This book represents a distinctive approach to cultural analysis, using multi-dimensional methods for addressing issues of public interest. The approach, which deploys Jim McGuigan’s original concept of the cultural public sphere, is demonstrated in several case studies, including:
celebrity death
festivals and urban regeneration
‘race’ and multicultural controversy
popular television (for instance, Little Britain and The Apprentice)
social significance of the all-purpose mobile communication device in a privatised and individualised way of life
riskiness and uncertainty at both the levels of environmental politics and working life in the creative and media industries These various case studies are analysed with regard to the dialectic of production and consumption in cultural circulation and situated in relation to major issues of social change. The book stresses the impact of neoliberalism throughout the world since the 1970s and the formation of a cool-capitalist culture that has colonised everyday life around much of the globe. In effect, this is a radical intervention in the research agendas and conceptual development of cultural policy studies, cultural sociology and, more generally, in the broad field known as ‘cultural studies’. It offers challenging theoretical arguments that are substantiated with concrete evidence of cultural and social processes.