Search results

From the point of view of a successful scenario writer for Royal Dutch Shell, there are several there are several artful techniques that go into crafting and presenting business scenarios. The first is art of keeping it short. To do this at Shell the author produced two different products based on two distinct mental disciplines: (1) thorough research leading to rich, fully articulated stories (the full scenario book); and (2) the distillation of these stories into essential concepts and images (a little book that was widely read and distributed). Any scenario author seeks to create new patterns of thinking in the mind of the managers. Therefore, model the scenario as if it were a stage set created by words. The managers are the actors who will animate it by their participation in each alternative scenario world. This then is the design goal for any scenario writing: engage the managers to step into the play and make it their own. The author’s method is to stimulate the development of scenarios in their minds to the point that they are just not hearing a memorable story but they are experimenting with it and imagining alternatives.

IN this number, as is our custom at this time of the year, we turn our attention to the coming Annual Meeting of the Library Association. The choice of Leeds as a venue for the Conference, coming as it does after Glasgow and Birmingham, is a proof to those who need it of the earnestness which actuates the Council, and the members, of the Library Association. We note that our colleagues the accountants, surveyors and others, have a weakness for Torquay, Southport and Scarborough for their serious annual deliberations; and such a choice has one advantage: it encourages members of committees to join their officers at the meetings. There are compensations, however, as any wise man will recognise. The library movement succeeds, in so far as it is able to convince the great centres of population of its value. Meeting in them has, therefore, a primary political value, if we may use that term in this connection ; and it has a secondary professional one in that in such great towns a really complete and active application of library work can be seen.

WE offer our readers the best wishes for the gracious season which is immediately in front of us. As each successive year passes we have repeated this wish, and probably have never done so in circumstances more interesting, and perhaps more encouraging, than those in which we write it to‐day. There is, of course, uncertainty as to the way the Government Committee on Libraries will deal with future library policy. Whispers reach us of possible loss of independence or the possible establishment of a new form of central control. It is too soon even to speculate. At all events, we know the old stultifying days of the penny rate have gone; we know the strides that libraries have made since 1919, in spite of financial difficulties, have been greater than those made in the twenty years before; and we believe it will not be long before the library system of England as a whole may, proportionately to its size, compare its work, and the public appreciation with which that work in regarded, with American libraries.

The nonhuman world is under substantial threat from human activities and economies. Rewilding gardens and community action can build relationships of care with the nonhuman, restore habitat, connect people and land, and empower humans to work with and for the nonhuman. Stories about family relationships to land and through land, and creating a wild garden are used to explore place attachment, creating relationships of care through gardening, and purposeful rewilding of a garden; stories about participation in a community service organization examine how collective action can take rewilding ideas out into the larger community. By consciously creating care for the nonhuman and participating in rewilding, we can actively build ecological paths forward for ourselves and our nonhuman neighbors.

This paper seeks to present a cultural approach to co‐branding. The purpose here is to discuss issues concerning the phenomena of brand and branding with particular focus on the mythological narratives that are at stake in a brand.

This paper conducts a case analysis of a co‐branded product. Provides both a managerial and a cultural reading of the co‐brand in question, before proceeding to make a “neo‐Freudian” analysis of the potentially transgressive meanings involved in the co‐branding in question. This is done not so much to produce an authoritative reading of the cultural and commercial sign of the co‐brand as to make a bold leap and provide a daring reading of a seemingly innocent co‐branded product.

Through the case study of the co‐branded product, the vast amount of cultural meanings that goes beyond the sets of brand identities proposed by the brand managers is explored. Discusses the limitations of traditional strategic branding models and suggests a certain degree of humility towards the mysterious and spiritual forces when trying to exploit mythological levels of social meanings and narratives in the branding process.

For brand managers who seek to co‐operate with other brands in the marketplace, this paper offers an argument for the almost limitless potential of symbolic dimensions that are inextricably linked to combining brand universes. By doing so, a more comprehensive understanding of the meaning management for co‐branded products and potentially a more successful outcome of the branding process may be achieved.

In addition to existing research, this paper illustrates that the practice of co‐branding involves a play with symbolic forces that can be unpredictable and difficult to control for a brand manager. This finding has implications for the degree to which one can expect to be able to manage the social communication processes generated from a co‐branded product.

Extending knowledge of the cultural shaping and variegating of white identity that occurs through the commercial diffusion of identity myths, we examine the reception of Southern identity myths promoted in the oppositional narratives of New South commercial media. We characterize oppositional narratives as texts which operate by eliciting an interpretive reading that devalues rather than supports the surface narrative, and explain the duplicitous text as one intended to seduce a dominant power, while empowering and bolstering identity of a marginalized group. After elaborating how oppositional discourse can serve to reinforce the identity frame constructed by regional media producers, we report on a study examining how urban and rural Southerners read and respond to this discourse. Our findings highlight mediators in the relationship between individuals’ oppositional readings and their alignment of identity in a manner responsive to it.