Chapter 5 traces the relationship between participatory technologies and information management in Russia. It argues that the Direct Line acts as a barometer of public opinion, a forum through which authorities can disseminate information to the public, and a tool to monitor and selectively punish officials. Moreover, this chapter explains how participatory technologies help authorities create the impression of effective governance and act as a means of public image making.

While the history of jazz and the biographies of the music’s practitioners have long enjoyed the attention of critics and audiences, the jazz musicians’ life stories, told in writing and from their personal perspectives, remain an understudied area of jazz scholarship and autobiography studies. This chapter surveys the genre of jazz autobiography by identifying its major styles, forms, and narrative patterns and tracing its century-long history from the 1920s to the 2020s. Assessing works by famous musician-writers such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Anita O’Day, and Artie Shaw, the chapter outlines the diversity of jazz autobiography, focusing on questions of narrative perspective, written and oral style, musical influences, as well as raced, classed, and gendered experiences. The chapter suggests that this diversity is nonetheless encapsulated by a common genre poetics of the jazz life as told from the musician’s vantage point.

This chapter provides a brief historical review of the philosophy of the image and a basic introduction to phenomenology. It then discusses how the phenomenological aesthetics of Hans-Georg Gadamer opens up a new way of understanding the artwork: it can present the truth of the original more clearly. This is demonstrated through examples of figurative art in general and the portrait in particular. In addition to Gadamer’s insights into the nature of an image, Gadamer also provides a new way of understanding mediation. I draw out this insight through the metaphor of sonic resonation, where finite limits need not be seen as the negative constraint of containment, but a positive condition for a particular voice, whose uniqueness adds to the symphonic beauty of the whole.

Representing Samuel Johnson, whose towering intellect and larger than life persona dominated his era, posed a challenge for portrait painters and caricaturists alike. His public image, which coalesced over several decades, has continued to mutate and proliferate long after his death. Expanding the idea of serial portraiture, this chapter examines pairs or clusters of related images across various artists and media, focusing on the formative function of Johnson’s portraits in and after life and their central role in mythologizing him as a literary colossus. This chapter is particularly interested in tracing how visual representations of Johnson morphed over time, were appropriated and reproduced, and interacted dialogically, creating a kaleidoscopic, multifaceted, complex portrait of Johnson. As his close ties with artists, his support of artistic institutions, his print collection, and his collaboration in the creation of numerous portraits amply demonstrate, Johnson was not the ignorant philistine disinterested in his image that he at times

professed to be.

Starting from the premise that discourse is what brings organizations into being, this chapter presents a state-of-the-art review of research on corporate discourse. Its main goal is to evaluate the contributions that discourse analytical perspectives and methodologies have made to the understanding of organizational practices, showing how corporations use discourse strategically to create and maintain corporate identity and perform ideological work. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part reviews studies concerned with aspects of internal communications, highlighting discursive strategies for “doing” business and adopted across contexts and media including business meetings, job interviews and business emails. The second part discusses studies investigating external communications, focusing specifically on communications with investors and stakeholders as well as with the wider world. Studies exploring CEO letters, annual and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, advertising and branding are reviewed. This part also discusses research that examined corporate communications in “moments of crisis,” showing how corporations strategically employ discourse to maintain a positive public image. The final sections summarize the implications and the need for “doing” discourse analysis in corporate environments and conclude with avenues for further research.