Branding the Games: Commercialism and the Olympic City

This chapter examines the role of branding and sponsorship in the Olympic games - with particular reference to the urban. The chapter identifies tensions between Olympic values, branding activities and a projected legacy. The chapter offers a social-theoretical account of the Olympic brand to analyisis on :London2012. It is a contributiuon to wider analysis in a book drawing upon historical, cultural, economic and socio-demographic perspectives. Olympic Cities examines the role of London hosting the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games as a means to promote urban regeneration and social renewal in East London

’Alright on the night?' Envisioning a ’night time economy’ in the Thames Gateway,

Providing a comprehensive overview and critique of the Thames Gateway plan, this volume examines the impact of urban planning and demographic change on East London's material and social environment

Book Review: Michael Payne - Olympic turnaround

In this book review, Iain McRury looks at an account of the "wake-up call" aimed at the International Olympic Committee in the late 20th century to prevent it from becoming ’extinct’, and its subsequent revival as the Olympics became a brand in itself. This is a re-issue of a book first published in 2005, updated with added material from the Beijing Games and some prefatory comments on London. MacRury judges it as timely and a welcome re-issue of a seminal account of the latest phases in Olympic and sports marketin

The Apprentice: Realities and Fictions for the London Skyline

This chapter examines the representation, values and legitimation in ’the city’, paying particular attention to London and reviewing a popular reality TV show: The Apprentice. The chapter frames the show as a morality tale akin to Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1973). Closer analysis highlights the show’s engagements with rhetorics of legitimation and ethos in ’the city’ and applying frames outlined in Boltanski and Chiapello (2005). The chapter adds to wider interdisciplinary analyis of London and recession, in the context of a book that examines the impact of the recession and discusses London’s future trajectory as an entrepreneurial city and capital of the United Kingdom

Book Review: New Dimensions of Doctor Who: Adventures in Space, Time and Television. London: I B Tauris. Hills, M. (ed) (2013)

Review of recent edited collection. Doctor Who, New Dimensions and the Inner World: A Reciprocal Review Two significant additions to Doctor Who’s academic ‘canon’ were published recently and, continuing Media Education Journal's interest in new ways of approaching the review format, here we ask two authors, Iain MacRury and Matt Hills, to appraise each others’ texts

Branded content: rupture, rapture and reflections.

This is primarily a discussion about change, a topic relevant to many industries and, particularly, to students as they prepare for exciting but potentially uncertain futures. It is an occasion to think about the implications and emergence of some new promotional idioms such as branded content, sub genres such as ‘native advertising’, and to consider some new generation, high profile, promotional media forms, notably vlogging

Framing the Mobile Phone: The Psychopathologies of an Everyday Object

This article proposes that the affective processes that shape our relationship to the world of digital consumption and communication can be illuminated further when viewed through a lens of object relations psychoanalysis. We focus on the use of the mobile phone as both an object in the world and of the psyche in order to reflect upon its uses as an evocative object that shapes the psychosocial boundaries of experience in everyday life. We argue that in contrast to the concepts of interpersonal communication that can be found in some domains of popular culture and in communication studies, object relations psychoanalysis can be usefully deployed in order to explore the unconscious attachments that develop in relation to consumer objects, allowing for the complexity of feeling and reflection that may emerge in relation to them and the potential spaces of the mind. The mobile phone’s routine uses and characteristics are widely understood. At the same time, the mobile phone invites critical reflections that identify a paradoxical object of both creative and pathological use. Such reflexivity includes the mobile’s relationship to the complexity of psychosocial experience within the contemporary cultural moment. Applying the ideas of psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott, Thomas Ogden and Christopher Bollas, we argue that one explanation for why the mobile phone continues to attract not only enthusiastic cultural commentary but also a degree of apprehension across academic and popular-discursive settings can be found in its capacity to both disrupt and connect as an object of attachment and as a means of unconscious escap

Re-thinking the Legacy 2012: The Olympics as commodity and gift

This paper opens discussion about the nature of Olympic ‘legacy’ and articulates a contradiction in the way ‘legacy’ is conceived - between ’gift’ and ’commodity’ (Mauss 1954).The The paper argues that establishing working definitions and parameters for ‘legacy’ is a difficult task. Defining ‘legacy’ is problematic especially if conceived as an entirely predictable or measurable set of objectives. Indeed, the definition of ‘legacy’ is partly constitutive of the legacy itself, a component of achievements that the city might make. Such a ‘legacy definition’ will become a functional term in the complex planning and evolving conceptions underpinning urban change for some time—if successfully negotiated and if governable. As such, ‘legacy’, and the activities and values entailed to it, can come to provide a catalytic ‘vocabulary of motives’ and a legitimating discourse enabling politicians, communities and their individual representatives to justify investments, evolving strategies and activities connected to and connecting developmental gains in a more or less healthy fashion. It is because of this that legacy and its various meanings come to matter

Olympic Turnaround: How the Olympic Games Stepped Back from the Brink of Extinction to Become the World’s Best Known Brand - and a Multibillion Dollar Global Franchise

First paragraph: A notable moment in the 1993 film adaptation of Kasuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day comes when Lewis, a wealthy American dinner party guest, pillories a table full of European aristocrats. The party, a group reminiscent in habitus and preoccupation with Pierre de Coubertin’s foundational International Olympic Committee (IOC), is taken aback. Lewis throws up his hands at their meddling in the serious business of global diplomacy, as it turns out, hurtling into World War II: You are, all of you, amateurs … Do you have any idea of what sort of place the world is becoming around you? … You need professionals to run your affairs, or you’re headed for disaster (The Remains of the Day 1993, adapted from Ishiguro 1989:106-107). Transplanted into the field of global sport and projected 50-odd years later, Michael Payne’s Olympic Turnaround recounts a similar ‘wake-up’ call – in this instance aimed at the IOC of the late 20th century. Payne is a former athlete (skiing) whose career flourished in sports marketing management – in an era (the 1970s) when this was a relatively underdeveloped area