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While most research has focused on federal faith‐based initiatives, what has gone largely unnoticed has been how extensive state faith‐based initiatives have become. State faith‐based initiatives are in fact more advanced in many ways than implementation at the federal level. States have passed significant faith‐based legislation, something the federal government has never been able to do, and state implementation of these initiatives has begun to shape governmental and faith‐based organizational culture. The consistent efforts of state liaisons and faith‐based conferences, with new faith‐based policies, have created greater opportunities for partnership between faith and government sectors, but have very rarely come up with the resources to make these new efforts work for extended periods of time. Analysis of data illustrates that state faith‐based policies and practices are creating an over‐arching cultural shift away from church/state separation to church/state cooperation.

While some see faith‐based initiatives as ephemeral, there is reason to believe that they can impact policy in the future by reshaping how the United States views the norm of church‐state separation. States have created extensive faith‐based bureaucracies, connecting government to religious groups and affecting the delicate balance between church and state for many years to come. These initiatives have flourished because of the confluence of fiscal need, social need, and religious belief with the political rhetoric surrounding them. State faith‐based initiatives have created a phenomenon that is beneficial for many politicians and political leaders, who can say they have helped and show off their new offices and policies, without having to come up with new money. The policies and practices that make up state faith‐based initiatives do not do what their supporters originally promised; rather, they have created a new cultural understanding of church and state.

This chapter systematically explicates how intermediaries construct the value of cultural goods to better understand the entrepreneurial implications of their functions. Three key properties of cultural goods—high symbolism, proliferation, and subjectivity—juxtaposed against three key valuation elements—categories, criteria, and standards—define the specific functions that intermediaries perform. Intermediaries make cultural goods visible through introduction, the sharing of information. They also instruct consumers, that is, they decode the symbolic meaning and value of the good. Finally, intermediaries perform the inclusion function, selectively validating the quality of certain cultural goods. These functions, although neither sharply demarcated nor linearly executed, result in a value pyramid, where goods at the highest apex of quality fetch either very high aggregate sales or individual prices. Operating as an entrepreneurial intermediary—pioneering or otherwise—that performs one or more of these functions brings different sets of challenges and has different implications for effective market creation.

Cinema-going was the most popular leisure pursuit in the 1930s and had become the essential social habit. This chapter provides a broad survey of the growth of the cinema-going habit in the period, outlines the various reasons behind it and assesses how different consumer groups could be attracted to this relatively new leisure form. The dissemination of the various roles performed by other leisure pursuits is essential to better understand the social and cultural tasks cinema-going performed. The other contrasting leisure activity chosen is reading. Cinema-going was a communal activity, reading was a primarily solitary pastime; the cinema offered a visual and sound experience, reading offered a literary one. There is more than a casual overlap between the cultural experiences of both leisure activities, and many similarities in their production and consumption, which the chapter identifies.

This chapter examines the role of English and other languages in the internet age, where literature is generally ignored. It highlights three significant historical changes that have indubitably weakened the status of literature. The first is the advancement of science, where technological advancements and the growing importance of science can be seen in universities around the world that are relentlessly downsizing the humanities, especially literature. The second is the diversification of cultural goods, which are products that function at once as art and entertainment. The technology of today has made it possible to produce cultural goods, such as film and music, at a high rate. These cultural goods have dethroned the novel as they similarly explore the meaning of human life. The chapter concludes by discussing the third factor, the spread of mass consumer society, which seemingly increases the disparity between the intrinsic value and market value of cultural goods.

This chapter details the formation of the zoharic manuscript collections, from the early fourteenth century until the first print editions in the second half of the sixteenth century. Cultural goods such as pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, and the like are forms of ‘cultural capital’, that is, they are part of the knowledge and skills that give people cultural advantages which in turn enable them to attain or preserve a higher status in society. The chapter argues that the collectors and scribes of the zoharic manuscripts were accumulating cultural capital: possession of these texts, and the ability to quote from them, increased the power and influence of those who copied, collected, and edited them. As long as the scope of the zoharic canon remained undefined, that is, before the printing of the book, the collectors and editors strove to compile collections as comprehensive as they could, and thus enhance their cultural capital. This process shaped, to a great extent, the scope of the zoharic canon, which was ultimately defined by the first printers of zoharic literature in the second half of the sixteenth century.

The logic of cultural accumulation reinforces Italy’s claim to be the world’s greatest cultural power, even as the government must find new ways to engage ordinary Italians in “their” heritage. This concluding chapter identifies further lines of inquiry made possible by theorizing cultural power as a distinct form of state power. It is a form of power constituted by control over cultural materials but is not limited to the cultural sphere. The tensile strength of state patrimony, not its metaphorical hardness or softness, provides us with a richer understanding of how Italy extends its sovereignty through cultural objects.

This chapter analyzes the materials associated with a ruralist notion of popular culture and its integration in the entertainment market. This stands as both a consequence of and as a complement to the effort of grounding the Portuguese nation on scientific knowledge. The study of vernacular song was not limited to rural repertoires, as the first historical endeavors that concentrated on presenting fado as a musical and poetic genre were published during the first decade of the twentieth century. However, many heterogeneous songs with “fado” in their title were already circulating in Portugal, evidencing the polysemic use of this term. Forms of the same music found their way into both rural and urban repertoires, creating problems for a perspective that depends on a clear segmentation between the urban and the rural or between the ethnological and the entertaining.