Culture

When I left my job as cultural economist with the mayor of London, England, and moved to Winnipeg, I was entranced by its creativity and charmed by its welcome.

I was invited to the Winnipeg Arts Council (WAC) Cultural Capital event in 2009 and the mayor’s Luncheon for the Arts in 2010, where I discovered how deeply the arts were woven into the fabric of city life.

I joined the boards of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Video Pool, and Manitobans for the Arts (M4A) and got to know vigorous movers in the Exchange District, such as Arts and Creative Industries Manitoba (ACI), as well as the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, who clearly grasped that alongside all the other reasons for support, there was a sound business case for the arts.

When the election race got under way, several candidates asked for my ideas on “arts policy” – an openness which I hope does not stop when the race is over. I did not respond immediately, because I did not see what I could add to the wealth of ideas which Winnipeg had already produced.

Upon reflection, however, I realised there was a further problem: why are none of these great ideas put into practice? Why is Winnipeg home to such unique institutions as the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Manitoba Museum, its concert halls and its theatres, cashing in on the benefits these bring to our citizens and businesses, while it flatlines spending on them?

That is the reason for this paper.

How does algorithmic information processing affect the meaning of the word culture, and, by extension, cultural practice? We address this question by focusing on the Netflix Prize (2006–2009), a contest offering US$1m to the first individual or team to boost the accuracy of the company’s existing movie recommendation system by 10%. Although billed as a technical challenge intended for engineers, we argue that the Netflix Prize was equally an effort to reinterpret the meaning of culture in ways that overlapped with, but also diverged in important respects from, the three dominant senses of the term assayed by Raymond Williams. Thus, this essay explores the conceptual and semantic work required to render algorithmic information processing systems legible as forms of cultural decision making. It also then represents an effort to add depth and dimension to the concept of “algorithmic culture.”

Although the Trio (GLOBE, Hofstede and Trompenaars) have at times engaged in intense criticisms of each others’ research they have much in common. Their differences are, as Earley states, only “minor variants on one another’s styles” (2006: 923). The postulates they share include - national cultures are: (1) values - defined as invariant transituational preferences; (2) universally shared by the population of a country; (3) coherent (contradiction-free/integrated); (4) the fundamental cause/source of behavior and artefacts; (5) stable; (6) identifiable from the mean scores of answers to self-response survey questions from a minute portion of a national population; (7) depicable in league (ranking) tables (indices) of  ‘dimensions’ (quantifiable comparators). Each of the seven postulates but 6 and 7 especially, have been critiqued Space does not permit a review of the commentary on all of the postulates. Instead, the paper considers some aspects which have received comparatively less attention in the management literature. These are: downward conflation (the belief or assumption that the macro (in this instance the national) is replicated at, indeed creates, lower hierarchical levels (organization, individuals, or whatever). More specifically it discusses a crucial methodological error (the ecological fallacy) which characterises an extraordinarily large number of papers which purport to apply the findings of one or other aspect of the Trio’s work. This section also considers the cultural generalizations of Samuel P. Huntington who shares Postulates 1 to 5 with the Trio. However, his primary focus is on the populations in or from multinational/regional locations which he calls “civilizations”. Although the trio also make general claims about such large populations, they do so to a lesser extent than Huntington. The paper then considers the implied, and sometimes explicit assumption, in the Trio’s work and the work of their followers that national cultures are coherent, that is, integrated and non-contradictory. National culture cannot logically be said to have uniform and enduring national “consequences” without that invalid assumption. Following that it discusses the assumption of the fixity of national boundaries within which unique and stable national cultures are said to be located. Finally, it considers a misleading, representation of intra-national variation – the view that countries are composites of multiple mono-cultures. The discussion of these matters is preceded by a commentary on the notion of culture employed by the Trio. A brief overview of the ‘dimensions’ employed by the Trio to depict ‘national cultures’ or national cultural differences is provided in an annex located at the end of this paper.

Two questions were the focus of this dialogue, what came into a culture
researcher’s mind when the theme ‘identifying
culture’ was raised, and second, what are
‘the implications for culture research in the
future’. Issues such as the limitations of using
the anthropological concept of culture on
organizational culture, cultures as social constructions,
cultures as organizational identities,
the influence of recipient cultures on
multinational companies’ organizational culture
through recontextualization, and the
influence of national culture and administrative
heritage on organizations and culture
scholars themselves are introduced in the
dialogue. Implications for culture research in
the future are given serious thought by these
culture scholars formulating encouraging
advice to those who aspire to continue
research in an area that has advanced from a
sticky swamp populated by extinct or unruly
wild animals (see e.g. Roberts, 1970; Adler,
1983; Boyacigiller and Adler, 1991; Redding,
1994) to a multi-disciplinary research
field, rich with empirical findings, focusing
on theory development and coping with the
complexities and intricacies of contemporary
organizations and human life.

RESUMEN:
El Movimiento de los Indignados (15-M) y la globalización de la protesta
El movimiento de los indignados se originó en las redes del ciberespacio, y se le ha visto crecer en las calles de Europa, Estados Unidos, Asia y América Latina. Zygmunt Bauman señala algunos rasgos que caracterizan al movimiento de los indignados.
Las consignas de la rebelión y protesta pacífica tuvieron su versión española en los acampados de la Puerta del Sol (Madrid). Surge así la conocida manifestación del 15-M, días antes de las elecciones municipales en todo el país.

En su estado actual la indignación es un insumo para cineastas, literatos y artistas de la sociedad de la información y del espectáculo, así como para activistas políticos y movimientos anárquicos.
Los principios del movimiento de los indignados son el apartidismo es decir, el no reconocimiento de ninguna filiación a partidos políticos o sindicatos, el pacifismo, la horizontalidad y la transparencia. No aceptan ningún tipo de representatividad. Se constata la desaparición de los medios de representación directa. Se organizan a través de asambleas populares abiertas, celebradas en plazas o parques y está estructurado en diversas comisiones (Legal, Comunicación, Acción) y grupos de trabajo (Cultura, Educación, Política, Economía, Medio Ambiente, Migración y Movilidad). Nada reconocible en los viejos conceptos de la ciencia política o la sociología, más bien se trata de un movimiento espontáneo.
Dr. ADOLFO VÁSQUEZ ROCCA

Between 1917 and 1922, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas was occupied by a unique mix of soldiers, war dissenters, radical labor organizers, foreign-born radicals, Black militants, and Mexican revolutionaries. One prominent figure was Ricardo Flores Magòn, one of the central theorists and agitators of the Mexican Revolution, who had offered one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of U.S. imperialism. This article observes how incarcerated revolutionaries, such as Magòn, along with working class soldiers coordinated night schools, produced their own newspaper, maintained a radical library, led marches, initiated strikes, and continued agitating and educating one another in the prison. Situated during the Mexican Revolution, the First World War, and the Bolshevik Revolution, the article explains how the U.S. produced a new security infrastructure to monitor, infiltrate, and suppress dissent. As Leavenworth became a central node of this infrastructure, it argues that the penitentiary offered a microcosm of antiracist and anti-capitalist struggles in the period. Drawing from prison records, prisoner book collections, correspondence, memoirs, open letters, and federal surveillance records, it explores the unanticipated alliances and political struggles that arose from this unique convergence space. It analyzes the insurgent prisoners’ discourses around racism, security, and class as they fought, taught, and learned from one another. It subsequently describes how a unique form of radical internationalism was theorized within and against this emergent security infrastructure.

Baseando-se em autores como Andreas Huyssen, Michael Pollak e Lúcia Santaella, este artigo tem como objetivo analisar a produção de sentido e a resignificação da memória provocados pela tecnologia digital. O portal hipermediático “Brasil Memória das Artes” é um projeto da Fundação Nacional de Artes, que tem como principal objetivo contribuir na disseminação da memória cultural dos brasileiros. Utilizando-se de diversos recursos midiáticos, o espaço oferece um grande acervo de áudios, vídeos, fotografias e textos que ajudam na composição de cada tema.

Edited by Nancy Duxbury, Will Garrett-Petts and David MacLennan
Series: Routledge Advances in Research Methods
This edited collection provides an introduction to the emerging and interdisciplinary field of cultural mapping, making a case for and demonstrating the spatial turn emerging in many related areas of critical, social and artistic research. The contributors explore innovative ways to encourage artistic intervention and public participation in cultural mapping—recognizing that artistic practices and public involvement introduce a range of challenges spanning various phases of the research process, from the gathering of data, to interpreting data, to presenting “findings” to a broad range of audiences. Toward these ends, the collection explores the international scope of conventional and alternative approaches to mapping cultures and communities.
November 2014 | Hb: 978-1-138-82186-6:

Various writers have commented on the post-apartheid resilience of discourses on ‘tradition’ and ethnic identity in South Africa, previously thought to be anomalies of apartheid, that were bound to disappear under a democratic dispensation. Researchers showed that ‘traditional’ institutions like chiefs  did not merely survive the democratisation of South African politics but were actually growing in popularity. What are the driving forces behind the new salience of tradition and tribalism in South Africa? Is the re-traditionalisation merely a resonance of decades of state reinforcement of traditional leadership and customary law or is it the manifestation of a locally driven post-apartheid search for identity? Or did the institution of chiefs only gain prominence in the light of the inability of local government to deliver on its development promises?
This paper aims to explore the questions posed above with specific reference to ethnographic material collected from the Maputaland region of northern KwaZulu-Natal. The ethnography flows from research I did in the Ubombo and Ingwavuma magisterial districts between May 2000 and August 2001. It focuses on the land claim initiated by the Zikhali chief and the establishment of a game reserve by the Mabaso Traditional Authority Council. I argue that much of the supposed ‘re-traditionalisation’  drive in the region was due to the lucrative opportunities that development ensured for ‘real’ community representatives. My emphasis is on the ways in which the two Traditional Authorities utilised discourses on ethnicity and ‘tradition’ to legitimise their position vis-à-vis the developers as representatives of whole communities.

There is a long tradition in which “phatic” forms of interaction are seen as (and characterized by) relatively low levels of “information” and “meaning”. Yet, observations on social media interaction patterns show an amazing density of such phatic interactions, in which signs are shared and circulated without an a priori determination of the meaning. We address the issue of “virality” in this paper: the astonishing speed and scope with which often “empty” (i.e. not a priori determined) signs circulate on the internet. We address “memes” – signs that have gone viral on the Internet – as cases in point. Virality as a sociolinguistic phenomenon raises specific issues about signs, meanings and functions, prompting a shift from “meaning” to “effect”. This effect, we can see, is conviviality: the production of a social-structuring level of engagement in loose, temporal and elastic collectives operating in social media environments.