This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to make a contribution to contemporary interests in re-emphasising the relevance of sociological and related inter-disciplinary perspectives for the understanding of events and mega-events. It outlines a framework for interpreting contemporary macro-structural social change and applies it in general terms to media, urban and locational mega-event issues. The book explores the problems that so-called internet piracy causes for sport mega-events, states' policy responses to this and mega-event organisations' search for a new symbiosis between events and the media. It looks into mega-events' simultaneous record of creating new public spaces in modern cities, and it does so mainly with reference to the Expo event genre. The book focuses on the main non-Western region of East Asia, and specifically on its core, the People's Republic of China.

This chapter examines the ways in which it might be wiser to look at criminology in reverse. Not only do the rich get richer and the poor get prison, as Reiman's famous book title suggests, but the law would appear to operate in such a way that the crimes of the rich are the ones causing the greatest social harm yet receiving the weakest social censure, whilst the crimes of the poor and young cause the least social harm yet receive the greatest social censure. This is the stuff of a through-the-looking-glass Jabberwocky criminology whose reverse message can only be read by holding it up to the mirror. This chapter assesses whether this strange criminology can be explained by the analysis of mimesis and the mimetic double bind in the work of Renee Girard, or whether the phenomenon is better seen as an inevitable reflection of the roots of dominant social censures within dominant and contradictory social relations.

Some students fit on Dreamfields' conveyor belt with greater ease from the outset. This chapter begins to unpick the inherent normality and 'innocence' of the middle classes embedded within Dreamfields' institutional perspective. It examines how this preferred normality intersects with race and is compounded by the education marketplace's demand for results. The chapter explores how these parameters shape teacher and student negotiations. Deficit representations of the working class underpin Dreamfields' rhetoric and practice, as the loud, illiterate 'chav mum' with her gaggle of multicoloured, illegitimate children is replaced by the respectable middle-class (mostly white) surrogate parent-teacher. Meanwhile the white working class are represented as an obstacle to what Chris Haylett terms 'multicultural modernisation', with their valueless culture obstructing the realisation of neoliberal modernity. Ethnic-minority children fall into the problematic working-class category. They are folded into the term 'urban children' and tied to pathologised urban space.

In 1847 the American Medical Association introduced its Code of Ethics, which deemed it ‘derogatory to professional character … for a physician to hold a patent for any surgical instrument, or medicine’. This chapter examines how the American patent system and the AMA’s ethics influenced B.F. Palmer, who in 1846 received the first patent for an artificial limb in the United States. While Palmer’s extra-medical position helped him avoid ethical controversy, the patent system also reinforced his aspirations to professional stature as a ‘surgeon-artist’. In arguing for a patent extension in 1860, Palmer and his attorney framed the patent as a kind of social contract, asserting the surgeon-artist’s exclusive, expert, and philanthropic character and depicting a benevolent professionalism in close parallel with that of the AMA. Palmer appealed to the moral economies of patenting and medicine alike, yet his argument also cast the sentimental work of resolving impairment in the hard fiscal terms legible to the Commissioner of Patents. The surgeon-artist’s professionalism depended on an ethic of beneficent contribution to the public good, underwritten by the authority of medicine, protected by the patent, and measured against the costs of charity.

In a novel departure in Irish public health promotion, 250,000 free measuring tapes were distributed via pharmacies throughout Ireland to encourage people to measure their waists in 2011. This was part of the Stop the Spread (STS) campaign which sought to change people's perception of a healthy and normal waist size. Its central message was that a waist circumference above 32 and 37 inches for women and men, respectively is overweight and an indicator of particular health risks. This chapter suggests that STS campaign illustrates a change in biopedagogical instructions and techniques in health promotion. It focuses on some recent Foucauldian scholarship in order to extend the relevance of such concepts to twenty-first-century movements in biopolitics and neoliberalism, and in order to set out an analytical framework by which STS can be analysed.

This chapter explores the role of social media in the creation of myths and public beliefs about justice and law. Using the case study of the YouTube clip Kony 2012 the author identifies a number of myths and public beliefs this video creates and sustains, looking at three principal myths, namely the myths regarding the background and facts of the armed conflict and the current situation in Uganda, the myths regarding possible military and legal solutions and last but not least the myth surrounding the effectiveness of online activism itself. Rauxloh argues that the portrayal of a very long and complex conflict as simply a war of good versus evil and the presented solution of the “mighty West” helping the “helpless Africa” perpetuates dangerous stereotypes which are in direct contradiction to the aims of international criminal justice in general and the International Criminal Court in particular. It is also argued that one of the most damaging myths is the notion of the internet as the freely accessible democratic forum which opens up the power of voice to everybody. Rauxloh warns that social media have an unprecedented potential for creating, spreading and perpetuating myths and public beliefs.

Given the symmetry between the changes within football and the larger structural changes in the Mancunian and English economy, Manchester United fans provide an excellent site through which to perceive how urban economic transformations have been understood and responded to. This chapter explores this process through an investigation of a particular group of Manchester United fans, who in 2005 formed a breakaway club 'FC United of Manchester' in response to a transnational debt-leveraged buy-out of their club. Distinctions between Manchester United's and FC United's modes of exchange were most straightforwardly articulated by Paul who told the author that 'FC United is a community club whereas Manchester United is a business'. 'Community' then becomes a political language but one that was used to contest a process of capitalist transformation and to bring a new reality into being. Since the 1980s, the club has become a sporting global brand.

This chapter establishes some of the conceptual cornerstones associated with governmentality thinking and considers their implications for an analysis of health and health policy in Ireland. It begins by laying out Michel Foucault and others' understandings of governmentality, and follows this by exploring how governmentality literature has been deployed within studies of health and health policy analysis. The chapter provides a context to some of the specificities and contingencies of Irish health policy debates. It also presents some key concepts discussed in this book. The book focuses on the way in which different health issues, through sources including policy documents, television health promotion campaigns and documents from professional bodies, have sought to 'bring into being' particular health problems and construct particular health behaviours as problematic. It deals with the issues of obesity and childhood, albeit in very different ways.