Interaction ritual chains

Music In Everyday Life

(2003). A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 115-115.

A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988

August 1977 marks the completion of 20 years of publishing for American Behavioral Scientist. These 20 years of lively ferment in the social and behavioral sciences have witnessed tremendous growth, considerable controversy, and greater interplay between the social science community and the larger (indeed, global) society which is the personal and professional environment for us all. American Behavioral Scientist will celebrate its 20th anniversary by featuring-over the next three years-a series of Special Issues devoted to retrospective assessments of the progress made in the major social science disciplines and subfields during the last 20-25 years. Each issue is being developed by a distinguished guest editor whose primary mission will be to garner the critical and analytic talents of a carefully selected group of contributors. Their cumulative perceptions should be of value to social scientists and serious students from all disciplines and all research orientations.

American Behavioral Scientist: * 20th Anniversary * 1957-1977

In this article, we address whether and how contemporary social classes are marked by distinct lifestyles. We assess the model of the social space, a novel approach to class analysis pioneered by Bourdieu's Distinction. Although pivotal in Bourdieu's work, this model is too often overlooked in later research, making its contemporary relevance difficult to assess. We redress this by using the social space as a framework through which to study the cultural manifestation of class divisions in lifestyle differences in contemporary Norwegian society. Through a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) of unusually rich survey data, we reveal a structure strikingly similar to the model in Distinction, with a primary dimension of the volume of capital, and a secondary dimension of the composition of capital. While avoiding the substantialist fallacy of predefined notions of 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' tastes, we explore how 168 lifestyle items map onto this social space. This reveals distinct classed lifestyles according to both dimensions of the social space. The lifestyles of the upper classes are distinctly demanding in terms of resources. Among those rich in economic capital, this manifests itself in a lifestyle which involves a quest for excitement, and which is bodily oriented and expensive. For their counterparts rich in cultural capital, a more ascetic and intellectually oriented lifestyle manifests itself, demanding of resources in the sense of requiring symbolic mastery, combining a taste for canonized, legitimate culture with more cosmopolitan and 'popular' items. In contrast to many studies' descriptions of the lower classes as 'disengaged' and 'inactive', we find evidence of distinct tastes on their part. Our analysis thus affirms the validity of Bourdieu's model of social class and the contention that classes tend to take the form of status groups. We challenge dominant positions in cultural stratification research, while questioning the aptness of the metaphor of the 'omnivore', as well as recent analyses of 'emerging cultural capital'.

Social space and cultural class divisions: the forms of capital and contemporary lifestyle differentiation.

This article discusses the impact of Pierre Bourdieu's social theorising on two related fields of debate, namely research about the evaluative practices of cultural critics, and research about the artistic legitimation of popular culture. More specifically, the article argues that the concept of field (Bourdieu 1993, 1996) makes it possible to investigate the ways in which criticism, as a cultural category, is "struggled over" by competing groups of experts and audiences. In this respect, field theory helps to address criticism as a field in itself, rather than as an uncontested and uniform cultural institution. The article will first contend that Bourdieu's attention to struggles over classifications and practices remains underappreciated in the sociological research about critics; then, it will argue that a field perspective may enhance the study of the institutional diversification of criticism within popular culture. This claim will be substantiated discussing some findings of the author's research about popular music criticism, and more specifically about the rise of specialised music magazines in 1970s Italy. The discussion will conclude considering the possibilities that field theory may open up for future research, particularly in relation to the impact of digital media on the institutions and practices of criticism.

Bourdieu and the sociology of cultural evaluation: lessons from the Italian popular music press

This article argues that focusing on intra-European inequalities is key to a deeper understanding of the Brexit process, as the impacts of the Brexit process on core–periphery inequalities within E...

https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/portal/files/69623578/Antonucci_Varriale_Unequal_Europe_Current_Sociology_2019.pdf

Unequal Europe, unequal Brexit: How intra-European inequalities shape the unfolding and framing of Brexit:

Cultural production and the morality of markets: Popular music critics and the conversion of economic power into symbolic capital

This article expands recent attempts to theorise the role of culture’s materiality in Pierre Bourdieu’s relational epistemology. Drawing on empirical research about the reception of rock and jazz in Italy, and focusing on the evaluative practices of Italian critics, the article theorises cultural evaluation as a social encounter between the dispositions of social actors (i.e. their habitus) and the aural, visual and narrative properties of cultural objects. The article argues that such encounters produce relational aesthetic experiences, which are neither a property of social actors (e.g. their class) nor of cultural artefacts, but emerge from interactions between the socio-historical specificity of the habitus and different cultural materials. This theoretical synthesis, it is argued, can account for meanings and affects which, albeit co-produced by embodied dispositions, are neither reducible to such dispositions nor to practices of distinction. Further, it can account for the formative power of aesthetic experiences, that is, the extent to which they create durable dispositions and attachments.

Beyond Distinction: Theorising Cultural Evaluation as a Social Encounter:

This article explores how symbolic boundaries between youth and adulthood shape experiences of upward and downward social mobility among EU migrants. Drawing on 56 biographical interviews with Ital...

/pdf/unequal-youth-migrations-exploring-the-synchrony-between-kd9ww1zfzf.pdf

Simone Varriale

Papers

Bourdieu and the sociology of cultural evaluation: lessons from the Italian popular music press

Unequal Europe, unequal Brexit: How intra-European inequalities shape the unfolding and framing of Brexit:

Cultural production and the morality of markets: Popular music critics and the conversion of economic power into symbolic capital

Beyond Distinction: Theorising Cultural Evaluation as a Social Encounter:

Unequal Youth Migrations: Exploring the Synchrony between Social Ageing and Social Mobility among Post-Crisis European Migrants: