downturn, it has exploded into a booming billion-pound industry both on TV and on the live circuit. Despite this, academia has either ignored comedy or focused solely on analysing comedians or comic texts. This scholarship tends to assume that through analysing an artist’s intentions or techniques, we can somehow understand what is and what isn’t funny. But this poses a fundamental question – funny to whom? How can we definitively discern how audiences react to comedy? Comedy and Distinction shifts the focus to provide the first ever empirical examination of British comedy taste. Drawing on a large-scale survey and in-depth interviews carried out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the book explores what types of comedy people like (and dislike), what their preferences reveal about their sense of humour, how comedy taste lubricates everyday interaction, and how issues of social class, gender, ethnicity and geographical location interact with patterns of comic taste. Friedman asks: Are some types of comedy valued higher than others in British society? Does more ‘legitimate’ comedy taste act as a tangible resource in social life – a form of cultural capital? What role does humour play in policing class boundaries in contemporary Britain? This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, social class, social theory, cultural studies and comedy studies.