- Industry: Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 1330
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- Company Profile:
Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
(born 1975) Already believed by many to be the greatest player to have played golf, regularly breaking records for lowest scores on the world’s courses, and at the age of twenty-four becoming the youngest player to win a career Grand Slam—1997 Masters, 1999 PGA tournament, 2000 US Open, the 2000 British Open (two years earlier than Jack Nicklaus achieved this feat). He has brought record numbers of viewers to televised golf, and, as the son of an African American father and a Thai mother, has opened up the sport to previously excluded or uninterested minorities. Now largely competing against himself, he sets new goals to achieve: tournaments without making a bogey; the first Grand Slam in a single year; and Nicklaus’ achievement of eighteen major career victories.
Industry:Culture
Backlash campaign since the 1980s seeking to establish the “official” status of English as a state and federal language to the exclusion of multilingual materials or required bilingual competence in official settings (sometimes extended into business as well). By 1999 twenty-five states had passed some form of official English law. Active proponents have been organized by US English, founded by California Senator S. Hayakawa in 1983; opponents include organized ethnic groups, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Education Association. This has become a contested issue in multicultural metropolises like Miami, FL, although some immigrants support its ideal of rapid assimilation.
Industry:Culture
Bacterial infection transmitted by ticks that live on deer or mice. Marked by a bull’s-eye rash, malaise, fatigue and muscle aches, it is often misdiagnosed, although it will respond readily to antibiotics. If left untreated, it can become disabling. First noted in suburban Lyme, Connecticut, in 1975, by the early 1990s more than 10,000 cases were reported annually chiefly in the Northeast, Midwest and California. In these areas, it has challenged outdoor life patterns as people cover up and spray insecticides to avoid ticks, or abandon wooded areas altogether. Its suburban demographics may also have encouraged rapid development of a vaccine, which became available in 1997.
Industry:Culture
Banks traditionally are protectors and providers of money intermediaries between those who have money and want it protected and those who need money to purchase homes, grow businesses or fund education. Banks take deposits and transfer this money to borrowers as loans, earning the spread between the low-interest borrowed funds and the higher-interest lent funds. The Federal Reserve, the industry’s regulator, allows banks the special privilege of creating money by lending more than they receive in deposits. Hence, banking was and is a confidence business: the system works as long as depositors have confidence in a bank’s solvency. Lost confidence results in depositors demanding their money back—an ominous event of the Depression. Deposit insurance, provided by the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) and FSLIC (Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation), was created as a New Deal reform to prevent bank runs. It protects up to $100,000 of a depositor’s money when a bank goes under.
Despite Depression fears, the banker has been a symbol of local tradition. Often a town’s most prominent citizen, the banker was conservative, well-respected and often politically influential. Banking was once profoundly local, whether in small towns or major cities. Only locals, it was thought, could evaluate borrowers’ ability to repay “Banker’s hours”—09:00 to 15:00—were a technical requirement. While adjusting the books each day was an exhaustive manual process, the staid, leisurely reputation of the banker persisted (as in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)).
American attitudes towards debt provided the impetus for the postwar growth of banking. European principles of thrift and avoidance of debt are ignored as Americans often prefer huge mortgages to tiny bank accounts. Home-equity loans even free up the value of one’s house to allow current spending. US households have over $5.5 trillion in outstanding debt.
Technology also has profoundly altered the banks’ and bankers’ role as intermediary smashed barriers to entry and prompted consolidation. Financial assets held by depository institutions have declined from 70 percent in 1932 to 40 percent in 1990. Much of this decline is explained by new institutions that provide savings and lending opportunities.
The consumer credit industry once a boon to banking, is now dominated by non-banking institutions. Credit cards provide a line of credit to individuals on which banks may earn healthy interest rates. By the mid-1980s, however, retailers (for example, Sears), phone companies (for example, AT&T) and manufacturers (for example, General Motors) had introduced credit cards, eliminating the bank as intermediary These firms sold their receivables in a burgeoning money market where firms sold debt to mutual funds and institutions, again bypassing banks.
Mortgage securitization, wherein a firm buys a portfolio of mortgages and packages them into diversified, saleable investments, removed other lucrative servicing and pricing opportunities that banks held. Starting in the early 1980s, investment banks like Salomon Brothers securitized over 70 percent of all mortgages (Crawford and Sihler 1991:138).
Banks now require fewer deposits and can extract fewer fees for services because loans are sold after origination. Mutual funds have embraced securitized debt. Money Market Mutual fund assets total $1 trillion, reducing the traditional savings account and bank certificate of deposit customer base.
Today, insurance companies offer investments, automobile manufacturers offer credit and third-party providers offer payroll and processing services. The banking industry has traditionally been restricted from business diversification by the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933, but deregulation and changing conditions have forced re-evaluation. The consolidation of banking, supported by loosened restrictions on interstate operations, has been the main focus of this restructuring. Chartered banks in the US have fallen from 13,124 in 1979 to 9,143 in 1997. The FDIC estimates there will be fewer than 5,000 US banks by 2005. Behemoths Nationsbank, Chemical and Corestates have merged with Bank of America, Chase Manhattan and First Union to eliminate operational redundancies and become more competitive. Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Bank of America and First Union have nearly $1 trillion in deposits, and operate from New England to California.
This often raises the specter of problems in urban or neighborhood finances as national banks go for maximum profits. The community bank has difficulty providing the services of a larger bank because its expenses are spread over a smaller asset base. Legislation, including the Community Reinvestment Act, requires banks to lend in the communities in which they operate, but does not promote autonomous financial planning for these areas.
Credit unions, which have acted as joint financial reserves for groups like teachers and government employees, have also been explored as a way to bring non-predatory financial services into low-income communities.
Banks now earn the majority of their income from fees, not the spread on deposits.
Banking is also done through technology-intensive phones or 24-hour automated tellers, more than through branch offices, reducing the need for personal interaction and providing economies of scale to large, centralized banks.
Savings and Loans (S&Ls) once held a unique place in the banking industry because they exclusively provided long-term, fixed-rate home mortgage loans. In the late 1970s, interest rates rose above 10 percent. S&Ls held portfolios of thirty-year mortgages earning as little as 5 percent, but had to pay double that to attract deposits. Additionally banks offered savings accounts. Real-estate loans, provided in the early 1980s, imploded when land prices declined. Regulators were slow to respond to problems—five US senators were even accused of using their influence to deflect attention from crooked financier Charles Keating. Deposit insurance provided a crutch as S&Ls across the country shut their doors, yet healthy S&Ls came under pressure as individuals lost confidence in the entire industry. Ultimately, the Resolution Trust Corporation was set up to bail out the S&L industry and recover some of the massive losses. It is estimated the S&L bailout cost the country $1 trillion.
The banking industry faces numerous challenges. Confidence in banking has declined in recent decades. Banks must improve services at lower prices and still remain competitive with other service providers. In order to survive, banks and other financial institutions must continue to reinvent themselves.
Industry:Culture
Barbed wire, dolls, first editions, baseball cards and dinnerware have achieved a post-Marxist transmutation from use value to exchange value in becoming collectibles. The emphasis, however, is on acquisition and sales as much as appreciation and process— while collectors range from connoisseurs to middle people, the framework of collectionism in late twentieth-century America was that of the market rather than the Medicis.
The range of objects amassed, sorted, evaluated and disposed of maps out not only the commodities of American life, but also its history—celebrities, events from Civil War memorabilia to the Titanic, antiques and ephemera made rare by their use and disposability: Avon cosmetic bottles, advertisements, playing cards and beverage cans.
They may be held and used within private circles, maintained in constant commercial motion or converted, in some cases, to the stuff of museums.
While stratification of culture and cash differentiates those who specialize in Monet from those concentrating on license plates, both follow a logic of reproduction and accumulation within industrial America, while they also reflect a nostalgia for a period of still local mass production—iron toys made in nineteenth-century factories speak of production and consumption on a scale very different from McDonald’s daily output of toys worldwide. Collection implies uniqueness and limitation, although both are called into question as catalogs and home-shopping channels flog newly minted collectible items, from dolls to signed sports and Star Trek memorabilia. Often, past items are also taken as indices of economic growth—juxtaposing millions for De Kooning or Jasper Johns with the sale of an original Barbie, or the speculative market (via catalogs, Internet and classified ads) for Beanie Babies in the late 1990s. Production may at least temporarily collapse a collectible market; yet this in itself may yield a secondary nostalgia further down the line.
Yet, the meanings of collectionism transcend the market. Collections can shape social lives spent in weekend searches through antique stores, flea markets and other resources, as well as demands for home care and display. Collectibles also form the cores of social networks and collectivities—Trekkies as well as Picasso owners reinforce identities through dialogues and memories as well as objects. Americans can find who they are through what they own (and what ownership they display). Hence, Laurie Rozakis’ Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buying and Selling Collectibles (1997) notes that “Collecting something special, something that you have selected, allows you to express yourself.
Your collection shows the world you are special.” (1997:9). To rethink the collections donated to the National Gallery or the Metropolitan, as well as family room displays of beer cans raises intriguing questions about identity itself.
Industry:Culture
Baseball game adapted for women by educators who believed that the women’s game should differ from the men’s in terms of the size of the ball, the pitching (which, though underarm, can be a fastpitch game at the top levels) and the vigor with which it was played. Only the first two strictures remained as the game spread rapidly in the industries that employed women during the Second World War (as many as 40,000 teams existing around the country in 1944). Following the war, softball remained largely unsupported in colleges and universities until the passage of Title IX in 1972, but by the 1990s an estimated 40 million men and women were playing softball in the US. Among men the game is normally given recreational status, but for girls and women it has become a major school and college sport, especially noted for being a new source of scholarships for women athletes at the larger universities.
Efforts to internationalize the game occurred throughout the 1970s, with a simultaneous attempt to have softball accepted as an Olympic sport. Softball was introduced at the Atlanta games of 1996 as a full Olympic sport. Led by shortstop Dot Richardson, the American team defeated seven other nations in a round-robin tournament, securing the gold medal.
Industry:Culture
Basketball is a monumental presence in the shrinking global community of the early twenty-first century. On the strength of unprecedented commercial success in the 1980s and 1990s, basketball has become one of the most popular sports in the world. The game’s social influence extends to spheres of economics, race and moral debate, while its sensational artistry has revolutionized the appeal of athletic competition as an outlet for fantasies of unfettered greatness and triumph over unthinkable odds.
James Naismith, a physical education instructor at a community youth center in Springfield, Massachusetts, invented basketball in 1891 as an indoor diversion for young male athletes during the Northeast’s cold winter months. (Women have participated in basketball since its inception, but accomplished female players have historically enjoyed fewer educational and professional opportunities than men.) Basketball caught on quickly at high-school and college levels after its invention. By the late 1930s, national intercollegiate tournaments that brought together teams from all over the country had begun to thrive.
A strong economy and the return of troops from abroad at the end of the Second World War opened new avenues for the growth of professional competition. Basketball achieved its first sustained success as a commercial enterprise during this period. The National Basketball Association (NBA) was formed through the merger of two struggling professional leagues in 1949. From its beginnings in remote outposts like Fort Wayne, Indiana, and TriCities, Washington, the NBA plotted a steady rise through the 1950s, showcasing pioneer superstars like George Mikan and Bob Cousy.
The NBA’s introduction of a twenty-four-second shot clock in 1954 marked the beginning of an era of dynamic change for basketball. A faster, more competitive game began to take shape in the 1960s as an unprecedented influx of talent emerged at all levels of the game. A distinct basketball tradition that had taken root in inner cities was producing a growing number of African American players with unique skills. This urban tradition fostered individuality a development that was at odds with basketball’s legacy as a team sport. The rivalry between two African American NBA centers—Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain—embodied the struggle between these opposite impulses.
Russell, a thoughtful and unselfish player, expanded the scope of defensive play with his prolific abilities as a shot blocker. Chamberlain was remarkable for his dazzling, but selfcentered, offensive prowess. He remains the only player in the history of the NBA to score 100 points in a single game.
The advent of the American Basketball Association (ABA), an upstart rival to the NBA, in 1967 intensified the tug-of-war between finesse and teamwork. The ABA took its cues from inner-city playgrounds, where triumph depended as much on creativity as skill. ABA players expressed basketball’s appeal as entertainment, developing a freewheeling ease that favored spectacular shots like the slam dunk. Julius Erving (“Dr J”), the ABA’s marquee player, used his unusual mix of athleticism and grace during the 1970s to innovate the spectacular offensive moves that are standard fare in basketball competition today. Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, another outstanding player to emerge in the 1970s, stretched the bounds of the game further by combining an ethic of teamwork with a personalized style to become one of the most accomplished players in NBA history Abdul-Jabaar, along with Chamberlain, remains one of the league’s top three all-time scorers.
Despite the ABA’s profound influence on the game, the market for basketball could not sustain two major professional leagues. A flagging ABA was folded into the NBA in 1977.
Due in part to a string of scandals about drug use among players, basketball’s popularity began to decline after the merger. Some public criticism took on racial overtones, blaming the league’s difficulties on the fact that the majority of its players were African American. Earvin “Magic” Johnson, an African American known for his energetic and flamboyant style, and Larry Bird, a soft-spoken, white player from the Midwest with a consummate technical command of the game, are widely credited with rescuing the NBA from its troubles. In addition to their extraordinary talent, Bird and Johnson revived a longstanding rivalry between their respective teams, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers.
In the 1980s, with a foundation built on the intensity and creativity of Johnson and Bird, basketball entered the most transformative era in its history. The timely interaction of a variety of social phenomena during this period fueled basketball’s rise to untold heights of popularity and profitability. Michael Jordan, one of the most athletic and versatile players ever to compete in the NBA, is recognized as the most powerful catalyst for basketball’s meteoric rise in the 1980s and 1990s. Jordan’s spectacular talent and dramatic flair revolutionized the concept of basketball as entertainment.
Charming, handsome and well-spoken, Jordan’s capital as a media figure today rivals his value as an athlete. While an active player, he drew sell-out crowds all over the country and boosted television ratings. Jordan has parlayed this appeal into multimillion dollar earnings from corporate endorsements. Although sports stars have historically lent their images to advertisers, Jordan’s $2.5 million dollar contract with the athletic shoe company Nike in 1984 established product endorsements as a permanent part of the basketball landscape. In 1998 Jordan earned an estimated $70 million in endorsement and business deals—more than twice his annual salary from the Chicago Bulls.
Profound changes in the media industry during the 1990s also contributed to basketball’s growth. Advances in technology and the emergence of media conglomerates created new markets all over the world. Basketball’s expansion has extended new opportunities to female players, with the advent of a successful women’s professional league in the mid-1990s.
Corporate America played a central role in basketball’s prosperity in the late twentieth century. Companies sponsor exhibitions where aspiring high-school players showcase their abilities, universities are paid millions to use certain brands of athletic wear exclusively and shoe companies have even begun managing players’ careers. Players’ salaries have kept pace with basketball’s progress, increasing from an annual average of $260,000 in 1984, the year Jordan entered the league, to an average of $2.4 million in 1998.
Despite their enormous earning potential, the social status of basketball celebrities remains ambiguous. As money replaces education as the premium offered to promising high-school talents, growing numbers of players forego athletic scholarships to enter the NBA. High schools, colleges and city playgrounds have turned into high-stakes proving grounds for young athletes aspiring to lucrative professional careers (as seen in the documentary Hoop Dreams, 1994). Missed educational opportunities and the rapid transition into fame and wealth appear to have contributed to the unruly and irresponsible behavior of some players both on and off the court. Violent outbursts by players have become regular occurrences during games. Similar tensions have escalated between coaches and players.
These trends have sparked public debate over NBA players’ status as role models to millions of children. The skewed racial makeup of basketball seems to have complicated these dynamics. The NBA remains mostly white at the levels of management, ownership and, to a lesser degree, coaching, while the highly paid players are overwhelmingly African American.
Industry:Culture
Before James Agee’s tenure as film critic for The Nation and Time from 1941–8, American film criticism was rarely taken seriously. Agee’s incisive reviews paved the way for the most significant journalistic critics of the postwar era—Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael.
While Agee’s literary sensibility enlivened his work, the more idiosyncratic Farber brought a painter’s eye and a superb command of the American vernacular to his quirky assessments of everything from neglected “B-movies” to the experimental films of Michael Snow. Active from the 1940s through the 1970s, Farber is probably best known for his distinction between “white elephant art”—prestigious, but empty and selfimportant films—and “termite art”—unpretentious movies redeemed by their low-key stylistic innovations.
Sarris and Kael were the dominant critical voices of the 1960s, and both writers attracted numerous disciples and imitators. Sarris’ The American Cinema proposed an American version of the highly polemical auteurism of Cahiers du Cinema. His elaborate rankings of American directors, which he only half-ironically labeled his pantheon, proved extremely controversial. Kael demolished Sarris’ auteurism in a characteristically acerbic article entitled “Circles and Squares.” Famously hostile to theoretical generalities (her critique of Sarris included the assertion that “film aesthetics as a distinct, specialized field is a bad joke”), Kael favored intuitive, visceral evaluations of movies and was praised for her slangy wise-cracking prose.
By the 1970s, academic theorists rejected the impressionistic, relatively apolitical criticism of Kael and Sarris. Cineaste and Jump Cut, leftist film journals radicalized by the antiwar movement and the Civil Rights movement, published translations of European theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer, while devoting considerable space to third-world films and radical documentaries ignored by mainstream critics. While Kael boasted that she never saw a film more than once, American academics, under the sway of semioticians like Christian Metz, favored meticulous textual analysis.
The impact of the academic engagement with European theory was particularly profound in feminist circles, and a journal such as the Berkeley-based Camera Obscura synthesized post-structuralist analysis and second-wave feminism’s critique of male ideology. Camera Obscura theorists deployed the work of Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser (especially as filtered through the work of French film-theorist Raymond Bellour) to claim that most Hollywood narratives were animated by an oedipal impetus that reinforced patriarchal attitudes. Subsequent feminist theorists paid more attention to the role of the female spectator; Mary Ann Doane and Tania Modleski, for example, challenged the view that women were incapable of deriving some form of pleasure from the maledominated commercial cinema.
The penchant for occasionally hermetic “grand theory” which reached its zenith during the 1970s, inspired an inevitable backlash. The 1980s marked a revival of historical criticism informed by empirical research—David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger’s delineation of what they termed the “classical Hollywood cinema” is a paradigmatic example. Their emphasis on normative elements in prototypical Hollywood films, particularly an ingrained tendency to foreground characters as “causal agents,” set the stage for publications advocating cognitive theory as an alternative to semiotics by Bordwell and his colleague Noel Carroll. Cognitivism aligned formalist analysis with an interest in the vicissitudes of human perception, but, as Robert Stam points out, the cognitivist agenda—despite its rhetoric—is not always antithetical to semiotics or psychoanalytic theory By the 1990s, burgeoning interests in multi-culturalism, postcolonial theory and queer theory infused new life into film studies. These disparate, although undeniably related theoretical strands, derived sustenance from broader tendencies in cultural studies that emphasized popular art instead of high culture. Multiculturalists and queer theorists nevertheless retained much of the skepticism concerning the “dominant culture” which inspired the New Left.
Multicultural film theory moved quickly from an earlier generation’s preoccupation with “negative images” of African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans to a more nuanced critique of how Eurocentric assumptions permeate popular culture, as well as a parallel exploration of how alternative cinematic practices can offer an anti-dote. Postcolonial theory was more concerned with the intersection of race and film in the “Diaspora”—the terrain where exiled Africans, Asians and Latin Americans created what was termed a “hybridized” cinema in the West. Post-colonial theory was unquestionably indebted to the radical assault on Eurocentrism outlined by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978). Yet Ella Shohat argued that postcolonial theorists, in their zeal to transcend the Third Worldism of the Cold War, ignored the fact that the ravages of colonialism have not disappeared.
Queer theory mirrors many of the tensions and contradictions that inform multicultural and post-colonial theory Cinematic queer theorists, unlike an earlier generation of gays and lesbians, were equally disinclined to promote politically correct “positive images.” Prominent queer theorists such as Alexander Doty championed the decidedly “incorrect” images that fueled the “New Queer Cinema” and dissected “queerness” in heterosexual entertainers like Jack Benny.
Although the chasm between popular film criticism and academic theory often seems unbridgeable, a handful of film reviewers—Jonathan Rosenbaum, B. Ruby Rich and J. Hoberman—encouraged a dialogue between film journalism and academic film theory during the 1990s.
Industry:Culture
Before the turn of the century strong political parties were a prominent feature of American cities. These party machines, as they were called, recruited citizens, especially new immigrants, to vote for their party. These organizations were not particularly ideological; instead, they recruited through an elaborate system of patronage run by “bosses.” Those who supported the party were rewarded with jobs or other services. Party machines were largely eliminated at the turn of the century by the Progressive movement, a group consisting largely of upper middle-class reformers determined to clean up city politics.
Industry:Culture
Beginning in the 1960s, the relationship between the American press and elected officials in Washington, DC changed from informal gatherings to ceremonious, and often contentious, events. The shift was symbolized by President Richard Nixon’s converting the White House swimming pool into a press briefing room in 1969. Television, particularly 24-hour news stations, helped create this new environment. The medium contributed to the rise of political commentators and made news from Washington available continuously and instantaneously. A mistrust between the press and Washington officials—largely the result of the Vietnam War and Watergate—became part of this atmosphere.
Industry:Culture
