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This chapter explores how we have limited our own understanding and application of ethics at work through our everyday talk about it. The chapter begins by arguing that how we frame ethics is as important, and sometimes more important, than the specific ethical decisions we make. The chapter explains how a perspective on ethics that is grounded in communication and rhetoric can illuminate how we unnecessarily restrain the influence of ethics at work. The chapter makes the case for examining popular culture and everyday talk for clues to how ethics is treated in our professional lives. Turning the saying “talk is cheap” on its head, the chapter urges a serious consideration of what it means to say, for example, that one's work is “just a job” or that we should “let the market decide.” Thus, the reader is urged to find ethical implications in diverse messages and cases, ranging from codes and handbooks, to television shows and Internet advertising, to everyday conversation, including sayings that become part of who we are.

The first chapter identifies why, after a century of indifference, comic books moved from the fringes of popular culture to the center of mainstream film production in the early 21^st century. It argues that comic-book movies were well suited, perhaps ideally suited, to the cultural, technological, and economic concerns that beset Hollywood production at the start of the twenty-first century, including post-9/11 concerns, digital filmmaking techniques, and conglomerate practices. That comic book adaptations could meet and surmount such demands, and achieve unprecedented levels of popularity, testifies to their importance within modern Hollywood filmmaking.

While acknowledging that the American dream does have a bright side, the introduction explains why we can learn more by examining the portrayal of its dark side in popular culture. Works like the Godfather films and Breaking Bad reveal the inner contradictions and tragic tensions in the American dream. The introduction offers an overview of the book and sketches the ways the chapters build on each other, developing a set of common themes, such as self-invention and imposture. All the works point to the western frontier as the mythical space for American self-fulfillment. The chapter discusses the Western as the archetypal American genre and traces the ways it migrates to other genres, such as science fiction and the gangster story. All these genres offer alternatives to the everyday middle-class world that popular culture normally mirrors, and thereby they raise questions about a narrowly middle-class conception of the American dream.

Chapter six examines what a popular audience of London’s inhabitants – elite and non-elite – gained from their consumption of fair amusements. Though urban officials and middling social reformers believed fairs threatened local and national order, they were in fact instrumental to celebrating local and national events. Print evidence of fair culture reveals the messages ordinary men and women consumed at fairs. These messages reflected and helped shape gendered understandings of men and women’s appropriate place in Britain. Theatrical entertainments and fair exhibits such as clocks or mechanical pictures reveal themes of local and national significance. In the context of increasingly global conflicts, fair exhibits communicated notions of one’s role in the community of Britain’s emerging empire. The fair ground was also a site at which a popular audience encountered ideas about new science and nation at exhibits and spectacles. While there was certainly not an ‘official’ popular scientific culture at fairs, during the late seventeenth century, fair-goers saw some of the same curiosities also exhibited at court. These curiosities contributed to fair-goers’ understandings of the larger world and their place, as Londoners and Britons, within it. Fair exhibits disseminated to popular audiences notions of local and national identity through plays, waxworks, clocks, and other exhibits illustrating national victories, royal lineages and masterpieces of British architecture, and the natural landscape. The visual and popular culture of fairs demonstrates that Britons of various economic and ethnic backgrounds actively contributed to national imagining. National identities were not only consolidated in the world of print or in strictly political contexts.

Conventional wisdom, gift-giving, funerary customs, eating rituals, jokes, sayings, and other traditions often invoke linkages between moods and foods. This chapter considers differences in patterns of comfort food cravings and consumption related to gender, age, and other factors. It also reviews hypotheses about reasons for comfort eating, e.g., sensory properties of food, associations of food with particular people or events, pharmacological constituents of items, and physiological processes of counteracting stress-induced hormones. Perhaps sometimes we eat what we do because of “what’s eating us,” but a combination of influences seems more likely—one in which folklore and popular culture play a significant role that has not been adequately explored.

The introduction presents the book’s arguments and historiographical interventions, outlines its structure, and provides an explanation of the study’s periodisation. The years between the end of the First World War and the early 1950s saw what was known as ‘modern ballroom dancing’ rise and fall as Britain’s foremost popular style, and witnessed the professionalisation and commercialisation of popular dance. The introductory chapter also provides definitions for the book’s framing concepts and key terms. It defines ‘commercial nationalism’ as the process through which national identity was commodified by the ballroom dance profession and dance hall industry, producing an explicitly ‘national’ dancing style, which was in turn accepted, rejected, or transformed by the dancing public. This dialectical relationship between the producers and consumers of dance also accounts for why the book employs the term ‘popular dance’, rather than ‘social dance’. The ‘popular’ references theoretical frameworks from cultural studies and the history of popular culture, to encapsulate the mechanisms of the culture industry that surrounded dancing.

Chapter 5 examines why and how the new Meiji government made a much more concerted effort to regulate the popular culture as a focal point of its program of remaking the county into a capitalist nation-state. It focuses on the early Meiji policy called “Reform of Popular Culture and Customs” implemented in the 1870s and 80s through a series of decrees and educational reforms. This policy was devised in conjunction with the government’s swift decision to dismantle the Tokugawa social order and erect a new one based on the liberal ideological principle of individual rights to equality and freedom. The new political leaders believed that a competitive ethos of self-motivated individuals was the key to Western nations’ dominance in wealth, military strength, and technology, and that Japan’s successful transformation into a modern nation-state worthy of the respect of Western counterparts depended on the creation of such an ethos at home. Accordingly, Edo-style popular culture, which seemed devoid of the ethos, was reconfigured as the markers of negative traces of the past— backwardness and ignorance— and a serious impediment to the nation’s drive for modernization. This chapter examines the implications of this reconfiguration, reflecting on Meiji power’s effects on subject-formation.

Three transformations have reshaped Brazilian popular culture over the last two decades—the emergence of a new middle class, the spread of digital media, and the rise of new forms of cultural sponsorship. The first has expanded the market for cultural products while driving changes in the themes and styles of those products. The second has expanded the number of distributors of cultural products, cracking open circuits previously dominated by a few media titans. The third has changed the economic calibration of cultural production. These three transitions are mutually constituted, informing each other as they unfold. This chapter will consider their importance in shaping recent trends, including the growing consumption of sports and advertising as popular culture and the evolution of sertaneja (“country”) popular music.

This chapter explores the entanglement between queer desires and struggles with normativities in fandoms through the case study of Denise Ho (a.k.a. HOCC) in Hong Kong. HOCC is one of the few celebrities in the Chinese-language entertainment industry to have come out as a lesbian. Data is drawn from participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 29 fans between 2009 and 2014. By analyzing the interplay between Hong Kong sexual cultures, fans’ everyday lives, and fans’ interactions with global media, it is found that fans struggled with negotiating HOCC’s gender and sexuality and their own before HOCC’s coming-out, leading to the paradoxical celebration and self-policing of queer reading at the same time. HOCC’s coming out in 2012 has significantly reshaped her queer fandom. It is observed that fans have turned their attention to the negotiation of HOCC’s “proper” lesbian embodiment as the “correct” representation of the LGBT/tongzhi movement. By revealing the complex relations between heteronormativity and homonormativity, this chapter concludes that HOCC fans in Hong Kong, who are situated within macrostructural and micropolitical forces, desire to be queer by transgressing normal and paradoxically desire to be normal by tactically negotiating the limits of queer.

This chapter offers a brief consideration of the role that the renewed popularity of the vampire and zombie plays within popular culture. Through consideration of the growing popularity of zombie walks, zombie runs, vampire fashion, vampire cosplay, this chapter argues that a fascination with the undead is a response to an unsettling cultural climate in which we are bombarded by the threat of annihilation but also serves as evidence of a cultural appropriation of this apocalyptic threat.

This chapter introduces readers to the basic concepts of the study of folklore, called folkloristics, including genres (such as folk speech, myth, folk tale, and legend), performance, and variation. It provides a comparison of folklore and popular culture, highlighting the importance of performance for understanding how folklore differs from mass media such as television and comic books, before discussing the importance of Superman’s transcendence of those boundaries. Included is a brief description of Superman as a collective character—he is comprised of numerous versions across different media. The introduction provides a discussion of how popular culture becomes folklore: becoming performed in face-to-face human interaction. This first chapter foregrounds folkloristics as a perspective, a way to approach material that can be applied to those elements of culture that originate in oral tradition, but that can also illuminate our understanding of material such as Superman.

Chapter 5 proposes that, while the incorporation of aspects of popular culture in literary texts is not new, it takes on new significance in the context of the distinction between the popular as ‘ours’ and the elite as ‘unpatriotic’ in Bolivarian rhetoric. In addition, the ‘popular’ as celebrated by the Bolivarian Revolution is defined by the national and often the indigenous. Popular culture in terms of globalised media are condemned as neo-imperialist. Bajo las hojas (Centeno, 2010), Chulapos Mambo (Méndez Guédez, 2011), Transilvania unplugged (Sánchez Rugeles, 2011) and El niño malo cuenta hasta cien y se retira (Chirinos, 2004) are all novels that blur the boundaries between elite and popular culture. Popular is understood here as genres such as the gothic, comedy and detective fiction with mass appeal and as global media and the internet. El niño malo… also incorporates aspects of indigenous story-telling to assert that this cultural legacy is not the preserve of the Bolivarian Revolution.

The “Cool Japan” wave that began in 2001 has ebbed and flowed, with many continuing to extol the country’s success in global pop culture markets while others express concern that it has fallen behind “K-Pop” and the increasing global weight of China. This chapter critically examines Joseph Nye’s conception of “soft power,” considering its affective role in representing national aspirations and concerns about global status. The achievement of “soft power” became a broad goal that would link a new, creative generation to the collective endeavors of their parents and grandparents, who had built ostensibly Japan’s postwar economic miracle. In this examination of post-Bubble Japan’s nervous efforts to maintain global cultural weight, the chapter draws from Lauren Berlant’s widely noted book Cruel Optimism, particularly its recognition of addictive modes in contemporary political and social life.