Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System:

John B. Thompson, profesor en la Universidad de Cambridge, ha dedicado los últimos 10 años de su vida e intereses en la investigación, a comprender la lógica que hay detrás de la producción de publicaciones, tanto en el ámbito académico como en el comercial. En el año 2005 publicó su libro Books in the Digital Age, el cual devela el mundo de las publicaciones académicas en dos entornos anglosajones: el de Estados Unidos y el de Inglaterra. Una reseña a este libro fue publicada en Comunicación y Sociedad (Fuentes Navarro, 2006, pp. 181-185). Posterior a la descripción y análisis de las publicaciones en el entorno académico, Thompson se propuso un reto mayor: describir y analizar la industria de la publicación de libros pero ahora comerciales –tanto de ficción como no ficción–, también en Estados Unidos y en Inglaterra.

Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century

In assessing new business proposals, venture capitalists rely on their own implicit theories (beliefs) about the attributes that a potentially successful business should possess. From these 'commonsense theories' venture capitalists develop decision rules (selection criteria) to assess the potential viability (and likely profitability) of new business proposals. Although identifying these selection criteria is important, it is also important to determine whether the criteria actually work; that is, are they related to future business success? Despite a call for such confirmatory research, there have only been a handful of studies to date that have attempted to validate venture capitalists' selection criteria. This article reviews and analyses previous empirical studies examining the reasons for small and mediumenterprise success and failure, and the results provide support for (validate) the selection criteria developed for a sample of UK venture capitalists.

Do venture capitalists' implicit theories of new business success/failure have emirical validity?

Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age

This paper presents a comparative analysis of career gatekeeping processes in two cultural fields. Drawing on data on appointment procedures in German academia and booking processes in North American stand-up comedy, we compare how gatekeepers in two widely different contexts evaluate and select candidates for established positions in their respective field and validate their decisions. Focusing on three types of gatekeeping practices that have been documented in prior research—typecasting, comparison, and legitimization—our analysis reveals major differences in how gatekeepers perform these practices across our two cases: (1) typecasting based on ascriptive categories versus professional criteria, (2) comparisons that are ad-hoc and holistic versus systematic and guided by performance criteria, and (3) legitimation by means of ritualization versus transparency. We argue that these differences are related to the social and organizational context in which gatekeepers make selection decisions, including differences in the structure of academic and creative careers and the organization of the respective labor markets in which these careers unfold. These findings contribute to scholarship on gatekeeping in cultural fields by providing comparative insights into the work of career gatekeepers and the social organization of career gatekeeping processes.

/pdf/career-gatekeeping-in-cultural-fields-18dmcggz34.pdf

Career gatekeeping in cultural fields

Recent sociological work shows that culture is an important causal variable in labor market outcomes. Does the same hold for product markets? To answer this question, we study a product market in w...

Encultured Biases: The Role of Products in Pathways to Inequality:

Are contemporary higher-status tastes inclusive, exclusive, or both? Recent work suggests that the answer likely is both. And yet, little is known concerning how configurations of such tastes are learned, upheld, and expressed without contradiction. We resolve this puzzle by showing the affordances of different levels of culture (i.e., genres and objects) in the expression of tastes. We rely on original survey data to show that people of higher status taste differently at different levels of culture: more inclusively for genres and more exclusively for objects. Inclusivity at the level of genres is fostered through familial socialization, and exclusivity at the level of objects is fostered through formal schooling. Individuals’ taste configurations are mirrored in and presumably reinforce their adult social-structural positions. The results have important implications for understanding the subtle maintenance of status in an increasingly diverse and putatively meritocratic society.

https://sociologicalscience.com/download/vol-8/july/SocSci_v8_230to264.pdf

Genres, Objects, and the Contemporary Expression of Higher-Status Tastes

Are higher status cultural tastes in the modern United States better described as being inclusive and broad or exclusive and narrow? We construct an original dataset in response to conflicting answ...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/13675494211006090

The social positions of taste between and within music genres: From omnivore to snob:

Since the Quiet Revolution, Quebec has significantly transformed its relationship to Catholicism. Some commentators have even gone as far as discussing an increasingly important secularization with...

Is Quebec Still a Catholically Distinct Society within Canada? An Examination of Catholic Affiliation and Mass Attendance:

Cet article se base sur les resultats d’une etude de cas de la question du choix de l’ecole catholique de langue francaise a Orleans, Ontario. A partir des resultats d’une serie d’entretiens semi-diriges effectues aupres de parents ayant choisi une ecole catholique de langue francaise pour leurs enfants, une typologie du choix de l’ecole catholique de langue francaise est presentee afin de contribuer a la comprehension du rapport culturel et identitaire des parents franco-ontariens au catholicisme. Suite a un bref survol de l’histoire du rapport identitaire des francophones de l’Ontario au catholicisme, de meme que du contexte scolaire franco-ontarien et du choix scolaire dans une optique culturelle, un apercu du portrait du rapport actuel des francophones de l’Ontario au catholicisme en tant que religion culturelle est presente a travers la question du choix scolaire.

/pdf/le-choix-de-l-ecole-catholique-de-langue-francaise-en-597gr43sbe.pdf

Jean-François Nault

Papers

Encultured Biases: The Role of Products in Pathways to Inequality:

Genres, Objects, and the Contemporary Expression of Higher-Status Tastes

The social positions of taste between and within music genres: From omnivore to snob:

Is Quebec Still a Catholically Distinct Society within Canada? An Examination of Catholic Affiliation and Mass Attendance:

Le choix de l’école catholique de langue française en Ontario : mutations du rapport identitaire des Franco-Ontariens au catholicisme