Böcker av Robert Jackall

Talking dogs pitching ethnic food. Heart-tugging appeals for contributions. Recruitment calls for enlistment in the military. Tub-thumpers excoriating American society with over-the-top rhetoric. At every turn, Americans are exhorted to spend money, join organizations, rally to causes, or express outrage. Image Makers is a comprehensive analysis of modern advocacy-from commercials to public service ads to government propaganda-and its roots in advertising and public relations. Robert Jackall and Janice M. Hirota explore the fashioning of the apparatus of advocacy through the stories of two organizations, the Committee on Public Information, which sold the Great War to the American public, and the Advertising Council, which since the Second World War has been the main coordinator of public service advertising. They then turn to the career of William Bernbach, the adman's adman, who reinvented advertising and grappled creatively with the profound skepticism of a propaganda-weary midcentury public. Jackall and Hirota argue that the tools-in-trade and habits of mind of "image makers" have now migrated into every corner of modern society. Advocacy is now a vocation for many, and American society abounds as well with "technicians in moral outrage," including street-smart impresarios, feminist preachers, and bombastic talk-radio hosts. The apparatus and ethos of advocacy give rise to endlessly shifting patterns of conflicting representations and claims, and in their midst Image Makers offers a clear and spirited understanding of advocacy in contemporary society and the quandaries it generates.

The series works in the classical tradition of social theory. In this view, theory is the historically informed framing of intellectual problems about concrete social issues and the resolution of those problems through the analysis of empirical data.

This analysis of advocacy - from commercials to public service ads to government propaganda - and its roots in advertising and public relations, uses the story of two organizations, the Committee on Public Information and the Advertising Council to clarify the quandaries it generates.

Based on years of fieldwork with the New York City Police Department and the District Attorney of New York, this book examines the moral ambiguities of the detectives' world as they shuttle between the streets and a bureaucratic behemoth.

Jackall tells how New York detectives pieced together a case of drug trafficking, money laundering, and murder, centered on a vicious Dominican gang known as the Wild Cowboys. Jackall's New York is a society with irreconcilable differences, fraught with self-doubt and moral ambivalence, where institutional logics often lead to perverse outcomes.