Potboilers looks at the many forms of popular narrative - in print, film and TV. It considers the ways in they have been analysed in literary criticism, sociology, communications, media and cultural studies.
The book introduces and summarizes two decades of debate about mass-produced fictions and their position within popular culture. It assesses the methods that have been used in these debates, focussing both on narrative analysis and the communications process. It explores generic conventions, the role of commercial strategies, and the nature of the audience with reference to...

The reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev have brought tumultuous change to political, social and economic life in the Soviet Union. But how have these changes affected Soviet press and television reporting? Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Media examines the changing role of Soviet journalism from its theoretical origins in the writings of Marx and Lenin to the new freedoms of the Gorbachev era. The book includes detailed analysis of contemporary Soviet media output, as well as interviews with Soviet journalists.

Fields in Vision offers a comprehensive and analytical study of the international phenomenon of television sports coverage. Garry Whannel considers the historical development of sport on television, the growth of sponsorship and the way that television and sponsorship have re-shaped sport in the context of the enterprise culture.
Drawing on archival research, Whannel first charts the development of the BBC Outside Broadcast department, and the growing battle for dominance between BBC and ITV, showing how sponsorship and the rising power of sports agents began to transform sport -...

Since the mid-1980s, broadcasting in the Federal Republic of Germany has been extensively re-regulated. The traditional duopoly of the public broadcasters Ard and ZDF has been challenged by new private networks in both radio and television. In two historic judgements handed down in 1986 and 1987, the Federal Constitutional Court set out terms for a new dual order of private and public broadcasting. But how were the guidelines of the court interpreted in practice?
Pluralism, Politics and the Marketplace traces the economic and political influences which shaped the emergence of a...

This challenging account of Britain's long-term economic performance examines why British economic growth has failed to keep pace with the performance of the other advanced industrial economies since 1870. It addresses both specifically economic questions - did the structure of the British economy undermine the nation's competitiveness? - and broader socio-historical questions - has British culture been hostile to business achievement and whether British education failed British industry? The book combines a survey of recent scholarly work with an original interpretive alternative to...

This study provides a detailed historical account of the policy and practice of radioactive waste management in Britain, Sweden and the Federal Republic of Germany. In their differing approaches, these three countries define the parameters of civil nuclear strategy in Europe. The comparative analysis of the evolution of policy clarifies the context of political and technical decision-making. Assessing the varying degrees of influence which the public, the industry and the government exercise over these actions, Frans Berkhout applies the concept of boundaries of control, questioning the...

Popular perceptions of the local press in Britain centre around images of newspapers printed on old-fashioned machinery, filled with reports of courts, councils, fetes and jumble sales, and the births, marriages and deaths of local citizens. Bob Franklin and Dave Murphy argue that this perception is long out-of-date. With almost 1800 titles, including paid and free, morning, evening and weekly newspapers, the local press is a highly significant component both in local media networks and in the context of the British press as a whole. Many papers combine substantial circulation figures with...

The history of Indian economic thought provides rich insights into both economic issues and the workings of the Indian mind. A History of Indian Economic Thought provides the first overview of economic thought in the sub-continent. Arguing that it would be inappropriate to rely on formal economic analyses it draws on a wide range of sources; epics, religious and moral texts for the early period and public speeches, addresses, and newspaper articles for controversies from the nineteenth century onwards.
What emerges is a rich mosaic reflecting India's different cultures and...

This text presents a corpus-based syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of free adjuncts and absolutes in present-day English. The major function of these constructions is to serve as adverbial clauses, most frequently without any overt specification of which semantic relation (time, cause or condition) they express in a given complex sentence. The main focus of the book is on central problems of their use and interpretation. These include the range of their semantic indeterminacy, the factors that help resolve it, and, for free adjuncts, the identification of their underlying subject...

The Internationalization of Japan provides the English-speaking reader with the opportunity to hear what some of Japan's leading social scientists and other commentators have to say about the internationalization of their country as well as their country's impact overseas. The topic is of extreme importance now as the international community demands a greater Japanese contribution to international society as well as changes in Japan to facilitate foreign access. The book discusses the internationalization of politics, economy and society. Topics of special interest include the...