This article draws on work in communication and marketing studies to develop a theory of cultural participation as fundamentally contested, between cultural producers who aim to steer and manage the activity of participants via the brand community ( participation from above) and participants who have the potential to resist and challenge the producers’ direction ( participation from below). It develops this theory empirically with reference to a cultural form in which audience participation plays a central part, professional wrestling. World Wrestling Entertainment aims to direct and contain participation within sanctioned parameters, both online and offline, while fans retain the capacity to develop and voice an effective critique of existing storylines through those same venues. By sampling and examining the key storylines building to World Wrestling Entertainment’s marquee event, Wrestlemania, from 2014 to 2016, I show how the logics of participation from above and below interact, and how, ultimately, the production and reproduction of brand community are fundamentally contested.
This article locates social media management literature in relation to broader shifts in management ideology. While studies of recent management ideology have highlighted its emphasis on the participation and autonomy of labor, they have largely failed to address how similar discourses have developed with respect to the informal ‘digital labor’ of social media users. I argue that the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ has spread from the formal workplace to the internet, and from the employee to the user. More specifically, I carry out a thematic analysis of ‘Web 2.0 manifestoes’ that finds them to be animated by three central ‘frames’: (a) user participation; (b) the pooling together of the contributions arising from that participation via the network; and (c) the resulting transformation of business and society. I conclude by pointing to the persistence of these sorts of ‘normative’ managerial discourses around social media, even with the recent prevalence of more ‘rational’ data-centered discourses.
This article has two analytical objectives: to read Nietzsche’s thought as an instance of the ‘artistic critique of capitalism,’ as theorized by Boltanski and Chiapello; and to connect that reading to illustrative historical examples of left-wing movements on which Nietzsche’s artistic critique exerted an influence. It thus brings into question the orthodox Marxist interpretation (associated primarily with Lukács and Mehring) of Nietzsche as a reactionary apologist for imperialism and capitalism. Certainly, Nietzsche’s political philosophy is explicitly elitist and antidemocratic, and thus in no way mounts a ‘social critique’ of the inegalitarianism and exploitation characteristic of modern class society. However, Nietzsche’s opposition to industrial discipline and standardization and his championing of the struggle against generic alienations align him in a profound way with the liberatory impulse of the artistic critique.
The Black Power movement emerged in the mid‐1960s United States inspired by the victories of the civil rights movement and responding to its limitations. Civil rights mobilization had successfully pressured the federal government to dismantle
de jure
segregation, but was incapable of redressing persistent black ghettoization. Black Power activists sought to combat institutionalized racism characterized by poor‐quality education, a lack of jobs, political marginalization, and containment policing.
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