Business Commons^™

Well Traveled: Strong Relationships And Unique Challenges Are Revealed In “Driving Richmond: Stories And Portraits Of Grtc Bus Drivers”, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

Here’s a well-kept secret: The regional GRTC Transit System is among the most progressive organizations in Richmond. The nonprofit plays a major role in reducing pollution, easing traffic congestion and connecting people to jobs. Its reform-minded leadership is eager to play a larger role. Its unionized bus drivers, which included some of the first waves of black and female drivers, help hold it all together.

And those drivers love their jobs — to a degree unusual for workers in any profession. That’s what I learned through interviews with 16 current and former drivers this summer for an exhibition at the …

Crossing The Great Divides: Selfridges, Modernity, And The Commodified Authentic, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

This article takes these critiques as a given. Incisive critical commentary on advertising and on marketing abounds, and exploring the false claims and schemes within a commercial culture is an essential and ongoing project. This critical approach, however, is not the end of the story, for armed only with skepticism, we are blinded to the dramatic commercial revolution offered by Selfridges, one that is intrinsically tied to British modernism. Selfridges embodies and deploys a surprisingly modernist set of tensions between low and high culture, and between the specter of the mass market and an alternative, non-commercial aesthetic. As this article …

The Shop Windows Were Full Of Sparkling Chains: Consumer Desire And Woolf’S Night And Day, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

“You know the horror of buying clothes” (L2 232), wrote Virginia Woolf to her sister in 1918. This statement takes us to the heart of early critical assumptions about Woolf and consumerism. Following good modernist principles, the argument ran, Woolf’s art was naturally above shopping, distinct from and even a reaction against consumer culture. More recently, critics such as Jennifer Wicke, Rachel Bowlby, and Reginald Abbott have unsettled this separation and have started to consider the complex relations among consumption, the market, and Woolf’s writing. Most of this attention, however, has focused either on selected essays or on Mrs. Dalloway …