All CEOs, managers, supervisors, training professionals, and educators must be able to effectively recruit, train, manage, and promote a culturally diverse work force. Unfortunately, few of them have been adequately trained to do so. Effective management of diversity is good business. It takes effective communication, conflict resolution, and the creation of an inclusive organizational culture to succeed. This comprehensive book helps administrators better understand the problems they face and how to deal with them by dispelling the myths and facing the realities of cultural diversity.

Drawing on numerous examples of successful diversity initiatives, the book gives the reader a balanced view of distinct diversity interventions. Cross-cultural training programs are critiqued, along with specific methods for assuring quality in-service training activities. Self-administered quizzes, surveys, and critical incidents are included to allow the reader to gain self-insight and self-improvement. African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, women, older workers, employees with disabilities, foreign workers, and majority cultural groups are discussed in great detail. Theories and laws, as well as behavioral, cognitive, and affective strategies are among the topics presented.

From Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Gehring presents a compelling theory of the black comedy film genre. Placing the movies he discusses in a historical and literary context, Gehring explores the genre's obession with death and the characters' failure to be shocked by it. Movies discussed include: Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-22, Clockwork Orange, Harold and Maude, Heathers, and Natural Born Killers.

This interdisciplinary book responds to the explosion of gay and lesbian creativity on modern-day France. Rather than attempting to formalize a specifically 'gay' or 'lesbian' style or identity, the authors seek to open up new 'homotextualities, ' understood here as ongoing constructions and deconstructions of both homosexuality and its environments. They investigate the work of (among others) Violette Leduc, Tony Duvert, Renaud Camus, and Guy Hocquenghem; the cinema of Josiane Balasko and Cyril Collard; the theoretical writings of Leo Bersani, Luce Irigaray, and Monique Wittig. Employing a range of methods, authors re-evaluate and contest both the literary and theoretical canon and establish new convergences between French and Gay Studies, in particular, queer theory. This book provides the first proper assessment of the usefulness of this approach when dealing with a literary and cultural tradition notoriously discreet about the very concept of a gay writer.

This richly illustrated volume explores the eroticization of death in the literature, art, and music of the nineteenth century, and in the popular culture of our time.

Death was the natural enemy of love in the arts of the West until the late eighteenth century, when the two mated in artistic fancy to celebrate death as a font of sensual bliss. Through the nineteenth century, voluptuous visions of death pervaded high culture. Keats fell half in love with easeful death, and, as Heine told it, Life only warms in death's cold arms. For Whitman, death was the word of the sweetest song. Flaubert tempted his Saint Anthony with Lust and Death fused into a single figure. Zola saw love and death intermixed in the somber pit of the human soul. At mid- century, painters and poets alike competed in depicting Ophelia drowning in ecstasy. At the century's end the figure of the femme fatale haunted the cultural elite. After 1914, the entire morbid complex sank into popular culture.

What was the source of this eroticization of death in the arts? To answer this question, Rudolph Binion explores a rich variety of prose and poetry, painting and sculpture, and lyrical and instrumental music, interlacing love and death. He compares modern and premodern treatments of key subjects such as Salome and Mary Magdalene, supporting his text with an array of arresting illustrations. In conclusion, he traces this fantasy of carnal love beyond death to the Christian message of spiritual love beyond death, which modern, post- Christian culture has both discarded and salvaged.

In "Love Beyond Death: The Anatomy of a Myth in the Arts," Rudolph Binion investigates the various art forms where the conjunction of love and death is found and provides an explanation for this bizarre match. Supporting his text with some of the most sinister, alluring, and provocative images from the nineteenth century, Binion provides the reader with a dizzying account of the development of this artistic obsession, and of its passage into the popular culture of the twentieth century.

In the last half century, ways of thinking about the Holocaust have changed somewhat dramatically. In this volume, noted scholars reflect on how their own thinking about the Holocaust has changed over the years. In their personal stories they confront the questions that the Holocaust has raised for them and explore how these questions have been evolving. Contributors include John T. Pawlikowski, Richard L. Rubenstein, Michael Berenbaum, and Eva Fleischner.

The matsutake mushroom continues to be a highly sought delicacy, especially in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cuisine. Matsutake Worlds explores this mushroom through the lens of multi-species encounters centered around the matsutake's notorious elusiveness. The mushroom's success, the contributors of this volume argue, cannot be accounted for by any one cultural, social, political, or economic process. Rather, the matsutake mushroom has flourished as the result of a number of different processes and dynamics, culminating in the culinary institution we know today.

Internationalism is generally considered to be a major feature of the labour movement, and to hold a far more powerful appeal for workers' organizations than national identity. However, this revisionist book argues that, in fact, it is the national dimension which is of utmost importance to workers' organizations, and that national questions have often compelled workers to engage in struggles on different levels. Through detailed case studies of trade union involvement in Northern Ireland, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria and Europe generally, contributors tackle subjects long neglected by labour historians and overturn the accepted wisdom that nationalism and the labour movement are irreconcilably opposed. This analysis of how international agendas are influenced by nationalist politics is unique, and the case-studies offer a dynamic description of the different ways in which nationalist values meet with trade union ideas and practices.The high standard of scholarship and the combination of historical and contemporary material make this book essential reading for students and researchers of labour history, politics, political theory and area studies.

This is the first ethnography to be written about a Campeche Maya community. It examines the surviving Maya traditional technologies and sacred cosmologies and discusses the potential for combining these with modern knowledge and technologies to form an efficient new system that will not only provide for ecologically responsible development but will also make possible the cultural survival of this threatened indigenous population.

This volume explores the intriguing ontological ambiguities of madness in literature and the arts. Despite its association with a diseased/abnormal mind, there can be much sense and sensibility in madness. Daring to break free from the dictates of normalcy, madwomen and madmen disrupt the status quo. Yet, as they venture into unchartered or prohibited terrain, they may also unleash the liberatory and transformative potential of unrestrained madness. Contributors are Doreen Bauschke, Teresa Bell, Isil Ezgi Celik, Terri Jane Dow, Peter Gunn, Anna Klambauer, Rachel A. Sims and Ruxanda Topor.

Every human society has a lineup of base, wicked, unethical characters-real and fictional-that are regarded as villainous. This book explores how western societies have used those they label villains to delineate insiders from outsiders; political, social, economic, and cultural behaviors deemed a threat to the order, harmony, and well-being of society itself; and normal as opposed to abnormal psychological behavior. Part One addresses how nature and those identified as ""barbarians"" were villainized as sinister ""others"" bent on destroying humanity and western civilization. Part Two considers how certain villainous types-tyrants, traitors, and tramps (aka ""femme fatales"")-challenged and reinforced western thinking with regard to legitimate governance, loyalty to one's people, and proper male/female roles and relationships. Part Three looks at how sociopathic gangsters and grifters and psychopathic murderers have served as models of evil and/or unprincipled behavior, and, in so doing, highlighted what we regard as moral and rightful conduct. In tandem with these villainous types, this study also considers two distinct though related phenomena, the dramatic shrinking of what is now considered villainous in the West, and the proliferation of all manner of odd and over-the-top villains in western pop culture and mass media.

In the years since World War II, commercial television has become the most powerful force in American culture. It is also the quintessential example of postmodernist culture. This book studies how "The Twilight Zone, The Prisoner, Twin Peaks," and "The X-Files" display many of the central characteristics that critics and theorists have associated with postmodernism, including fragmentation of narratives and characters, multiplicity in style and genre, and the collapse of traditional categorical boundaries of all kinds. The author labels these series strange TV since they challenge the conventions of television programming, thus producing a form of cognitive estrangement that potentially encourages audiences to question received ideas.

Despite their challenges to the conventions of commercial television, however, these series pose no real threat to the capitalist order. In fact, the very characteristics that identify these series as postmodern are also central characteristics of capitalism itself, especially in its late consumerist phase. An examination of these series within the context of postmodernism thus confirms Fredric Jameson's thesis that postmodernism is a reflection of the cultural logic of late capitalism. At the same time, these series do point toward the potential of television as a genuinely innovative medium that promises to produce genuinely new forms of cultural expression in the future.

The serial killer has become an obsession ever since Jack the Ripper became a media sensation, embedding a new and horrifying type of murderer into our cultural consciousness - one who kills darkly and in the dark. All popular media - print, radio, television, and so on - have become absorbed by this new figure. This book traces its diffusion through all media and discusses what this reveals about modern society. Using the Dexter saga of novels and television programs as its basis, the book argues that a "Dexter Syndrome" has emerged whereby we no longer see a difference between real and fictional serial killers. The psychological and social reasons for this are explored by tracing pop culture texts themselves (movies, novels, etc.). Above all else, Dexter's concept of a "moral code" forms a thematic thread that allows the author to argue that our contemporary moral nihilism has produced the demand for horror and horrific characters like serial killers, who have replaced medieval demons and monsters.

As the first book to introduce and analyze cultural studies in contemporary China, this volume is an important resource for Western scholars wishing to understand the rise and development of cultural studies in China. Organized according to subject, it includes extensive material examining the relationships between culture and politics, as well as culture and institutions in contemporary China. Further, it discusses the development of cultural debates.

"A lively and interesting overview of guns in American life; past, present, and future...Guns in America: A Reader will serve most promisingly as a long-awaited introduction to a complex and controversial issue."
--"Left History"

Firearms have long been at the core of our national narratives. From the Puritans' embrace of guns to beat back the "devilish Indian" to our guilty delight in the extralegal exploits of Dirty Harry, Americans have relied on the gun to right wrongs, both real and imagined.

The extent to which guns have been woven into our nation's mythology suggests that the current debate is only partly about guns themselves and equally about conflicting cultural values and competing national identities. Belying the gun debate are a host of related issues: contesting conceptions of community, the proper relationship between the individual and the state, and the locus of responsibility for maintaining order.

Guns in America documents and analyzes the history of firearms in America, exploring various aspects of gun manufacture, ownership, and useaand more importantly, the cultural and political implications which this history reveals.

Eschewing single-minded partisanship and emphasizing nuance and compromise, Jan E. Dizard and Robert Merrill Muth have assembled a diverse array of writings from all points on the ideological spectrum. The documents span the whole of American history, from Puritan sermons to contemporary NRA documents. The result is an indispensable panorama of the never-ending controversies over gun control, crime, hunting, and militias.

Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to perform a kind of racially charged cultural work: to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the "nature" of identity in the present. Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history. This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines-biology, history, cultural studies, law, medicine, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology-to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book's essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.

A collection of essays that explore the effects of modernization on Jewish self-understanding. Over the last three centurles, the Jewish experience has been profoundly affected by modernity, which Meyer defines as not only technological advance, cultural innovation, and reliance upon human reason but also as the adaptation of Jews to a modern framework within non-Jewish economies, societies, and cultures. Judaism within Modernity begins with an exploration of Jewish historiography and the problems of periodization in modern Jewish history. In these beginning essays we see the range of Meyer's thinking about what constitutes modernization and how to determine its beginning. He discusses the role of history in defining identity among Jews and suggests that finding an adequate paradigm of continuity is essential to the historian's task. The essays in the second section focus on the Jews of Germany. Here Meyer writes about the influence of German Jews on Jews in the United States, comparing the historical experience of the two communities. These essays also address the intersection of religion, scholarship, and history with politics in nineteenth- and twentiety-century Germany. A third section deals with the European Reform movement, which brought a liberal Judaism to the majority of German Jews. Here Meyer likewise presents a fresh perspective on the way the Reform movement was viewed by those outside of it, especially by non-Jews. The essays in the final section explore Judaism in the United States. In particular, they show how reform Judaism and Zionism were able to recondle their initial differences. Judaism within Modernity is an impressive collection of essays written by a renowned Jewish historian and will be a standard volume for students and scholars of the modern Jewish experience.

"A Companion to Digital Literary Studies" offers an extensive examination of how new technologies are changing the nature of literary studies. Through a series of specially commissioned articles by leading scholars, theorists, and writers creating born-digital literature, the text provides a thorough overview of the intersections between computing, literary studies, and new media. It takes a highly interdisciplinary perspective in its examination of scholarly editing and literary criticism, interactive fiction and gaming, multimedia and immersive environments, and born digital literature.

"This Companion" is the only comprehensive collection of seminal works available to meet the needs of this growing area of inquiry. It is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand, use, or create digital literature.

The technical problems confronting different societies and periods, and the measures taken to solve them, form the concern of this annual collection of essays. It deals with the history of technical discovery and change, and explores the relationship of technology to other aspects of life - social, cultural and economic. The book shows how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it occurred.

Using the 1893 and the 1993 World's Parliament of Religions as a focus for probing intercultural religious communication, this study describes more than a century's preoccupation with a provocative phenomenon called universal religion. It presents 12 enduringly significant speakers whose rhetorical effectiveness, combined with their concepts of universal religion, forge an intercultural synthesis combining Eastern religions and Western thought. This volume will interest scholars and students of both religion and rhetoric as well as the general public. It provides a deeper appreciation of such well-known communicators as Emerson and Thoreau, as well as an introduction to the significant contributions of thinkers such as Roy, Sen, Besant, Vivekananda, Tagore, Radhakrishnan, Gandhi, Jenkins Lloyd Jones, John Haynes Holmes, and Preston Bradley. The 1893 Parliament of The World's Religions and the 1993 World's Parliament of Religions are described by contemporary historians as watersheds in human history and turning points in humanity's spiritual progress. These parliaments are the two occasions when the world's religious leaders have gathered, and the events symbolize a growing preoccupation with an emerging universal religion evolving through interreligious communication. The 1893 Parliament is recognized for commencing interreligious dialogue and encouraging comparative religion; the 1993 Parliament is remembered for networking the worldwide religious and spiritual communities. This volume describes a little-known but highly important minority movement in which a comparatively few communicators in India and the United States have progessively synthesized Eastern religion and Western thought. The work examines these speakers and their speeches by placing this distinctive rhetorical discourse within their historical times and cultural contexts; specifying the concepts about universal religion proposed by each speaker; and indicating their contributions to an emerging and evolving religion that is universal.

"The claim 'I'm straight' is the psychosexual analogue of 'The check is in the mail': if you need to say it, your credit or creditability is already in doubt." So begins Paul Morrison's dazzling polemic, which takes as its point of departure Foucault's famous remark that sex is "the explanation for everything."

Combining psychoanalytic, literary, and queer theory, The Explanation for Everything seeks to account for the explanatory power attributed to homosexuality, and its relationship to compulsory heterosexuality. In the process, Morrison presents a scathing indictment of psychoanalysis and its impact on the study of sexuality. In bold but graceful leaps, Morrison applies his critique to a diversity of examples: subjectivity in Oscar Wilde, the cultural construction and reception of AIDS, the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, the practice of bodybuilding, and the contemporary reception of the sexual politics of fascism.

Analytical, witty and astute, The Explanation for Everything will challenge and amuse, establishing Paul Morrison as one of our most exciting cultural critics.

This book examines the new ways of working and their impact on employees' well-being and performance. It concentrates on job demands and flexible work emanating from current economic and organizational change, and assesses impact on workers' health and performance. The development of issues such as globalization, rapid technological advances, new management practices, organizational changes and new job skills are addressed. This book gives an overview and discusses the potential negative and positive effects of such new job demands and new forms of work.

This volume pays tribute to the formidable legacy of Hena Maes-Jelinek (1929-2008), a pioneering postcolonial scholar who was a professor at the University of Liege, in Belgium. Along with a few moving and affectionate pieces retracing the life and career of this remarkable and deeply human intellectual figure, the collection contains poems, short fiction, and metafiction. The bulk of the book consists of contributions on various areas of postcolonial literature, including the work of Wilson Harris, the ground-breaking writer to whom Hena Maes-Jelinek devoted much of her career. Other writers treated include Ben Okri, Leone Ross, Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Patrick White, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Dan Jacobson, Joseph Conrad, and Eslanda Goode Robeson. Caryl Phillips revisits his earlier reflections on the 'European tribe'. There are wide-ranging essays analysing consanguineous authors, on such topics as Caribbean treatments of the Jewish Diaspora, Swiss-Caribbean authors, the contemporary Australian short story and the Asian connection, and 'habitation' in Australian fiction, as well as a searching examination of the socio-political fallout from the scandal of Australia's 'Stolen Generations'. Contributors are: Gordon Collier, Tim Cribb, Fred D'Aguiar, Geoffrey V. Davis, Jeanne Delbaere, Marc Delrez, Jean-Pierre Durix, Wilson Harris, Dominique Hecq, Marie Herbillon, Louis James, Karen King-Aribisala, Benedicte Ledent, Christine Levecq, Alecia McKenzie, Carine Mardorossian, Peter H. Marsden, Alistair Niven, Annalisa Oboe, Britta Olinder, Christine Pagnoulle, Caryl Phillips, Lawrence Scott, Stephanos Stephanides, Klaus Stuckert, Peter O. Stummer, Petra Tournay-Theodotou, Daria Tunca, Cynthia vanden Driesen, Janet Wilson.

"Cultural Theory: An Introduction" is a concise, accessible introduction to a complex field. Philip Smith provides a balanced, wide-ranging overview of contemporary cultural theory, covering the major thinkers and key concepts that have appeared and developed over the last century. Assuming no specialist knowledge on the part of the reader, Smith deals with some of the most sophisticated issues in contemporary social thought. Coverage includes fields such as symbolic interactionism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis, and leading thinkers like Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas, and Giddens. The book has an abundance of special features for students, with summaries, biographical notes, suggestions for further reading, and extensive cross-referencing. For any student or scholar with an interest in the theoretical study of culture and society, this book is an ideal guide.

In the first half of the nineteenth century most leading French Romantic authors wrote travel books. French Romantic Travel Writing is the first study exclusively devoted to surveying the travelogues they produced and the reasons for, and significance of, this trend. Whilst 'the journey' was one of Romanticism's central images, suggesting as it did a dynamic, expanding, and evermore complex world in which artists' lives were increasingly experienced as wanderings and endless quests, the fashion for Romantic travel books was more marked in France than in Germany or England. Chateaubriand, Stael, Stendhal, Nodier, Hugo, Lamartine, Nerval, Gautier, Sand, Custine, Quinet, Merimee, Dumas, and Tristan all wrote one or more travelogues, including at least four masterpieces-Hugo's Le Rhin (1842), Nerval's Voyage en Orient (1851), and Stendhal's two Rome, Naples et Florence (1817 and 1826). The book explores the reasons for this difference from England and Germany. These include French foreign and cultural policies, as well as the particular needs of Parisian publishers. It puts forward the case for the collective achievement of these Romantic travel books, compared to those of most later writers in nineteenth-century France. A distinctive feature of the survey is its belief in the value of concentrating on the text of these books as published by their authors, as opposed to manuscript and peripheral material.