From outlawing bowling in colonial America to regulating violent video games and synthetic drugs today, Mark Stein's Vice Capades examines the nation's relationship with the actions, attitudes, and antics that have defined morality. This humorous and quirky history reveals that our views of vice are formed not merely by morals but by power. While laws against nude dancing have become less restrictive, laws restricting sexual harassment have been enacted. While marijuana is no longer illegal everywhere, restrictive laws have been enacted against cigarettes. Stein examines this nation's inconsistent moral compass and how the powers-that-be in each era determine what is or is not deemed a vice. From the Puritans who founded Massachusetts with unyielding, biblically based laws to those modern purveyors of morality who currently campaign against video game violence, Vice Capades looks at the American history we all know from a fresh and exciting perspective and shows how vice has shaped our nation, sometimes without us even knowing it.

Mark Stein is a playwright and screenwriter. His plays have been performed off-Broadway and at theaters throughout the country. His films include Housesitter, with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn. He has taught at American University and Catholic University.

CAPTURE THE ONBOARDING MARGIN WITH THE "4 PILLARS" OF SUCCESSFUL ONBOARDING "Bringing a new employee on board can be the start of a rewarding relationship or the beginning of a missed opportunity. This smart book can teach you how to make the most of each employee's career starting on Day One." --Daniel H. Pink, author of DRIVE and A WHOLE NEW MIND "This book has the potential to change the way that we think about new hires and what is possible from the group. With the instruction provided, you can migrate onboarding from the administrative to the strategic, and deliver far greater value for your enterprise." --Betty Thompson, Senior Vice President, People Services, Booz Allen Hamilton "People are a company's most important asset. Successful Onboarding makes the case for the importance of effective onboarding in setting up employees for success." --Stephen Squeri, Group President, Global Services and Chief Information Officer, American Express Company "Hiring employees is the biggest investment most organizations make. Understanding how to make sure that investment sticks is what onboarding is about, and Successful Onboarding shows you how to do it right." --Peter Cappelli, Director of the Center for Human Resources, The Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania; author of TALENT ON DEMAND Fact: 1/3rd of all external hires are no longer with the organization after 2 years. What can you do about it? In a word: onboarding; although poorly understood, subject to narrow definitions, and with limited best practice understanding or management rigor. Consultants Mark Stein & Lilith Christiansen have worked with leading companies on it, and they've synthesized their work into a ready to use system. With Successful Onboarding, you can: Rewrite the employer-employee compact--to everyone's advantage Reduce time-to-productivity--while increasing the level of productivity and retention Make improvements at the systemic level--with gains realized with regularity * Enroll new hires in your company's strategic plan Successful Onboarding provides a business case, a systemic approach to the entire process, and instructive inside stories from Apple, Starbucks, Netflix, Microsoft, Baird, Bank of America, John Deere, and dozens of other industry leaders. "This is a terrific resource for anyone wanting to create an effective onboarding program." --Mindy Moye, Ph.D., Manager Employee Engagement, John Deere "In Successful Onboarding Lilith and Mark demonstrate the financial impact that the onboarding process can have on your organization, and provides a roadmap for improving your return on investment. The book has already changed the way we think about onboarding in our organization." --Andrew Blocher, Chief Financial Officer, Federal Realty Investment Trust "Goodbye old-school orientation and welcome to onboarding. A great reference to tailor your onboarding based on your culture and strategy. This book demonstrates how sound and creative onboarding can prevent a lot of voluntary off-boarding from high performing employees." --Sonia Narang, Director, Leadership & Organization Development, Sony Pictures Entertainment "Every company leader who is serious about delivering results through people should read this book. Successful Onboarding not only gives a roadmap to successful hiring and retention, but also addresses the common pitfalls that lead to adjustment struggles, discouragement and skepticism from new hires. This book rings true to those of us who coach leaders in the onboarding transition." --Kate Ebner, Co-Director, Georgetown University Leadership Coaching Program, Principal, The Nebo Company "This is an important book for business leaders who want to assure employee engagement from Day One! Practical and instru

An effective tool for reading postcolonial con/texts, ideology also provides a matrix to grasp the world, enabling collective political action. This interdisciplinary volume reflects that each position is subject to asymmetrical power relations, with critiques of ideological manifestations occurring in intersecting cultural, social, and political configurations.

The sites from which postcolonial cultural articulations develop and the sites at which they are received have undergone profound transformations within the last decades. This book traces the accelerating emergence of cultural crossovers and overlaps in a global perspective and through a variety of disciplinary approaches. It starts from the premise that after the 'spatial turn' human action and cultural representations can no longer be grasped as firmly located in or clearly demarcated by territorial entities. The collection of essays investigates postcolonial articulations of various genres and media in their spatiality and locatedness while envisaging acts of location as dynamic cultural processes. It explores the ways in which critical spatial thinking can be made productive: Testing the uses and limitations of 'translocation' as an open exploratory model for a critically spatialized postcolonial studies, it covers a wide range of cultural expressions from the anglophone world and beyond - literature, film, TV, photography and other forms of visual art, philosophy, historical memory, and tourism. The extensive introductory chapter charts various facets of spatial thinking from a variety of disciplines, and critically discusses their implications for postcolonial studies. The contributors' essays range from theoretical interventions into the critical routines of postcolonial criticism to case studies of specific cultural texts, objects, and events reflecting temporal and spatial, material and intellectual, physical and spiritual mobility. What emerges is a fascinating survey of the multiple directions postcolonial translocations can take in the future. This book is aimed at students and scholars of postcolonial literary and cultural studies, diaspora studies, migration studies, transnational studies, globalisation studies, critical space studies, urban studies, film studies, media studies, art history, philosophy, history, and anthropology. Contributors: Diana Brydon, Lars Eckstein, Paloma Fresno-Calleja, Lucia Kramer, Gesa Mackenthun, Thomas Martinek, Sandra Meyer, Therese-M. Meyer, Marga Munkelt, Lynda Ng, Claudia Perner, Katharina Rennhak, Gundo Rial y Costas, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein, Silke Stroh, Kathy-Ann Tan, Petra Tournay-Theodotou, Daria Tunca, Jessica Voges, Roland Walter, Dirk Wiemann.

In this fascinating book, Mark Stein examines "black British literature," centering on a body of work created by British-based writers with African, South Asian, or Caribbean cultural backgrounds. Linking black British literature to the bildungsroman genre, this study examines the transformative potential inscribed in and induced by a heterogeneous body of texts. Capitalizing on their plural cultural attachments, these texts portray and purvey the transformation of post-imperial Britain. Stein locates his wide-ranging analysis in both a historical and a literary context. He argues that a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach is essential to understanding post-colonial culture and society. The book relates black British literature to ongoing debates about cultural diversity, and thereby offers a way of reading a highly popular but as yet relatively uncharted field of cultural production. With the collapse of its empire, with large-scale immigration from former colonies, and with ever-increasing cultural diversity, Britain underwent a fundamental makeover in the second half of the twentieth century. This volume cogently argues that black British literature is not only a commentator on and a reflector of this makeover, but that it is simultaneously an agent that is integral to the processes of cultural and social change. Conceptualizing the novel of transformation, this comprehensive study of British black literature provides a compelling analytic framework for charting these processes.

Humour is a key feature, laughter a central element, disrespect a vital textual strategy of postcolonial transcultural practice. Devices such as irony, parody, and subversion, can be subsumed under an interventionist stance and have accordingly received some critical attention. But literary and cultural postcolonial criticism has been marked by a restraint verging on the pious towards the wider significance and functions of laughter. This collection transcends such orthodoxies: laughter can constitute an intervention - but it can also function otherwise. The essays collected here take an interest in the strategic use of what can loosely be termed laughter - in all its manifestations. Examining postcolonial transcultural practice from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, this study seeks to analyse laughter and the postcolonial in their complexity. For the first time, then, this collection gathers a group of international specialists in postcolonial transcultural studies to analyse the functions of laughter, the comic and humour in a wide range of cultural texts. Contributors work on texts from Africa, Asia, Australia, North America, the Caribbean, and Britain, reading work by authors such as Zakes Mda, Timothy Mo, VS Naipaul, and Zadie Smith. This interdisciplinary collection is a contribution to both, postcolonial studies and humour theory.