Introduction: Culture Incorporated

The production of an issue of an academic journal that meets international standards of refereeing and quality control is a steep learning curve for the novice editor, and brings great respect for the necessarily unacknowledged ‘blind’ readers, whose scrupulous analysis is integral to finding the shape of the issue. But what would happen if, by a Brechtian leap of defamiliarization, the sphere of consultancy were stretched to include, say, the Birmingham and Cambridge godfathers of cultural studies?