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This paper explores the advantages (for large investors) of directly owning productive assets, compared with indirect ownership through stock in corporations. Significant factors are agency costs and recent changes in the tax and regulatory environment. Recent corporate scandals have led to legislative and regulatory responses that significantly increase the monitoring costs and other burdens of becoming or remaining a public corporation. As a result, there has been a substantial increase in going-private transactions, particularly among smaller public companies. However, the pressures to go private are not entirely new. We trace the legal concept that the corporation is an entity separate and apart from its owners, showing how the legal status of corporations hinders resolution of conflicts among the parties to the enterprise. Thus, there have long been fundamental flaws inherent in the corporation as the form of organization for certain activities. Direct ownership of major assets by investors prevents future expropriation of resources, and is preferable to corporate ownership whenever other alternatives for indemnification or liability limitation are available (such as insurance, limited partnerships, limited liability companies, etc.). Finally, the renewal of direct ownership is not a radical shift, but a return to long-established tradition in the organization of business activities.

Purpose: At a conference inspired by Hans Christian Andersen, this chapter makes the case for his shadowy American contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe.

Methodology: Employing a comparative literary analysis, it contends that consumer culture theory (CCT) can learn more from Poe’s quothful raven than Andersen’s ugly duckling.

Findings: Principally that Poe’s Ps of Perversity, Pugnacity, and Poetry are particularly pertinent to an adolescent, self-harm-prone subdiscipline that’s struggling to find itself and make its way in the world.

Originality: Poe and Andersen’s names rarely appear in the same sentence. They do now.

This chapter introduces the concept of ‘inditation’ to the creative industries. The concept builds on an old verb ‘to indite’ and the noun ‘inditing’, meaning ‘to make up’ and ‘to compose’. This chapter attempts to obtain the concept into the actual use of language. The term’s meaning gets adjusted in the sense of a conceptual redesign. Furthermore, this chapter introduces the concept of ‘inditation’ as a process of composing ‘the new’ by creative entrepreneurs. They indite entrepreneurial brainchildren, ‘the new’, as unique outcomes such as artwork, product prototypes, or services. The chapter asks what it means to indite and contributes three autoethnographic examples. It also suggests that inditation could evolve a process-oriented framework for bringing ‘the new’ into the world and outlines further research towards constructing a theory of inditation.

Since the turn of the Millennium, horror has had a resurgence both in cinema and in television. With programmes like The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer paving the way for other horror shows such as The Walking Dead, American Horror Story and Penny Dreadful, this introduction discusses the way that TV has become a bedrock of new, exciting, vibrant and bold horror productions.