Events dominate our screens, our lives, and increasingly global geopolitics. Analysis of events and their management has remained rooted in leisure and management studies - until now. This break-through book situates events in questions of power and social control. Rojek powerfully argues that events are essential elements in corporate-state partnerships of 'invisible government' that have revived the romance of charity as to form illusory communities, while cloaking power imbalances and social inequalities. Events are moving politics from the old idea of 'the personal is political' to the new, more seductive notion that 'representation is resistance'. Wielding rich case studies from the World Cup and the Olympics to Live Aid, Burning Man and Mardis Gras, Rojek presents a dazzlingly original account of communication power, social ordering and control. It is essential reading in media & communication studies and across the social sciences.