Spectacular Nature or Managing Organizational Change

Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience

Author: Susan G Davis

This is the story of Sea World, a theme park where the wonders of nature are performed, marketed, and sold. With its trademark star, Shamu the killer whale--as well as performing dolphins, pettable sting rays, and reproductions of pristine natural worlds--the park represents a careful coordination of shows, dioramas, rides, and concessions built around the theme of ocean life. Susan Davis analyzes the Sea World experience and the forces that produce it: the theme park industry; Southern California tourism; the privatization of urban space; and the increasing integration of advertising, entertainment, and education. The result is an engaging exploration of the role played by images of nature and animals in contemporary commercial culture, and a precise account of how Sea World and its parent corporation, Anheuser-Busch, succeed. Davis argues that Sea World builds its vision of nature around customers' worries and concerns about the environment, family relations, and education.
While Davis shows the many ways that Sea World monitors its audience and manipulates animals and landscapes to manufacture pleasure, she also explains the contradictions facing the enterprise in its campaign for a positive public identity. Shifting popular attitudes, animal rights activists, and environmental laws all pose practical and public relations challenges to the theme park. Davis confronts the park's vast operations with impressive insight and originality, revealing Sea World as both an industrial product and a phenomenon typical of contemporary American culture. Spectacular Nature opens an intriguing field of inquiry: the role of commercial entertainment in shaping public understandings of theenvironment and environmental problems.

Table of Contents:

	List of Illustrations
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
1	Another World: Theme Parks and Nature	19
2	The Park and the City	40
3	Producing the Sea World Experience: Landscape and Labor	77
4	Enlightenment Lite: The Theme Park Classroom	117
5	Routine Surprises: Producing Entertainment	152
6	Dreaming of Whales: The Shamu Show	197
	Conclusion	233
	Notes	247
	Index	305

Look this: Cases in Financial Management or Creating Do It Yourself Customers

Managing Organizational Change: A Multiple Perspectives Approach

Author: Ian Palmer

Managing Organizational Change, by Palmer/Dunford/Akin, provides managers with an awareness of the issues involved in managing change, moving them beyond "one-best way" approaches and providing them with access to multiple perspectives that they can draw upon in order to enhance their success in producing organizational change. These multiple perspectives provide a theme for the text as well as a framework for the way each chapter outlines different options open to managers in helping them to identify, in a reflective way, the actions and choices open to them. The authors favor using multiple perspectives to ensure that change managers are not trapped by a "one-best way" of approaching change which limits their options for action. Changing organizations is as messy as it is exhilarating, as frustrating as it is satisfying, as muddling-through and creative a process as it is a rational one. This book recognizes these tensions for those involved in managing organizational change. Rather than pretend that they do not exist it confronts them head on, identifying why they are there, how they can be managed and the limits they create for what the manager of organizational change can achieve.