Global Culture Industry

"A fascinating set of accounts of the changing role and meaning of selected 'cultural objects'." Area "Their empirical work is thorough and detailed, with each chapter providing a rich description of the history, life, and geography of the cultural object in question." British Journal of Sociology "Scott Lash and Celia Lury reconceptualize our understanding of cultural industries in the context of globalization. By analysing and documenting the shift from representation to objects in contemporary production of meaning, they open new avenues for research on communication and culture: things materialize our imaginary, we communicate through objects. This pathbreaking study will stimulate the intellectual debate for years to come." Manuel Castells, University of Southern California, Los Angeles "Scott Lash and Celia Lury throw down the gauntlet to liberal and Marxist economic and cultural theory. They discover meaning-making at the centre of both production and consumption. Totems rule the marketplace, and popular culture generates, displaces and energizes iconic brands. The circulation of economic value has become a conversation between symbolic things. Deeply researched and theoretically sophisticated, Global Culture Industry is an important book." Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University "By tracing the lives of a series of cultural objects, Lash and Lury analyse with great insight how, in our age of globalization, culture comes to play an ever more central and intense role in economic production. In the process, they revise powerfully our traditional notions of the culture industry." Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire and Multitude