The Culture of Speed
The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy
John Tomlinson
2007 Sage
Publisher’s Description: Is the pace of life accelerating? If so, what are the cultural, social, personal and economic consequences? This stimulating and accessible book examines how speed emerged as a cultural issue during industrial modernity. The rise of capitalist society and the shift to urban settings was rapid and tumultuous and was defined by the belief in ‘progress’. The first obstacle faced by societies that were starting to ’speed up’ was how to regulate and control the process. The attempt to regulate the acceleration of life created a new set of problems, namely the way in which speed escapes regulation and rebels against controls. This pattern of acceleration and control subsequently defined debates about the cultural effects of acceleration. However, in the 21st century ‘immediacy’, the combination of fast capitalism and the saturation of the everyday by media technologies, has emerged as the core feature of control. This coming of immediacy will inexorably change how we think about and experience media culture, consumption practices, and the core of our cultural and moral values.
Incisive and richly illustrated, this eye-opening account of speed and culture provides an original, essential guide to one of the central features of contemporary culture and personal life.
Shaping the Day
Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300-1800
Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift
2009 Oxford University Press
Publisher’s Description: Timekeeping is an essential activity in the modern world, and we take it for granted that our lives are shaped by the hours of the day. Yet what seems so ordinary today is actually the extraordinary outcome of centuries of technical innovation and circulation of ideas about time.
Shaping the Day is a pathbreaking study of the practice of timekeeping in England and Wales between 1300 and 1800. Drawing on many unique historical sources, ranging from personal diaries to housekeeping manuals, Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift illustrate how a particular kind of common sense about time came into being, and how it developed during this period.
Many remarkable figures make their appearance, ranging from the well-known, such as Edmund Halley, Samuel Pepys, and John Harrison, who solved the problem of longitude, to less familiar characters, including sailors, gamblers, and burglars.
Overturning many common perceptions of the past-for example, that clock time and the industrial revolution were intimately related-this unique historical study will engage all readers interested in how ‘telling the time’ has come to dominate our way of life.
The Labour of Leisure
The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time
Chris Rojek
2009 Sage
Publisher’s Description: Leisure has always been associated with freedom, choice and flexibility. The week-end and vacations were celebrated as ‘time off’. In his compelling new book, Chris Rojek turns this shibboleth on its head to demonstrate how leisure has become a form of labour.
Modern men and women are required to be competent, relevant and credible, not only in the work place but with their mates, children, parents and communities. The requisite empathy for others, socially acceptable values and correct forms of self-presentation demand work. Much of this work is concentrated in non-work activity, compromising traditional connections between leisure and freedom. Ranging widely from an analysis of the inflated aspirations of the leisure society thesis to the culture of deception that permeates leisure choice, Rojek shows how leisure is inextricably linked to emotional labour and intelligence. It is now a school for life.
In challenging the orthodox understandings of freedom and free time, The Labour of Leisure sets out an indispensable new approach to the meaning of leisure.
A Journey Through Ruins
A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London
Patrick Wright
2009 Oxford University Press
Publisher’s Description: A unique evocation of Britain at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s rule, A Journey Through Ruins views the transformation of the country through the unexpected prism of every day life in East London.
Written at a time when the looming but still unfinished tower of Canary Wharf was still wrapped in protective blue plastic, its cast of characters includes council tenants trapped in disintegrating tower blocks, depressed gentrifiers worrying about negative equity, metal detectorists, sharp-eyed estate agents and management consultants, and even Prince Charles.
Cutting through the teeming surface of London, it investigates a number of wider themes: the rise and dramatic fall of council housing, the coming of privatization, the changing memory of the Second World War, once used to justify post-war urban development and reform but now seen as a sacrifice betrayed. Written half a century after the blitz, the book reviews the rise and fall of the London of the post-war settlement. It remains one of the very best accounts of what it was like to live through the Thatcher years.
On Living in an Old Country
Patrick Wright
On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (Updated Edition)
2009 Oxford University Press
Publisher’s Description: The hulk of Henry VIII’s flagship is raised from the seabed in an operation that captures the mind of the nation. The leader of the Labour party wears an informal coat at the Cenotaph and provokes a national scandal. An elderly lady whose ancient house is scheduled for demolition dismantles it, piece by piece, and moves it across the country…
On Living in an Old Country probes such apparently fleeting and disconnected events in order to reveal how history lives on, not just in the specialist knowledge of historians, archaeologists and curators, but as a tangible presence permeating everyday life and shaping our sense of identity. It investigates the rise of ‘heritage’ as expressed in literature, advertising, and political rhetoric as well as in popular television dramas, conservation campaigns, and urban development schemes. It explores the relations between the idea of an imperilled national identity and the transformation of British society introduced by Margaret Thatcher.
This is the book that put ‘heritage’ on the map, opening one of the defining cultural and political debates of our time, and showing why conservation is a subject of such broad significance in contemporary Britain. This new edition includes an extensive new preface and interview material reflecting on the ongoing debate about the heritage industry which the book helped to kick-start.
After Modernity
Rodney Harrison and John Schofield
After Modernity: Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary Past
2010 Oxford University Press
Publisher’s Description: This book summarizes archaeological approaches to the contemporary past, and suggests a new agenda for the archaeology of late modern societies. The principal focus is the archaeology of developed, de-industrialized societies during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. This period encompasses the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the ‘internet age’, a period which sits firmly within what we would recognize to be a period of ‘lived and living memory’. Rodney Harrison and John Schofield explore how archaeology can inform the study of this time period and the study of our own society through detailed case studies and an in-depth summary of the existing literature. Their book draws together cross-disciplinary perspectives on contemporary material culture studies, and develops a new agenda for the study of the materiality of late modern societies.
Critical Social Theory and the End of Work
Edward Granter
Critical Social Theory and the End of Work
2009 Ashgate
Publisher’s Description: Critical Social Theory and the End of Work examines the development and sociological significance of the idea that work is being eliminated through the use of advanced production technology. Granter’s engagement with the work of key American and European figures such as Marx, Marcuse, Gorz, Habermas and Negri, focuses his arguments for the abolition of labour as a response to the current socio-historical changes affecting our work ethic and consumer ideology. By combining history of ideas with social theory, this book considers how the ‘end of work’ thesis has developed and has been critically implemented in the analysis of modern society. His work will appeal to scholars of sociology, history of ideas, social and cultural theory as well as those working in the fields of critical management and sociology of work.
The Ethnography of Time
Matthew Hodges
The Ethnography of Time: Living with History in Modern Rural France
2008 Mellen Press
Publisher’s Description: This book advances an anthropological understanding of time and history. Drawing on the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and the work of anthropologists Alfred Gell and Nancy Munn, the author presents the carefully documented case for the importance of time studies to anthropology.
The argument is channelled through an ethnographic account of the rapid and far-reaching changes affecting life in a Mediterranean French village. These are driven by the regional political economy, and heritage tourism in particular; but in an original analysis of such processes of modernization, the book traces their impact in terms of the lived experience of time.
Experiences of tradition, epoch, cultural rupture and remembrance, mythologizations of history, and the local “politics of time”, are brought clearly into focus; as is the place of heritage tourism, local history, and kinship in mediating disjuncture. A sensitive portrait emerges of how people inhabit the uncertain timescapes of modernity, in a wide range of everyday scenarios.
The book develops the notion of “living traditions” as a dynamic form of cultural continuity; and fashions a layered, integrated model of experience, time and history informed by Deleuze’s philosophy of flux. Discussion extends to pragmatist and phenomenological theories of time, and the work of philosophers such as MacIntyre. Generously illustrated, the book is notable for illuminating this complex field in clear, evocative language.
Bringing in the Future
William Ascher
Bringing in the Future: Strategies for Farsightedness and Sustainability in Developing Countries
2009 University of Chicago Press
Publisher’s Description: Humans are plagued by shortsighted thinking, preferring to put off work on complex, deep-seated, or difficult problems in favor of quick-fix solutions to immediate needs. When short-term thinking is applied to economic development, especially in fragile nations, the results—corruption, waste, and faulty planning—are often disastrous. In Bringing in the Future, William Ascher draws on the latest research from psychology, economics, institutional design, and legal theory to suggest strategies to overcome powerful obstacles to long-term planning in developing countries. Drawing on cases from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Ascher applies strategies such as the creation and scheduling of tangible and intangible rewards, cognitive exercises to increase the understanding of longer-term consequences, self-restraint mechanisms to protect long-term commitments and enhance credibility, and restructuring policy-making processes to permit greater influence of long-term considerations. Featuring theoretically informed research findings and sound policy examples, this volume will assist policy makers, activists, and scholars seeking to understand how the vagaries of human behavior affect international development.
Contemporary Archaeologies
Cornelius Holtorf and Angela Piccini (eds.)
Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now
2009 Peter Lang Publishing
Publisher’s Description: This book is about the archaeology of the present and the very recent past. Archaeology’s repertoire of questions, procedures, methodologies and terminologies, its material manifestations (protected sites, public museums, archives) and its popular appeals are rooted in modernity. Contemporary archaeologies marry archaeology in the modern world with the archaeology of the modern world. Their strengths lie in a stimulating mix of interdisciplinary practices across academic, public-sector and professional contexts. This book brings together a wide variety of original case-studies, from contemporary theme parks to the bases of Antarctica expeditions, from a rocket engine test site in Australia to Swedish automobile history, from tiger enclosures to the ‘privatisation of experience’, and from a Nevada peace camp to a stretch of gutter in Bristol.
