De.Centering Soft Power: How Cultural Industries and Policies Interact in Digital Nation Branding (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 107)

Soft power has offered a compelling alternative to coercive power by emphasizing attraction, persuasion, and cultural appeal.Yet its apparent simplicity has obscured profound conceptual tensions.These conceptual weaknesses are compounded by an enduring focus on the state as the primary agent of soft power and a geopolitical inheritance merging from Western imaginary which does not reflect the cultural influence which today flows through the Global South.This collection of papers critically reassesses the concept of soft power by examining how cultural influence is produced, circulated, and contested in contemporary digital and postcolonial contexts.Decentering soft power along three dimensions: conceptually, institutionally, and geopolitically, the contributions trace across diverse empirical contexts how cultural influence is produced, circulated, resisted, and reconfigured through creative labor, heritage work, digital platforms, and counter-narratives, often in tension with official