Rather than offering a strictly economic approach to the causes of the financial collapse, this book argues that the crisis was as much cultural as economic, and that any way forward must understand the complex relationship between media, culture and the economy. It was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

While many discussions of the economic crisis of 2007-2008 have sought to explain the causes of the financial collapse, this volume looks to supplement these accounts by exploring possible alternatives for the post-crisis world in which we now live. However, rather than offering a strictly economic approach, Cultural Studies and Finance Capitalism argues that the crisis was as much cultural as economic, and that any way forward must understand the complex relationship between media, culture and the economy. The chapters in this volume deal with a wide range of themes including celebrity culture, media coverage of the economy, examinations of economic theory and financial markets. They bring together research that combines an historical perspective with a view towards the future of critical cultural and political analysis. In a period marked by anxiety and economic austerity, this volume offers the reader tools for understanding the place and importance of cultural research in the post-crisis era. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Cultural Studies.

Introduction -- Market reports -- Reading the ticker tape -- Picturing the market -- Confidence games and inside information -- Conspiracy and the invisible hand of the market -- Epilogue

Drawing on a wide range of case studies, Cultures of Financialization argues that, in our age of crisis, the global economy is more invested than ever in culture and the imagination. We must take the idea of 'fictitious capital' seriously as a way to understand the power of finance, and what might be done to stop it.

One of the world’s most celebrated theologians argues for a Protestant anti-work ethicIn his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber famously showed how Christian beliefs and practices could shape persons in line with capitalism. In this significant reimagining of Weber’s work, Kathryn Tanner provocatively reverses this thesis, arguing that Christianity can offer a direct challenge to the largely uncontested growth of capitalism.Exploring the cultural forms typical of the current finance-dominated system of capitalism, Tanner shows how they can be countered by Christian beliefs and practices with a comparable person-shaping capacity. Addressing head-on the issues of economic inequality, structural under- and unemployment, and capitalism’s unstable boom/bust cycles, she draws deeply on the theological resources within Christianity to imagine anew a world of human flourishing. This book promises to be one of the most important theological books in recent years.

The relationship between culture and the law has become an emergent concern within contemporary Cultural Studies as a field, but the recent focus has been largely limited to the role played by cultural representations and identity politics in the legitimation of legal discourse and policies. While continuing this emphasis, this collection also looks at the law itself as a cultural production, tracing some of the specific contours of its function in the last three decades. It argues that, with the onset of neoliberal or late capitalism, the law has taken on a new specificity and power, leading to what we are calling the ‘juridical turn’, where the presumed legitimacy of the law makes other forms of hegemonic struggle secondary. The collection not only charts the law and cultural policy as they exert their powerful—if often overlooked—influence on every aspect of society and culture, but it also seeks to define this important field of study and demonstrate the substantial role law plays in the production of our social and cultural worlds. In this trailblazing collection of contributions by leading and emerging figures in the field of cultural legal studies, chapters examine various ways in which this process is manifested, such as U.S. legislation and Supreme Court Decisions on gay marriage, immigration, consumer finance, welfare, copyright, and so-called victim’s rights, along with international comparisons from Europe and Latin America. It promises to be a pathbreaking analysis of our juridically-determined conjuncture. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

A collection of sixty-four essays in which scholars from various fields examine terms and concepts used in cultural and American studies.

It is a truism to suggest that celebrity pervades all areas of life today. The growth and expansion of celebrity culture in recent years has been accompanied by an explosion of studies of the social function of celebrity and investigations into the fascination of specific celebrities. And yet fundamental questions about what the system of celebrity means for our society have yet to be resolved: Is celebrity a democratization of fame or a powerful hierarchy built on exclusion? Is celebrity created through public demand or is it manufactured? Is the growth of celebrity a harmful dumbing down of culture or an expansion of the public sphere? Why has celebrity come to have such prominence in today’s expanding media? Milly Williamson unpacks these questions for students and researchers alike, re-examining some of the accepted explanations for celebrity culture. The book questions assumptions about the inevitability of the growth of celebrity culture, instead explaining how environments were created in which celebrity output flourished. It provides a compelling new history of the development of celebrity (both long-term and recent) which highlights the relationship between the economic function of celebrity in various media and entertainment industries and its changing social meanings and patterns of consumption.

Several of the most important and influential political economists of communication working today explore a rich mix of topics and issues that link work, policy studies, and research and theory about the public sphere to the heritage of political economy. Familiar but still exceedingly important topics in critical political economy studies are well represented here: market structures and media concentration, regulation and policy, technological impacts on particular media sectors, information poverty, and media access. The book also features new topics for political economy study, including racism in audience research, the value and need for feminist approaches to political economy studies, and the relationship between the discourse of media finance and the behavior of markets.

This collection of essays explores the interfaces between new information technologies and their impact on contemporary culture, and recent transformations in capitalist production. From a transnational frame, the essays investigate some of the key facets of contemporary global capitalism: the ascendance of finance capital, and the increasing importance of immaterial labor (understood here as a post-Fordist notion of work that privileges the art of communication, affect, and virtuosity). The contributors address these transformation by exploring their relation to new digital media (YouTube, MySpace, digital image and video technology, information networks, etc.) and various cultural forms including the Hispanic television talk show, indigenous video production, documentary film in Southern California, the Latin American stock market, German security surveillance, transnational videoconferencing, and Japanese tourists¿ use of visual images on cell phones. The authors argue that the seemingly radical newness and alleged immateriality of contemporary speculative capitalism, turns out to be less dramatically new and more grounded in colonial/racial histories of both material and immaterial exploitation than one might at first imagine. Similarly, human interaction with digital media and virtuality, ostensibly a double marker for the contemporary and economically privileged subject, in fact reveals itself in many cases as transgressive of racial, economic and historical categories.