Pros and Cons: Negotiating Value in Blog Culture

Anatomy of Criticism

@contents: Selected Contents: Acknowledgements Why Fiske Still Matters Henry Jenkins Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular Kevin Glynn, Jonathan Gray and Pamela Wilson Notes on Contributors Preface Chapter 1 The Jeaning of America Chapter 2 Commodities and Culture Chapter 3 Productive Pleasures Chapter 4 Offensive Bodies and Carnival Pleasures Chapter 5 Popular Texts Chapter 6 Popular Discrimination Chapter 7 Politics References Index

Understanding popular culture

We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technical and scientific advance, as well as rapid obsolescence. The key component of a knowledge economy is a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources. We provide evidence drawn from patent data to document an upsurge in knowledge production and show that this expansion is driven by the emergence of new industries. We then review the contentious literature that assesses whether recent technological advances have raised productivity. We examine the debate over whether new forms of work that embody technological change have generated more worker autonomy or greater managerial control. Finally, we assess the distributional consequences of a knowledge-based economy with respect to growing inequality in wages and high-quality jobs.

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The Knowledge Economy

Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature

Introduction - Jenny Kitzinger and Rosaline S Barbour The Challenge and Promise of Focus Groups The Impact of Context on Data - Judith Green and Laura Hart Combining Focus Groups and Interviews - Lynn Michell Telling How it Is Telling How it Feels Are Focus Groups Suitable for 'Sensitive' Topics? - Clare Farquhar with Rita Das How Useful Are Focus Groups in Feminist Research? - Sue Wilkinson Do Focus Groups Facilitate Meaningful Participation in Social Research? - Rachel Baker and Rachel Hinton How Useful Are Focus Groups for Obtaining the Views of Minority Groups? - Lai-Fong Chui and Deborah Knight Are Focus Groups an Appropriate Tool for Studying Organizational Change? - Rosaline S Barbour Can Focus Groups Access Community Views? - Claire Waterton and Brian Wynne Some Issues Arising in the Systematic Analysis of Focus Group Materials - Jane Frankland and Michael Bloor The Analytical Potential of 'Sensitive Moments' in Focus Group Discussions - Jenny Kitzinger and Clare Farquhar Can Focus Groups Be Analyzed as Talk? - Greg Myers and Phil Macnaghten Theorizing Subjects and Subject Matter in Focus Group Research - Sarah Cunningham-Burley, Anne Kerr and Stephen Pavis Afterword - Rosaline S Barbour and Jenny Kitzinger

Pros and Cons: Negotiating Value in Blog Culture

References

Anatomy of Criticism

Understanding popular culture

The Knowledge Economy

Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature

Developing focus group research : politics, theory and practice

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