Questions of symbolic classification have been central to sociology since its earliest days, given the relevance of distinctions for both affiliation and conflict. Music and its genres are no exception, organizing people and songs within a system of symbolic classification. Numerous studies chronicle the history of specific genres of music, but none document recurrent processes of development and change across musics. In this article, we analyze 60 musics in the United States, delineating between 12 social, organizational, and symbolic attributes. We find four distinct genre types—Avant-garde, Scene-based, Industry-based, and Traditionalist. We also find that these genre types combine to form three distinct trajectories. Two-thirds originate in an Avant-garde genre, and the rest originate as a scene or, to our surprise, in an Industry-based genre. We conclude by discussing a number of questions raised by our findings, including the implications for understanding symbolic classification in fields other tha...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25472554.pdf

Classification as Culture: Types and Trajectories of Music Genres

How do markets change? Findings from a 7-year longitudinal processual investigation of consumer performances in the war on music downloading suggest that markets in the cultural creative sphere (those organizing the exchange of intellectual goods such as music, movies, software, and the written word) evolve through stages of perpetual structural instability. Each stage addresses an enduring cultural tension between countervailing utilitarian and possessive ideals. Grounded in anthropology and consumer behavior, I illustrate this historical dynamic through the process of marketplace drama, a fourfold sequence of performed conflict among opposing groups of consumers and producers. Implications for theorizing on market system dynamics and the consumption of performance are offered.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/522098

Conflict and Compromise: Drama in Marketplace Evolution

This article challenges accounts of global environmental politics which come from a liberal institutionalist position and focus on the development of international regimes. We argue that a perspective which starts from the role of the state in promoting capital accumulation can much better explain the content both of state policies and of particular international agreements. We first outline the way that fossil fuel companies have been able to secure their interests in state policies on global warming. We then develop the argument that their ability to do this is best explained in terms of the structural power of capital, deriving from the role of the state within capitalist societies. Finally, we suggest that this may also be producing transformations within global warming politics, as insurance companies in particular become involved. Such involvement, particularly given the heightened power of finance under conditions of globalization, suggests the possibility of constructing coalitions which may turn ...

A climate for business: global warming, the state and capital

1. Music’s deep connection to social identities has been distinctively intensified by globalization. This intensification is due to the ways cultural separation and social exchange are mutually accelerated by transnational flows of technology, media, and popular culture. The result is that musical identities and styles are more visibly transient, more audibly in states of constant fission and fusion than ever before. 2. Our era is increasingly dominated by fantasies and realizations of sonic virtuality. Not only does contemporary technology make all musical worlds actually or potentially transportable and hearable in all others, but this transportability is something fewer and fewer people take in any way to be remarkable. As sonic virtuality is increasingly naturalized, everyone’s musical world will be felt and experienced as both more definite and more vague, specific yet blurred, particular but general, in place and in motion. 3. It has taken only one hundred years for sound recording technologies to amplify sonic exchange to a point that overwhelms prior and contiguous his-

A Sweet Lullaby for World Music

The concept of improvisation has become increasingly popular in the discourse of organizational theory. This paper explores several aspects of improvisation, in the context of musical, organizational, and everyday activities, in order to address some of the philosophical and practical issues relevant to this emerging interest. Connections are made between the modernist concept of organization and scholarly inquiry, and postmodern or complexity-based approaches that stress creativity as an emergent property of the relationship between order and disorder. It concludes by suggesting that the study of improvisation demands a profound immersion in (inster-)subjectivity, emotions, time, aesthetics, performance, and social creativity, none of which have traditionally been the focus of organization and management studies, or the social sciences in general. It also suggests that the practice of social sciences itself should reflect upon, and attempt to incorporate these elements.

The Complexity of Improvisation and the Improvisation of Complexity: Social Science, Art and Creativity

Noise... The Political Economy of Music

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts -- automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism -- as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of \"end of history\" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize \"everyday life,\" laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American Cinema, 1940-1950

Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward a Disciplinary History of Film Studies 1. First Forays in Film Education: The Pedagogy of Photoplay Composition at Columbia University 2. A Brief Interlude as the Movies March On: Terry Ramsaye and the New School for Social Research 3. "Younger Art, Old College, Happy Union": Harvard Goes into the Business and Art of the Movies 4. Between Academia and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: The University of Southern California Ventures into the Cinema 5. Politics as Pedagogy, Pedagogy as Politics: The Rather Brief Moment in Time of Harry Alan Potamkin 6. Appreciations of Cinema: Syracuse Discovers Film Art 7. Cinematic Diversions in Sociology: Frederic Thrasher in the World of Film Appreciation 8. Middlebrow Translations of Highbrow Philosophy: The Film Fandom of the 1930s Great Books Intellectuals Notes Index

Dana Polan

Papers

Noise... The Political Economy of Music

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American Cinema, 1940-1950

Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film

Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction