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In 1969, the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote On Death and Dying. In this influential essay, she presented her now-famous 5-stage model of approaching death, which can be modelled into a downward trajectory (1. shock and denial, 2. anger, 3. bargaining, 4. depression) followed by a symmetrical psychological rise (5. acceptance).

In 1888–1894, in response to Hans von Bülow's death, Gustav Mahler composed his Symphony No. 2 (subtitled ‘Resurrection’), in which the idea of death is omnipresent: it opens with a funeral march based on a symphonic poem called Totenfeier (‘Remembrance Ceremony’) containing a Dies Irae motive and closes with a very long finale inspired by Klopstock's Die Auferstehung (The Resurrection). The structure of the finale itself is quite similar to the symmetrical mechanism described by Kübler-Ross, which can be summarised in the symphony by this verse sung by the choir: ‘Sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben!’ (‘I shall die, to live!’). With this ‘death and transfiguration’ movement, the orchestra and the choir embodying the psychological process of a dying subject covers every single step of the model: from a ‘cry of despair’ in the first bar (1. shock) to a horn call without response (2. denial), to the depiction of a rivalry between the Dies Irae motive (‘death’) and what will be the Resurrection theme (3. bargaining), to a grieving section (4. depression) and to a long rising towards an optimistic climax at the end (5. acceptance).

Even though the death acceptance process was far from being formalised in Mahler's days, this symphony shows that more than 75 years before Kübler-Ross, the composer, who had many opportunities to grieve since his youth (facing his brothers' and sisters' deaths), intuitively converted these experiences into an in-depth knowledge of the psychological processes of dying. In other words, after having dealt with the loss of loved ones, Mahler turns out to know how to deal with his own.

Management research has begun to explore how cultural entrepreneurs use established or declining societal traditions to create distinctive new ventures and products. In this study, we propose an alternative pathway for creating entrepreneurial opportunities, that is, through leveraging extinct societal traditions. Extinct societal traditions yield opportunities to create highly distinctive products and ventures, yet their use entails substantial challenges. To understand how entrepreneurs can successfully leverage extinct societal traditions, we investigate the case of The Merchant of Venice, an Italian venture established in 2013 that produces luxury perfumes based on the perfume-making tradition that flourished in Venice between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and disappeared afterwards. Our study illuminates how cultural entrepreneurs can leverage extinct societal traditions by (a) exhuming lost knowledge and practices, (b) validating them as an authentic and appreciable tradition of a given community and territory, and (c) elevating their meaningfulness as core to place identity. Our study contributes to the literature on cultural entrepreneurship and traditions by revealing the distinct challenges that resurrecting extinct traditions entail, enriching the understanding of types, goals, and processes of cultural entrepreneurship, and widening current knowledge of the roles of tradition custodians.

In this chapter, we consider music as a tool for emotional regulation in relation to disability, which can be employed to counter the dehumanisation of disabled people that arises from unregulated emotional responses to disability. Responding to Julia Kristeva's presentation of non-disabled encounters with disability as causing a physical or psychical death, Alison Duncan Kerr's arguments on the rationality of regulating emotions in encounters where unregulated emotions have negative effects on the self and others are brought together through Rebecca Jiggens' cultural model of understanding the significance of disability to illustrate the irrationality and moral paucity of ableism. We argue that music can play a role in regulating the emotions typically felt towards the disabled. Kristeva's idea that disability wounds or even kills the abled is insightful, but if we are right, then the tight connection between death and emotional reactions to disability could be overcome through the process of emotion regulation.

Black death on a loop online through the click economy brings to bear the mimetic violence associated with Blackness. The idea of consuming Black death as a repeat event highlights the visceral economy of online consumption practices in which Black death is shared and passed on as viral content. The foreshadowing of the Black body and Black death is both banalized and commodified as content for instant gratification spread via algorithms, tagging, likes and newsfeeds. The distributive popular economy online and the offering of Black death through a click economy redrafts Blackness through its historic fungibility of slavery and White oppression, and equally ‘virtuality’ in which both its hyper-visibility and invisibility assemble it through new modalities of violence whilst invoking new spaces to commune, grieve and experience collective grief for these demised bodies. Blackness is made perceptible through its liminality and denial of its corporeality such that both social death and mortal death are ascribed to it. This chapter agitates against the futility of Black death by its quest to read Black humanism online as a moment of empowerment and emancipation to reclaim Blackness and to defy its formlessness in the digital economy as the new graveyard of its spiritual resurrection.

This chapter is an exercise in speaking, letting individuals speak for themselves insofar as possible. As Marx famously put it, “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” The “they” were peasants, potato farmers in 1840s France, and by extension peasants, workers, and other lower class groups, not to mention women and minorities who rarely made it into the historical record, and even more rarely in their own words. To give “voice to the voiceless,” as the now old new social historians of the 1960s and 1970s put it, I consciously include here numerous speakers, arranged in two sets of different voices: quotes in the text and endnotes to further document and amplify points. With this plethora of voices, the aim is not to complicate but to speak clearly, listen carefully, and engage respectfully. To multiply the speakers speaking is the single best way to make two primary points concerning what is most important about the Chief Illiniwek mascot controversy: that the sheer number of individuals speaking out is in itself significant, and that this community colloquy all comes down to identity – who we are, individual identity, communal identity.

Purpose — Analyze and assess the actions taken by the government of Iceland prior to a banking crisis that resulted in the collapse of Iceland’s largest banks in October 2008. Was the government’s behavior prior to the crisis dishonest in the sense that it deliberately tried to fake reality or was the government honest but incompetent in the sense that it did not see the problem coming, and was therefore not trustworthy?Design/methodology/approach — Review of the existing literature, analysis, and assessment of this literature. Case study of Iceland.Findings — The government showed negligence and made mistakes by not taking credible actions to manage risks following a rapid cross-border expansion of Iceland’s largest banks. This had severe consequences and resulted in the collapse of the largest banks in October 2008. Instead of addressing the problems in the economy the government launched a PR campaign and the analysis of various scholars may have helped to justify inaction. According to the Special Investigation Commission (SIC),¹ the government did not address an obvious problem and could perhaps on that basis be charged with dishonesty, including faking reality with PR campaigns. As some scholars put it, the authorities gambled for resurrection, and failed. The analysis carried out by a number of other scholars who downplayed the problem may have confused the government and it may have been honest in its inaction. In that situation one can argue that the government was honest but incompetent and not trustworthy, as according to the SIC and several international scholars the problem was obvious.Research limitations/implications — This is a case study. The study does not present results that can be evaluated on the basis of statistical significance and generalized. Some of the lessons, however, can have a wider relevance than for Iceland only. This is especially true for small countries with a large banking sector, using its own currency, and with limited fiscal space to support the banks during a crisis.Practical implications — The combination of a risk seeking behavior of businesses, in this case in the banking sector, and inactive or negligent governments can result in the collapse of a country’s economy. The Icelandic government should encourage and enforce more risk mitigation via regulations, monitoring, and supervision of the private sector’s cross-border activities. This does not only apply to the banking sector but also to other sectors such as the energy sector.Social implications — Less risk seeking behavior and more risk mitigating actions can stabilize Iceland´s economic growth in the medium and long term, and reduce the risk of an economic collapse that typically has severe social consequences.Originality/value — The so-called Viking spirit of Icelandic business people accompanied with aggressive risk taking and bold business behavior can be very detrimental for a small economy especially when global economic and financial crisis hit.

This research investigates whether firms that voluntarily publish environmental reports to supplement their annual financial statements disclose significantly more sustainability data than others. A matched-pair sample of companies, drawn from the EPA’s list of the 500 largest (volumetric basis) U.S. polluters, that published such environmental reports during 2001 or 2002 is used to assess the type and level of non-environmental social accounting disclosures in five different areas: employee safety/health, workforce and supplier diversity, product safety, community involvement, and energy usage. Fifty-two environmental report producers were matched with non-reporters based on total asset size and SIC. Content analysis was used to assess the substance of sample firm reporting. The results show highly significant differences in social accounting reporting, with the environmental report publishers disclosing more sustainability data in a wider range than their matched counterparts.

To resurrect and renew the tradition of the early Frankfurt School, whose of Marxist–Hegelian dialectical approach to understanding the societal conditions of its emergence – post World War I Germany, the rise of fascism, New Deal politics, the defeat of fascism, and the subsequent rise of consumer society – remains relevant to studying present circumstances, stressing the cultural dimension of capitalism, the proliferation of alienation, ideology, and mass media, and, finally, the nature of the society-character/subjectivity nexus.

Employing a comparative historical approach to the study of alienation, ideology, and character, to articulate social-theoretical standards for critical social research today.

Global civilization faces an array of crises, beginning with economies whose lack of growth or stability the ability of a large segment of the world’s population to obtain jobs conducive to a decent standard of life. With governments’ inability to implement public policies to buffer instabilities, cultural values are in crisis as well.

Reviving the framework of early Frankfurt School Critical Theory is necessary to promote a better world.

Reconstructing key concerns of the Frankfurt School is conducive to critiquing this tradition’s recent preoccupation with communication and recognition, and demonstrates how the first generation’s legacy helps us understand contemporary social movements of the Right and the Left, in ways that are similar to the Weimar Republic in Germany. Both the Right and the Left being products of legitimation crises that trigger a desire for regressive or progressive social change – the Right would restore a mythical past, the Left would foster a new social order based on humanistic concerns.