How do we explain the breakthrough market success of businesses like Nike, Starbucks, Ben & Jerry's, and Jack Daniel's? Conventional models of strategy and innovation simply don't work. The most influential ideas on innovation are shaped by the worldview of engineers and economists - build a better mousetrap and the world will take notice. Holt and Cameron challenge this conventional wisdom and take an entirely different approach: champion a better ideology and the world will take notice as well. Holt and Cameron build a powerful new theory of cultural innovation. Brands in mature categories get locked into a form of cultural mimicry, what the authors call a cultural orthodoxy. Historical changes in society create demand for new culture - ideological opportunities that upend this orthodoxy. Cultural innovations repurpose cultural content lurking in subcultures to respond to this emerging demand, leapfrogging entrenched incumbents. Cultural Strategy guides managers and entrepreneurs on how to leverage ideological opportunities: - How managers can use culture to out-innovate their competitors - How entrepreneurs can identify new market opportunities that big companies miss - How underfunded challengers can win against category Goliaths - How technology businesses can avoid commoditization - How social entrepreneurs can develop businesses that appeal to more than just fellow activists - How subcultural brands can break out of the 'cultural chasm' to mass market success - How global brands can pursue cross-cultural strategies to succeed in local markets - How organizations can maximize their innovation capabilities by avoiding the brand bureaucracy trap Written by leading authorities on branding in the world today, along with one of the advertising industry's leading visionaries, Cultural Strategy transforms what has always been treated as the "intuitive" side of market innovation into a systematic strategic discipline.

Strategies for Cultural Change develops a conceptual framework for thinking about cultural change. Starting with a discussion of the vocabulary (the concepts) of cultural change, the book moves on to the grammar (the thinking structures), and finally the ""oral"" practice (the applications) of cultural change in the organizational setting. Four main questions are addressed: Why change culture? Is planned cultural change possible? What kind of cultural change is envisaged? How does cultural change occur? The book contains 14 chapters organized into two parts. Part One examines the different types of cultural change strategy in some depth. ""Developmental"" and ""transformational"" strategies are then brought together into a single conceptual framework for cultural change. Part Two shifts from strategy to implementation; from thinking frameworks to frameworks for action. It begins by surveying current practice and examines the various, often strikingly different, ways in which people seek to effect cultural change in their organizations. Accounts are presented based both on the author's own first-hand experiences of working with private and public sector companies on cultural change programs, and on an extensive review of the available literature.

Cultural Realism is an in-depth study of premodern Chinese strategic thought that has important implications for contemporary international relations theory. In applying a Western theoretical debate to China, Iain Johnston advances rigorous procedures for testing for the existence and influence of "strategic culture." Johnston sets out to answer two empirical questions. Is there a substantively consistent and temporally persistent Chinese strategic culture? If so, to what extent has it influenced China's approaches to security? The focus of his study is the Ming dynasty's grand strategy against the Mongols (1368-1644). First Johnston examines ancient military texts as sources of Chinese strategic culture, using cognitive mapping, symbolic analysis and congruence tests to determine whether there is a consistent grand strategic preference ranking across texts that constitutes a single strategic culture. Then he applies similar techniques to determine the effect of the strategic culture on the strategic preferences of the Ming decision makers. Finally, he assesses the effect of these preferences on Ming policies towards the Mongol "threat." The findings of this book challenge dominant interpretations of traditional Chinese strategic thought. They suggest also that the roots of realpolitik are ideational and not predominantly structural. The results lead to the surprising conclusion that there may be, in fact, fewer cross-national differences in strategic culture than proponents of the "strategic culture" approach think.

Ecological organizing: implications of evolving cultural values for organization and strategy / Peter J. Robertson and Joseph W. Harder -- Have you seen corporate cultural responsibility? Prospects of a new construct for corporations operating across communities / W. G. (Will) Zhao, Kyle Neabel, and Jingjing Du -- Managing cultural integration in mergers and acquisitions / José-Luis Rodríguez-Sánchez, Eva-María Mora-Valentín, and Marta Ortiz-de-Urbina-Criado -- Culture, paradoxical frames, and behavioral strategy / Joshua Keller and Erica Wen Chen -- Cultural values in the fair-trade market: examining producers' organizations / Mantiaba Coulibaly-Ballet, Zorana Jerinic, and Djamila Elidrissi -- National culture and legitimacy in international alliances / Rajesh Kumar and T. K. Das -- Are family businesses values-driven organizations? An exploratory research / Angela Dettori and Michela Floris -- The case of executives' cultural intelligence in behavioral strategy: an introductory essay and a research agenda / Arash Najmaei -- Building an alliance culture: lessons from Quintiles / Dave Luvison, Ard-Pieter De Man, and Jack Pearson -- Personal values of civil engineers and architects in the strategic decisions of construction companies / Atilla Damci, David Arditi, Gul Polat, and Harun Turkoglu -- Cultural characteristics of Chilean and Brazilian workforces and strategic human resource management: an integrative literature review / Francisca Álvarez-Figuer.

Strategic Intelligence is a form of meaning that promises the possibility of strategic advantage, dignity, the achievement of objective, and the fulfillment of potential in hostile environments. In The Cultural Roots of Strategic Intelligence Gino LaPaglia demonstrates that the strategic aspect of reason—arising in human experience, encoded as value, and born by culture as a strategic resource—has been encoded as values that have been memorialized in culturally authoritative sources in various Eurasian cultures for thousands of years. These sources have validated a strategic orientation in the world, legitimized the strategist as a heroic identity, and transmitted a coherent world view that enables the practitioner of strategy to overcome asymmetric threat. By excavating the provenance of strategic thought expressed in the cultural identity of the strategist in the most culturally authoritative mythological, literary, philosophical and religious sources, and excavating the underlying strategic values expressed in cultural products, LaPaglia demonstrates that the strategic aspect of human rationality is one of the most basic structural dynamics of human meaning, and that the transmission of this strategic way of being and acting in the world offers hope for life’s underdogs.

It is a peculiar moment for art, as it becomes both increasingly rarefied and associated with elite lifestyle culture, while simultaneously ubiquitous, with the boom of "creative" industries and the proliferation of new technologies for making art. In these important essays, Ben Davis covers everything from Instagram to artificial intelligence, eco-art to cultural appropriation. Critical, insightful, and hopeful even in the face of the apocalyptic, this is a must read for those looking to understand the current art world, as well as the role of the artist in the world today.

Grounded in painstaking research, To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture revisits the circumstances which led to the arts being embraced at the heart of the Cuban Revolution. Introducing the main protagonists to the debate, this previously untold story follows the polemical twists and turns that ensued in the volatile atmosphere of the 1960s and ’70s. The picture that emerges is of a struggle for dominance between Soviet-derived approaches and a uniquely Cuban response to the arts under socialism. The latter tendency, which eventually won out, was based on the principles of Marxist humanism. As such, this book foregrounds emancipatory understandings of culture. To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture takes its title from a slogan – devised by artists and writers at a meeting in October 1960 and adopted by the First National Congress of Writers and Artists the following August – which sought to highlight the intrinsic importance of culture to the Revolution. Departing from popular top-down conceptions of Cuban policy-formation, this book establishes the close involvement of the Cuban people in cultural processes and the contribution of Cuba’s artists and writers to the policy and praxis of the Revolution. Ample space is dedicated to discussions that remain hugely pertinent to those working in the cultural field, such as the relationship between art and ideology, engagement and autonomy, form and content. As the capitalist world struggles to articulate the value of the arts in anything other than economic terms, this book provides us with an entirely different way of thinking about culture and the policies underlying it.