Brand value: how affective labour helps create brands

One way brands create value is by engaging the capacity of cultural labourers to animate affective connections with consumers. Brands assemble social spaces that harness the communicative capacities of cultural actors. A mode of branding that works by managing an open-ended social process depends on affective labour. Affective labour involves not only the capacity of individuals to produce specific meanings and feelings, but also the open-endedly social capacity to stimulate and channel attention and recognition. This affective labour does not always depend on making particular "authentic" representations, but on facilitating a general circulation of meaning. By investing in social spaces and relations corporate brands engage popular musicians in new forms of labour. This article examines the participation of popular musicians in branding programmes run in Australia by corporate brands between 2005 and 2010. I examine the accounts of musicians and managers who participate in these programmes to consider how they make their participation in social relations that create brand value meaningful. They employ a variety of practices: identifying with brands, endorsing brands' claims of socially responsible investment in culture, and distancing themselves from their own participation in branded space

Wrong-Site Procedures: Preventable Never Events that Continue to Happen

A comprehensive discussion of “never events” or preventable and grievously shocking medical errors that may result in serious morbidity and mortality is incomplete without a thorough analysis of wrong‐site procedures (WSP). These occurrences are often due to multiple, simultaneous failures in team processes and communication. Despite being relatively rare, wrong‐site surgery can be devastating to all parties involved, from patients and families to healthcare workers and hospitals. This chapter provides a general overview of the topic in the context of clinical vignettes discussing specific examples of WSP. The goal of this work is to educate the reader about risk factors and preventive strategies pertinent to WSP, with the hope of propagating the knowledge required to eliminate these “never events.” To that end, the chapter discusses pitfalls in current surgical practice that may contribute to critical safety breakdowns and emphasizes the need for multiple overlapping measures designed to improve patient safety. Furthermore, updated definitions regarding WSP are included in order to better characterize the different types of WSP. Most importantly, this chapter presents evidence‐based support for the current strategies to prevent wrong‐site events. A summary of selected recent wrong‐site occurrences is also provided as a reference for researchers in this important area of patient safety

'Excellence' and exclusion:the individual costs of institutional competitiveness

A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom’s ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities’ response to government demands for research auditability. In this paper, we consider the casualties of what Henry Giroux (2014) calls “neoliberalism’s war on higher education” or more precisely the deleterious consequences of non-participation in the REF. We also discuss the ways with which higher education’s competition fetish, embodied within the REF, affects the instrumentalization of academic research and the diminution of academic freedom, autonomy and criticality

Metrics for optimising the multi-dimensional value of resources recovered from waste in a circular economy: A critical review

© 2017 The Authors - Established assessment methods focusing on resource recovery from waste within a circular economy context consider few or even a single domain/s of value, i.e. environmental, economic, social and technical domains. This partial approach often delivers misleading messages for policy- and decision-makers. It fails to accurately represent systems complexity, and obscures impacts, trade-offs and problem shifting that resource recovery processes or systems intended to promote circular economy may cause. Here, we challenge such partial approaches by critically reviewing the existing suite of environmental, economic, social and technical metrics that have been regularly observed and used in waste management and resource recovery systems' assessment studies, upstream and downstream of the point where waste is generated. We assess the potential of those metrics to evaluate ‘complex value’ of materials, components and products, i.e., the holistic sum of their environmental, economic, social and technical benefits and impacts across the system. Findings suggest that the way resource recovery systems are assessed and evaluated require simplicity, yet must retain a suitable minimum level of detail across all domains of value, which is pivotal for enabling sound decision-making processes. Criteria for defining a suitable set of metrics for assessing resource recovery from waste require them to be simple, transparent and easy to measure, and be both system- and stakeholder-specific. Future developments must focus on providing a framework for the selection of metrics that accurately describe (or at least reliably proxy for) benefits and impacts across all domains of value, enabling effective and transparent analysis of resource recovery form waste in circular economy systems.We gratefully acknowledge support of the UK Natural Environ-ment Research Council (NERC) and the UK Economic and SocialResearch Council (ESRC) who funded this work in the context of‘Complex Value Optimisation for Resource Recovery’(CVORR)project (Grant No. NE/L014149/1)

Auguste Comte and the religion of humanity

grantor: University of TorontoThe thesis aims to re-think the totalisation attempted by Auguste Comte, with particular attention to the post-theistic religious project taken to be its animating centre. Comte's work needs to be understood against the background, I argue, not only of its immediate context (the exigencies of reconstruction in post-Revolutionary France) but also of a longer term Western project to reconcile faith and reason. In the transposed, post-Baconian, terms of Comtean positivism, reason is rendered in terms of science, while faith focuses on Humanity as the 'positive' successor to God. Theology, demystified, is replaced by sociology, a crowning science whose 'epistemological ' object is 'demonstrated' to be the proper object of ' worship' for a Humanity finally entering its mature phase of development. An interrogation of Comte's thought in such terms, I suggest, affords a vantage point from which to examine the intellectual underpinnings of faith in the collective human subject as a progressive and non-nihilistic response to the 'death of God'. To that end, it facilitates a non-sterile 'left-wing' engagement with French post-structuralism, by highlighting a complex of issues concerning the relation between social being, (transformist) politics and the transcendent which have persisted in French social theory even after the deconstructive turn. The analysis proceeds through an examination of Comte's thought at three levels: (1) the overall logic of Comte's developing system of systems; (2) his sociological thematisation of the contemporary 'religious' crisis of industrialism; and (3) Comte's idea of Humanity as a Great Being evolving towards moral-affective perfection. The internal contradictions of this whole effort are identified and anatomised. Two conclusions are drawn: first, that Comte, who sought to replace God by a divinised idea of the human collectivity, is, unwittingly, the first thinker of the 'end of the social'; and secondly that by making explicit, and taking cognizance of, the 'second death of God' in which Comte's religious project founders, recent French thinkers like Althusser, Baudrillard and Nancy have revived, in a critically renewed theoretical and ideological register, a form of theorising which might address, in a post-theistic way, the transcendent dimension of a socially engaged politics.Ph.D

The Passion of the Social: Reflections on the Seattle Rave Killings

Andrew Wernick is a sociologist and historian of ideas as well as a cultural theorist and jazz pianist. He is the founder and director of Trent Univesity’s Institute for the Study of Popular Culture as well as the current chair of Trent’s Cultural Studies Department. His interests are in media theory and advertising and the place of religion in postmodernity, and in the notion of time in contemporary culture. He is the author of Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology, and Symbolic Expression (Sage, 1991), Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity: the Post-theistic Project of French Social Theory, (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and co-editor ofShadow of Spirit: Religion and Postmodernism (Routledge, 1992) and Images of Ageing(Routledge, 1995).Arthur Kroker, Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and TheoryFacultyUnreviewe