Jonathan Schroeder
Jonathan Schroeder is the William A. Kern Professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology.
His research focuses on the intersections of branding and visual culture.
He is the author of Visual Consumption (Routledge, 2002), co-author of From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands (Palgrave, 2013) (with Zhiyan Wu and Janet Borgerson), and Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America (MIT Press, 2017) (wth Janet Borgerson), editor of Conversations on Consumption (Routledge, 2013) and Brands: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2015) and co-editor of Brand Culture (Routledge, 2006), the Routledge Companion to Visual Organization (2014) (with Emma Bell and Samantha Warren), and August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Image, Text and Theatre (2019) (with Anna Stenport and Eszter Szalczer, and Designed for Dancing: How Midcentury Recrods Taught America to Dance (MIT Press, 2021).
His PhD is in Social Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and he did postdoctoral work at Rhode Island School of Design.
He has held visiting appointments at Wesleyan University (Center for the Humanities), Göteborg University, Sweden (Centre for Consumer Science), University of Auckland, New Zealand (Centre for Digital Enterprise), Bocconi University in Milan (Program in Fashion, Experience, and Design), Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade, Walailak University, Thailand, and London School of Economics.
Address: 92 Lomb Memorial Drive
Eastman Building 3006
Rochester, NY 14623
His research focuses on the intersections of branding and visual culture.
He is the author of Visual Consumption (Routledge, 2002), co-author of From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands (Palgrave, 2013) (with Zhiyan Wu and Janet Borgerson), and Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America (MIT Press, 2017) (wth Janet Borgerson), editor of Conversations on Consumption (Routledge, 2013) and Brands: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2015) and co-editor of Brand Culture (Routledge, 2006), the Routledge Companion to Visual Organization (2014) (with Emma Bell and Samantha Warren), and August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Image, Text and Theatre (2019) (with Anna Stenport and Eszter Szalczer, and Designed for Dancing: How Midcentury Recrods Taught America to Dance (MIT Press, 2021).
His PhD is in Social Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and he did postdoctoral work at Rhode Island School of Design.
He has held visiting appointments at Wesleyan University (Center for the Humanities), Göteborg University, Sweden (Centre for Consumer Science), University of Auckland, New Zealand (Centre for Digital Enterprise), Bocconi University in Milan (Program in Fashion, Experience, and Design), Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade, Walailak University, Thailand, and London School of Economics.
Address: 92 Lomb Memorial Drive
Eastman Building 3006
Rochester, NY 14623
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The book offers insights into Strindberg as a multimedia artist, whose writing is inseparable from his visual imagination and from the visual technologies of his time. His very modern work can be understood as an important influence on contemporary photography, cinema, and painting.
The book is beautifully illustrated, with many never-before-seen images from Strindberg's work, and includes contributions from actress Liv Ullmann, director Robert Wilson, and curator and well-known museum director Daniel Birnbaum.
Not just decorated cardboard that protected the vinyl disks within, record album covers in the 1950s and 1960s served commercial, pedagogical, and rhetorical purposes. Record albums, as popular and mass culture artifacts, were designed to teach US citizens about ideal lifestyles in postwar America. Record albums suggested how to entertain at home, appreciate diverse cultures, and travel the world. The book explores the contribution of record albums, as material artifacts, to the imagination and construction of modern US identity and global citizenship, and discusses how the Cold War raging between the two postwar superpowers encroached upon the design, music, and marketing of mainstream albums. These midcentury LPs – featuring the Cuban playground released before Castro, jazz albums adorned with abstract art, and lifestyle LPs with attractive images of appliance-filled kitchens – appear as subtle elements of the ideological struggles of the era. Drawing upon notions of materiality and agency in the constitution of consuming subjects, and informed by critical visual and cultural analysis, the book reveals how peripheral objects, such as record albums, reveal hidden pedagogical aspects of popular culture.
The book is organized into “home” and “away” sections. As recording technology emerged and developed, it brought sounds, sights and specially designed furniture – including the hi-fi – into the home. The home section reveals how the US home became an entertainment zone – a place to play music, prepare dinner, and show off one’s taste for guests – in postwar popular culture. The analysis shows how record albums occupied a space evoking identity and group membership in many US homes during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The away section examines LPs from an influential era in the development of international tourism for a mass US population, when the marketing of hi-fi equipment, Broadway shows and movies such as Flower Drum Song, The King and I, and South Pacific, and packaged tours united to create a sense of the good life, which included a vision of the rest of the world and how to travel through it. Beyond issues of graphic design, the book emphasizes social and cultural themes that animate these LPs via their liner notes, music, and cover design.
perspective to examine the capacity of Chinese brand culture to
serve as a complement to existing models of brand globalization.
Moving away from the trend to study the managerial aspects of
Western brand building in Chinese contexts, we examine how
Chinese branding efforts express significant aspects of their own
brand culture. Our selection of Jay Chou, the 2008 Beijing Olympics
Opening ceremony, and Shanghai Tang, an aspiring global fashion brand with aesthetic roots in Chinese historical culture, as illustrative cases, is fully consistent with this unwritten and unspoken consensus around exploiting Chinese cultural specificity towards the global development of Chinese brands. Although these three cases may seem “under the radar,” we believe that, together, they provide unique insights into the relation between brands and Chinese culture, and offer intriguing possibilities for thinking about global Chinese brands.
Papers
The book offers insights into Strindberg as a multimedia artist, whose writing is inseparable from his visual imagination and from the visual technologies of his time. His very modern work can be understood as an important influence on contemporary photography, cinema, and painting.
The book is beautifully illustrated, with many never-before-seen images from Strindberg's work, and includes contributions from actress Liv Ullmann, director Robert Wilson, and curator and well-known museum director Daniel Birnbaum.
Not just decorated cardboard that protected the vinyl disks within, record album covers in the 1950s and 1960s served commercial, pedagogical, and rhetorical purposes. Record albums, as popular and mass culture artifacts, were designed to teach US citizens about ideal lifestyles in postwar America. Record albums suggested how to entertain at home, appreciate diverse cultures, and travel the world. The book explores the contribution of record albums, as material artifacts, to the imagination and construction of modern US identity and global citizenship, and discusses how the Cold War raging between the two postwar superpowers encroached upon the design, music, and marketing of mainstream albums. These midcentury LPs – featuring the Cuban playground released before Castro, jazz albums adorned with abstract art, and lifestyle LPs with attractive images of appliance-filled kitchens – appear as subtle elements of the ideological struggles of the era. Drawing upon notions of materiality and agency in the constitution of consuming subjects, and informed by critical visual and cultural analysis, the book reveals how peripheral objects, such as record albums, reveal hidden pedagogical aspects of popular culture.
The book is organized into “home” and “away” sections. As recording technology emerged and developed, it brought sounds, sights and specially designed furniture – including the hi-fi – into the home. The home section reveals how the US home became an entertainment zone – a place to play music, prepare dinner, and show off one’s taste for guests – in postwar popular culture. The analysis shows how record albums occupied a space evoking identity and group membership in many US homes during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The away section examines LPs from an influential era in the development of international tourism for a mass US population, when the marketing of hi-fi equipment, Broadway shows and movies such as Flower Drum Song, The King and I, and South Pacific, and packaged tours united to create a sense of the good life, which included a vision of the rest of the world and how to travel through it. Beyond issues of graphic design, the book emphasizes social and cultural themes that animate these LPs via their liner notes, music, and cover design.
perspective to examine the capacity of Chinese brand culture to
serve as a complement to existing models of brand globalization.
Moving away from the trend to study the managerial aspects of
Western brand building in Chinese contexts, we examine how
Chinese branding efforts express significant aspects of their own
brand culture. Our selection of Jay Chou, the 2008 Beijing Olympics
Opening ceremony, and Shanghai Tang, an aspiring global fashion brand with aesthetic roots in Chinese historical culture, as illustrative cases, is fully consistent with this unwritten and unspoken consensus around exploiting Chinese cultural specificity towards the global development of Chinese brands. Although these three cases may seem “under the radar,” we believe that, together, they provide unique insights into the relation between brands and Chinese culture, and offer intriguing possibilities for thinking about global Chinese brands.