Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience

Name: Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience | PLR Database
Price: 49.95 USD
Availability: InStock

Amazon.com Price: $49.95 (as of 20/06/2025 19:44 PST- Details)

Categories: Industries, Kindle eBooks

This is the tale of Sea World, a theme park where the wonders of nature are performed, marketed, and sold. With its trademark star, Shamu the killer whale—in addition to performing dolphins, pettable sting rays, and reproductions of pristine natural worlds—the park represents a careful coordination of shows, dioramas, rides, and concessions built across 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 outcome is an interesting exploration of the role played by images of nature and animals in up to date 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 in regards to the environment, circle of relatives relations, and education.

While Davis shows the many ways in which 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 up to date American culture.

Spectacular Nature opens an intriguing field of inquiry: the role of commercial entertainment in shaping public understandings of our surroundings and environmental problems.

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