Guy Redden | The University of Sydney (original) (raw)

Books by Guy Redden

Sage, 2019

Questioning Performance Measurement: Metrics, Organizations and Power is the first book to interr... more Questioning Performance Measurement: Metrics, Organizations and Power is the first book to interrogate the organizational turn towards performance metrics critically. Performance measurement is used to evaluate a diverse range of activities throughout the private, public and non-governmental sectors. But in an increasingly data driven world, what does it really mean to measure ‘performance’?

Taking a sociology of quantification perspective, this book traces the rise of performance measurement, questions its methods and objectivity, and examines the social significance of the flood of numbers through which value is represented and actors are held accountable.

Graham Meikle and Guy Redden (eds.) News Online: Transformations and Continuities. Palgrave, 2010... more Graham Meikle and Guy Redden (eds.) News Online: Transformations and Continuities. Palgrave, 2010.

News matters. It is still the main forum for discussion of issues of public importance. It is where we come together to inform, persuade, influence, endorse or reject one another in a collaborative process of making meaning from events. But the news is changing — content, distribution channels, geographical constraints, production values, business models, regulatory approaches and cultural habits are all in flux, as new media technologies are adopted and adapted by users. However, despite having driven many of the changes themselves, established media organisations are in many cases struggling to adapt to this changed environment.

News Online: Transformations and Continuities is for everyone who wants to better understand the news media of the twenty-first century. With contributions from leading international scholars who question established understandings of news in the light of change, this book charts a course through recent upheavals and ranges over a broad terrain — from the BBC to experimental videogames, from Latin American newsrooms to Northeast Asian blogs, from the crisis in US newspapers to Twitter users in Iran. Each chapter provides an insightful analysis of how popular digital communications change relations of production and consumption, in addition to the effect on cultural and political participation. News Online considers the shifting boundaries between the popular and the professional made possible by the redistribution of news functions.

Contributors

Stuart Allan, Ian Bogost, Axel Bruns, Andrés Cañizález, Kate Crawford, Mark Deuze, Natalie Fenton, Simon Ferrari, Leopoldina Fortunati, Gerard Goggin, Jairo Lugo, Robert McChesney, Brian McNair, An Nguyen, Bobby Schweizer, Einar Thorsen, Tamara Witschge and Xin Xin

Papers by Guy Redden

This article aims to examine how and why the urban metal scene in Bangladesh came into existence.... more This article aims to examine how and why the urban metal scene in Bangladesh came into existence. Based on interviews with key figures in the scene, ethnographic observation and textual analysis, the article proposes that urban youths’ frustration with the poor state of conditions in the country is channeled into a passion to build an alternative space. Participants assert the distinction of their music from mainstream rock and pop. Translocal connections with other metal scenes existing elsewhere are emphasized in a local scene that remains tied to the activities of a largely middle-class, parttime, male population of artists who share particular social and economic resources.

Local Government Studies, 2019

Australian Literary Studies, 2013

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2011

This book represents a welcome addition to the literature on the news media of the twentyfirst ce... more This book represents a welcome addition to the literature on the news media of the twentyfirst century. A collection of contributions from elite media scholars, the edited volume investigates the ongoing changes that affect the processes of selection, presentation and ...

With the explosion of reality television onto screens and schedules worldwide, this timely and or... more With the explosion of reality television onto screens and schedules worldwide, this timely and original book explores makeover tv, the ubiquitous reality format that has received little critical attention to date. Top writers and scholars take discussion of reality tv to the next level with lively examination of a wide range of contemporary makeover shows, such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, Faking It, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and The Apprentice, that ultimately speak to television's own enduring ability to reinvent itself. The book is organized around the overarching argument that contemporary makeover programming provides the paradigmatic example of reality television's far-reaching prominence and mass appeal, an appeal that lies in powers of transformation' or televisual performance that tries not only to capture reality but to intervene in it, with the ultimate aim of remodelling reality. They examine how makeover programming annexes the private space of the h...

Neoliberalism is commonly considered to be an orientation towards social and economic life that p... more Neoliberalism is commonly considered to be an orientation towards social and economic life that prioritizes market-based competition over other modes of organization. Recent studies have stressed the international rise of neoliberal patterns of governance, but also their flexibility over time and the varied forms they take in context. Through depicting neoliberal reforms in Australia and New Zealand from the 1980s to the present, the aim of this article is to highlight contingencies and variations in neoliberalization processes. Australian and New Zealand neoliberalisms share origins in the structural liberalization of trade, labour and financial markets effected by centre-left governments and legitimated by discourses about necessary economic modernization benefitting all. Subsequent governments have largely maintained the underlying reforms, but in articulation with varying social agendas and approaches to fiscal discipline and welfare. Inchoate concerns about inequality have rece...

Contents: Editors' Introduction: Religion as living culture, Michael Bailey and Guy Redden Pa... more Contents: Editors' Introduction: Religion as living culture, Michael Bailey and Guy Redden Part I New Media Religion: Transformations in British religious broadcasting, Stephen Hunt Alternative Islamic voices on the internet, Aini Linjakumpu Mediatizing faith: digital storytelling on the unspoken, Knut Lundby Haredim and the internet: a hate-love affair, Yoel Cohen. Part II Consumption and Lifestyle: Fixing the self: alternative therapies and spiritual logics, Ruth Barcan and Jay Johnston Religious media events and branding religion, Veronika Kronert and Andreas Hepp The after-life of born-again beauty queens, Karen W. Tice How congregations are becoming customers, Rob Warner US evangelicals and the redefinition of worship music, Anna E. Nekola. Part III Youth: The making of Muslim youth cultures in Europe, Thijl Sunier Religious experience of a young megachurch congregation in Singapore, Joy Kooi-Chin Tong. Part IV Politics and Community: Recent literary representations of Brit...

Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory

M/C Journal

Creators do not just 'create' or 'act' -- they are privileged agents, points of o... more Creators do not just 'create' or 'act' -- they are privileged agents, points of origin, sources of innovation and transformation. Within religious systems, creators can exist in an extra-discursive real beyond nature and culture, functioning as the origin of the word and being. They can be supernatural, existing outside nature to influence earthly events via strange powers. They can also be 'supra' natural -- above nature -- capable of acts that both break and establish laws to which the created are subject. Yet, these types of creators only seem to exist through the cultural economies which allow their representation. Their roles and personas can differ with the production, combination and utilisation of selected characterisations: in other words, creators are created. As these texts explore, the idea of creator is a site of textual contestation, where creations must be authenticated not only by their authors but by their believers. These fictive acts and ot...

M/C Journal

Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector ev... more Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometimes much more frequently. He wasn't looking for something that might sustain his interest. Hardly that. He simply enjoyed jerking the dial into fresh image-burns. He explored content to a point. The tactile visual delight of switching channels took precedence, however, transforming even random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstractions. -- Don DeLillo (16) DeLillo captures in a few lines key aspects of a cultural narrative concerning how technology has sped up human lives. The speeds at which forms are transmitted and affect the ways we apprehend the world. Speed is enjoyable. Speed abstracts. Speed is visceral. Speed fragments. We are both agents of its processes and subject to its force. Like DeLillo's channel surfer then you may explore the content of this 'speed' issue of M/C with a certain mobility, and yet you are constrai...

Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy

This paper examines a particular form of online activity — weblogging — and how it has allowed fo... more This paper examines a particular form of online activity — weblogging — and how it has allowed for specific new forms of popular political communication in the context of the Second Gulf War. After describing the basics of weblogging, the paper discusses Western media coverage of the war and then shows how ‘warbloggers’ positioned themselves vis-à-vis media coverage and propaganda, creating commentaries that frequently combined media and political criticism. While bloggers of every political hue offered a range of perspectives and personal styles, some general tendencies are evident in warblogging discourse. The piece ends by questioning the significance of warblogging in terms of its potential contribution to democratic communication.

Critical Sociology

Recent work has acknowledged the variegated forms neoliberalism takes in different contexts while... more Recent work has acknowledged the variegated forms neoliberalism takes in different contexts while recognizing the elements that connect them. Neoliberalization has proven a flexible, adaptive and renewable pattern of reform. At the same time, there is increasing evidence for Harvey’s contention that its principal socio-economic outcome is inequality. Accordingly, this article proposes that contextualized understandings of neoliberal formations may shed some light on how inegalitarian upwards redistribution has come to pass. It focuses on the Australian government of John Howard (1996–2007), arguing that its fiscal policies created an ‘investor state’ – a uniquely generous and expensive system of tax cuts and state subsidy for investors and consumers of private welfare services. This fulfilled the general neoliberal imperative to boost markets in a locally adapted way that built on the market liberalization of the previous Hawke and Keating governments. Importantly, however, it also ...

Open Cultural Studies

MasterChef Australia is the most popular television series in Australian history. It gives a wide... more MasterChef Australia is the most popular television series in Australian history. It gives a wide range of ordinary people the chance to show they can master culinary arts to a professional standard. Through content and textual analysis of seven seasons of the show this article examines gendered patterns in its representation of participants and culinary professionals. Women are often depicted as home cooks by inclination while the figure of the professional chef remains almost exclusively male. Despite its rhetoric of inclusivity, MCA does little to challenge norms of the professional gastronomic field that have devalued women’s cooking while valorising “hard” masculinized culinary cultures led by men.

Sage, 2019

Contributors

Local Government Studies, 2019

Australian Literary Studies, 2013

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2011

Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory

M/C Journal

Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy

Critical Sociology

Open Cultural Studies

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This article aims to examine how and why the urban metal scene in Bangladesh came into existence.... more This article aims to examine how and why the urban metal scene in Bangladesh came into existence. Based on interviews
with key figures in the scene, ethnographic observation and textual analysis, the article proposes that urban youths’
frustration with the poor state of conditions in the country is channelled into a passion to build an alternative space. Participants assert the distinction of their music from mainstream rock and pop. Translocal connections with other metal scenes existing elsewhere are emphasized in a local scene that remains tied to the activities of a largely middle-class, part-time, male population of artists who share particular social and economic resources.