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The open road is popularly imagined as both cinematic and male, a space suited to the scope afforded by the cinema and the breadth demanded by the male psyche. However, while these connotations are ingrained within the aesthetics of driving, its kinaesthetics – the articulations between bodies, movement and space – have more in common with television and with stories of women’s desire. Drawing from Iris Marion Young’s theories of gendered embodiment, this article argues that driving, television and female desire are all marked by the same contradictions between movement and stability, and between public and private. It analyses two recent television programmes concerned with women behind the wheel – Black Mirror’s ‘San Junipero’ (Netflix, 2016) and the first two seasons of Big Little Lies (HBO, 2017–present) – to argue that driving on television affords a space through which to negotiate feminine embodiment, agency and desire.
This book takes a body of ethnographic data collected in 2001-2, during a year's fieldwork at the Bank of Scotland (BoS) and HBOS, and revisits it from the perspective of the 2014-16 period. It explores the tension between the 'ethnographic present' of the author's original research and the unavoidable alteration of perspective on that data that the economic crisis has created. The original research had been planned to take place in the BoS but in 2001, before the research began, BoS had merged with the Halifax to form HBOS. The book provides a long-term historical perspective on BoS/HBOS, from inception to the 2008 financial crisis, and then a consideration of the nature of historical explanation, under the rubric of 'theory'. The main attempts to explain the proximate causes of the 2008 crisis, as well as more encompassing political economic arguments about the trajectory and dynamics of capitalism are examined. The concept of 'culture' as applied to both national groups, Scots and English, and organizations, BoS and Halifax, are also dealt with. The book examines other governing concepts such as organisational change in the business world and social change, identity and the way Scottish and English experience their own personhood, and comparative nature of ethnographic research. The conclusion reviews and draws together the themes of the book, returning to the overarching question of historical perspective and explanation.
On Sunday 10 June 2007, at 9.56 p.m. EST, the premium cable network HBO first transmitted what would become one of the most discussed, debated and minutely deconstructed moments in the history of American television drama. At the close of the final episode of their era-defining hit series The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) the action simply stopped, apparently mid-scene, with an abrupt cut to black. After almost ten seconds of agonisingly dead air, the closing credits appeared. Fans would long debate whether the cut away from a close-up of
2 History: from the Bank of Scotland’s origins to HBOS and crisis Conceptualising history It is very traditional to begin an ethnography with a chapter of historical background to the case in question. This chapter does that, but it also seeks to be explicit about how it does that, because how we conceptualise history, how we select and organise events, facts, details into a narrative, implies a general approach to explanation. Historical narratives encode a certain amount of theory, whether we like it or not (Carr 1961; Koselleck 1985; White 1984). In the next
7 Histories: third-phase ‘co-pros’ ‘Cultural collision’ The first collaboration between HBO and Granada was in 1987 with Tailspin (US title)/Coded Hostile (UK). This treatment of the 1983 shooting down of Korean Airlines Flight KAL 007 was described by Leslie Woodhead as ‘very ritzily made. High-profile actors, driving score’. The Hollywood influence was obvious, and continued to be for third-phase co-pros. The kinds of genre rules that have accrued from fiction filmmaking added a further dimension to docudrama’s rooting in news and current affairs. Tailspin
1 Introduction: ethnography, history and the vagaries of research This book takes a body of ethnographic data collected in 2001–2, during a year’s fieldwork at the Bank of Scotland and HBOS, and revisits it from the perspective of the present, that is, the time of writing this book (c.2014–16). That present is one in which the global banking and financial crisis that emerged around 2008 has had devastating effects on several banks, including this one. My original research had been planned to take place in the Bank of Scotland (BoS) but earlier in 2001, before
organisation within Lloyds plc. Although HBOS continues behind the scenes as a ‘holding company’ within Lloyds, it has effectively disappeared from public view, for rather obvious reputational reasons. BoS and the Halifax, however, continue as public brands and banking organisations within Lloyds.1 The BoS ‘brand’ has been preserved, but the organisation has lost much of its earlier culture, ethos and identity that form the substance of this study. No doubt some currently working for BoS might want to contest this, but I base this on the remarks of current and former
chastened one is stripped of their self-projected infallibility and reduced to their most pathetic humanity. Whilst such scenes are played out across the television landscape ad infinitum, this chapter will explore moments in which Veep (HBO, 2012–19) embeds such schadenfreude into its political satire. Veep epitomises the notion that ‘satire’, a word derived from the Latin satura lanx for medley or ‘full dish’, is a comedic corrective to the lip service and incompetence that are frequently the hallmarks of political figures
financial sector and private lives of the people in this study. This fieldwork was focused on the workplace and the various organisational contexts that shaped that environment. Central here were the ‘three banks’: HBOS, BoS and Halifax (and, to a degree, Capital Bank, embedded within BoS). And within these there were distinctive parts, such as the major divisions of the Bank, which also had different ‘shadings’ of culture. My informants frequently understood each of the three banks as having a distinctive ‘culture’, I would say because the concept of culture I have just
In an Expression of the figure’s mutability, Nina Auerbach writes that ‘every age embraces the vampire it needs’. 1 The twenty-first-century vampire is a substantially different creature from the grotesque monsters who lurk in the shadows of narratives from the mid-nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. The HBO television series True Blood (prod