This chapter considers SPAM’s emergence as a mass commodity and agent of ‘gastrocolonisation’, charting its appearance in literary texts and popular culture from witty ‘SPAM-ku’ poems’ to the work of Indigenous poets from Oceania. It begins by discussing the commodity’s emergence as a cheap protein source for immigrants and urban working-class Americans during the Depression, before tracing SPAM’s migration to countries such as Hawaii, South Korea and Guam, where American military personnel were stationed during wartime. While SPAM captured hearts and appetites, transitioning from a war ration to haute cuisine, it has been seen as problematic by Indigenous writers such as Craig Santos Perez. The chapter ends by examining SPAM’s appearance in Perez’s poetry as it visualises the devastation wrought upon the CHamoru body and land.

Chapter 5 follows a small but diverse group of Cuban Spanish Civil War volunteers, paying particular attention to Rolando Masferrer and Eufemio Fernández. The post-Spain trajectories of these volunteers illustrate the volatile nature of politics in Cuba and the Circum-Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s, where coalitions were consistently made and unmade in transnational efforts to topple regional dictators. Later, several Spanish Civil War volunteers came to occupy influential roles as strategists and instructors within the military structures that the Castro regime developed to support revolutionary movements in the Americas after 1959. Thus, Cuban politics offered an unusually large and varied number of opportunities for Spanish Civil War veterans to remobilise after their service in Spain and to continue to engage with armed revolutionary projects of a transnational or internationalist nature.

The publicity politician starred centrally in the attention economy. He vied for press attention to maintain his symbolic and political relevance. Celebrity politicians drowned out other politicians and policies in the news – demonstrating the disparity in media attention. Yet too much attention hurt leaders’ traditional ‘aura’: quantity jeopardized quality. To remain aloof, they limited their exposure – avoiding early ‘paparazzi’. Maintaining stature was easier for monarchs than conventional politicians, but even the latter attained elevated positions. While this containment of coverage brought benefits, extra exposure could also enhance a politician’s celebrity – even if it was negative. Politicians and journalists realized the advantages of negative publicity, with some opposing criticism of a political competitor to avoid increasing his attention capital. This attention economy functioned according to a Matthew effect: politicians who received attention garnered ever more attention. Mediagenic politicians, notably natural celebrities like monarchs, flourished in the international struggle for media attention. While the mass press democratized celebrity – a diversity of people gaining fame and access to power – political noteworthies, traditional anchors of stability, occupied a privileged position in the fin-de-siècle attention economy. Ample attention finally constituted feedback for politicians – the media ‘democratically’ shaping the parameters of politics.

This chapter synthesises the key themes of the book, focusing on how the new psychology of intergroup relations advances our understanding of social change. The chapter first summarises how the new approach enhances traditional theories and methods, highlighting the role of place, time and change in group processes and intergroup relations. Multi-group dynamics create a complex system which is marked by intersectionality, and the interplay of stability, conflict and innovation. Further, the chapter explores how individuals and groups can engage with the new psychology of system change. It stresses the importance of altering relationships, understanding pushback and articulating shared visions to address collective threats with effective solutions. The need for enhanced perception of latent forces in social and physical environments is emphasised, alongside the call for connecting knowledge and power across mainstream institutions. The chapter considers how readers can be equipped to understand and effect change locally and globally, and to see and intervene in the broader socio-ecological system.

Preparing oneself to thoughtfully engage in intracultural ethnography within today’s multifaceted and dynamic cultural settings is no small task. To document and theorize the cultural undercurrents at work in today’s multicultural work settings requires an understanding of the complexity of culture as expressed, enacted, and negotiated across interconnected levels of analysis and spheres of influence. The following tools and practice opportunities are designed to consolidate your learning from the previous chapters, using practical aids for sifting through the various layers of culture while allowing for and giving voice to individual variance.

Chapter 3 synthesizes analyses of changes in both social justice movements and legal and policy institutions to broaden our understanding of interconnections among segregation, environmental disparities, and structural vulnerabilities in low-income communities of color. The Buchanan case highlights a relatively narrow framing of land-use injustice in the early twentieth century: zoning as a tool of racial segregation in housing. Throughout the twentieth century, the struggle for land use justice broadened to address the deep structural inequalities and systemic marginalization of all low-income communities of color, including land-use policies creating disparities in environmental conditions, community infrastructure, and vulnerabilities to disasters, shocks, and change. As both grassroots movements and institutions have evolved to grapple with the persistence and complexity of land use injustice in the United States, building the capacities, power, and resilience of low-income communities of color is critical to transformation and justice, and this growing focus on community capacities has come to characterize land-use justice movements.

Transcultural ethnography is about understanding the flows of culture and its consequences as organizations expand their global reach across national boundaries. This scope of research focus beyond a company’s nation of origin is precisely what distinguishes international business from other types of business studies that are primarily domestic. Yet, the concept of national borders is fraught with controversy both in real world actuality as well as in ivory tower discussions. An ethnographic perspective that considers both culture and borders as concepts that are often overdetermined in our efforts to put together aggregated understandings of a world increasingly characterized by cultural flows as well as barriers is essential to theory building. Since transcultural ethnography involves research at globally distributed sites, a comprehensive understanding of how changing cultural contexts affect multinational enterprises (MNEs) and in turn the reciprocal effects of the MNEs on the host environments is essential to advancing transnational theory.

Chapter 1, “‘We Are Not Immune’: A New Branch of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement,” begins by describing the emergence of a new coalition of feminists who turned their attention to the HIV epidemic in an attempt to understand how the virus would impact women. Together they realized that HIV was killing women more often than the those in charge of the AIDS response acknowledged. The failure to recognize and respond to issues facing women with HIV was due, in part, to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention definition of AIDS that did not include gynecological infections. The incomplete definition of AIDS resulted in a lack of data on women with HIV and impacted the Social Security Administration’s determinations of who should receive benefits. Allying with lawyers and fellow activists, feminists set out to challenge the law and science of the epidemic.

Traditional pastoral practices have maintained Alpine grasslands over thousands of years, and Alpine biodiversity now depends on these practices. Grasslands are also central to the identity of pastoral communities: They are biocultural landscapes. Across the Alps, these landscapes are now threatened by high rates of agricultural land abandonment as traditional, labor-intensive agricultural methods become uneconomic, and small-scale development increases. The Autonomous Province of Bozen/Bolzano-South Tyrol, Italy, experiences some of the lowest rates of land abandonment and high rates of grassland retention. The case study explores the functions of regulatory intervention and coordination, two of the regulatory functions advanced by this book’s CIRCle Framework of regulatory functions for addressing cumulative environmental problems. It investigates how a diverse set of regulatory interventions provides for maintaining and restoring grasslands in South Tyrol, and how diverse forms of coordination – links between areas of laws, coordinating institutions, and dispute resolution processes – facilitate implementation in a context of deep multilevel governance.