Landscapes of Capital

Every era has its dominant representations. Just as landscape painters of previous centuries captured and expressed new modes of perceiving history, corporate advertisers now devise the imagined landscapes of global capitalism. Advertising functions as an omnipresent discursive form, publicly assembling and circulating the predominant tropes of our era. This project is based on the premise that corporate advertising’s landscapes help shape our epoch’s imaginative conceptualizations of the spatial relations, the temporal flows, and the cultural geographies that correspond to the emergence of a high-tech global economy. In Landscapes of Capital Robert Goldman and Steven Papson examine how corporate television ads from the last fifteen years have organized predominant images, tropes and narrative representations of a world in transition. The volume takes particular interest in how relations of space, time, speed, capital, technology and globalization are narratively represented in advertising. Goldman and Papson skillfully demonstrate how Capital represents itself at a moment of critical historical transition Ð the passage into high-tech globalization and the crises associated with it. They argue that corporate ads can be read to reveal how Capital represents itself and the world that is being wrought Ð in terms of the signifiers it prefers and the stories it tells.

Business & Money

Papson, Stephen

Goldman, Robert

Marketing & Sales

Polity

Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh (Cultural Icons series)

This book is one of the first to take an in-depth look at how an advertising image works. It situates the Nike swoosh logo in terms of political economy, sociology, culture and semiotics. Nike Culture describes and deconstructs the themes and structures of Nike′s advertising, outlines the contradictions between image and practice, and explores the logic of the sign economy. In addition, by focusing on issues revolving around representations of race, class and gender, the desire for both community and recognition, and the construction of sport as a spiritual enterprise, the book offers insights into the cultural contradictions embedded in sports culture.

Sage Publications Ltd.

In a World of His Own Making

Blue Canary

Sign Wars: Cluttered Landscape of Advertising, The

Television has become so saturated with commercials that it is difficult at times to tell the different images apart, much less remember or care about them. But, on closer look, television commercials can tell us a great deal about the interplay of market forces, contemporary culture, and corporate politics. This book views contemporary ad culture as an ever-accelerating war of meaning. The authors show how corporate symbols or signs vie for attention-span and market share by appropriating and quickly abandoning diverse elements of culture to differentiate products that may be in themselves virtually indistinguishable. The resulting "sign wars" are both a cause and a consequence of a media culture that is cynical and jaded, but striving for authenticity. Including more than 100 illustrations and numerous examples from recent campaigns, this book provides a critical review of the culture of advertising. It exposes the contradictions that stem from turning culture into a commodity, and illuminates the impact of television commercials on the way we see and understand the world around us.

Goldman, Robert L.

The Guilford Press

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Books by Papson, Stephen