The Trojan Horse

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The Trojan Horse traces the growth of commercial sponsorship in the public sphere since the 1960s, its growing importance for the arts since 1980 and its spread into areas such as education and health. The authors’ central argument is that the image of sponsorship as corporate benevolence has served to routinize and legitimate the presence of commerce within the public sector. The central metaphor is of such sponsorship as a Trojan Horse helping to facilitate the hollowing out of the public sector by private agencies and private finance. The authors place the study in the context of the more general colonization of the state by private capital and the challenge posed to the dominance of neo-liberal economics by the recent global financial crisis. After considering the passage from patronage to sponsorship and outlining the context of the post-war public sector since 1945, it analyses sponsorship in relation to Thatcherism, enterprise culture and the restructuring of public provision during the 1980s. It goes on to examine the New Labour years, and the ways in which sponsorship has paved the way for the increased use of private-public partnerships and private finance initiatives within the public sector in the UK

The Trojan Horse

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The Trojan Horse traces the growth of commercial sponsorship in the public sphere since the 1960s, its growing importance for the arts since 1980 and its spread into areas such as education and health. The authors’ central argument is that the image of sponsorship as corporate benevolence has served to routinize and legitimate the presence of commerce within the public sector. The central metaphor is of such sponsorship as a Trojan Horse helping to facilitate the hollowing out of the public sector by private agencies and private finance. The authors place the study in the context of the more general colonization of the state by private capital and the challenge posed to the dominance of neo-liberal economics by the recent global financial crisis. After considering the passage from patronage to sponsorship and outlining the context of the post-war public sector since 1945, it analyses sponsorship in relation to Thatcherism, enterprise culture and the restructuring of public provision during the 1980s. It goes on to examine the New Labour years, and the ways in which sponsorship has paved the way for the increased use of private-public partnerships and private finance initiatives within the public sector in the UK

The ‘caged torch procession’: Celebrities, protesters and the 2008 Olympic torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco

Along with the opening and closing ceremonies, one of the major non-sports events associated with the modern Olympic Games is the torch relay. Although initiated in 1936, the relay has been subject to relatively little academic scrutiny. The events of April 2008 however will have cast a long shadow on the practice. This essay focuses primarily on one week (6–13 April) in the press coverage of the 2008 torch relay as the flame made its way from London to Paris in Europe and then to San Francisco in the USA. It discusses the interpretations offered in the mediated coverage about the relay, the Olympic movement, the host city and the locations where the relay was taking place, and critically analyses the role of agencies, both for and against the Olympics, that framed the ensuing debate

News, celebrity, and vortextuality: a study of the media coverage of the Michael Jackson verdict.

This paper examines the transformation of news as a cultural commodity and a social process by the expansion in the range, volume, and circulation speed of media production. It introduces the concept of vortextuality and illustrates the vortextual effect with reference to the coverage of the verdict announcement in the trial of Michael Jackson. The nature of “news” has been transformed by new media technology, the erosion of the division between public and private, and the growth of a celebrity culture. during the last two decades the volume of information in circulation, and the speed of circulation and feedback of information have increased dramatically. These tendencies have given rise to an effect I term vortextuality, whereby major news stories have the power to dominate the news media to such an extent that all attention appears, temporarily, to be directed towards them. Editorials, cartoons, columns, features, phone-ins are all focused on the same issue. As with vortex-based natural phenomena, however, the vortextuality effect is unpredictable and short-lived. This paper illustrates some of the processes of vortextuality at work in the media coverage around the world of the announcement of the verdict in the Michael Jackson trial

Television sport coverage and cultural transformation

Includes bibliographical referencesSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DX219825 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo