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Showing papers in "Cultural Sociology in 2011"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use social network analysis to derive "positions" and "relations" between positions, as prioritized by Bourdieu, from data on concrete interactions and relations.
Abstract: This paper reflects upon Bourdieu’s concept of cultural fields, Becker’s concept of ‘art worlds’ and the concept of networks as developed in social network analysis. We challenge the distinction that Bourdieu makes between the objective ‘relations’ and ‘positions’ constitutive of ‘social space’ and visible social relationships. In contrast, we maintain that interaction is generative of social spaces and positions and should be integral to any account of them. Becker’s position is better from this perspective, but while Becker refers repeatedly to social networks, he fails to develop the concept or exploit its potential as a means of exploring social structures. Both Becker and Bourdieu have an underdeveloped conception of social connection which weakens their respective conceptions of the space of cultural production. Our proposed remedy is to use social network analysis to derive ‘positions’ and ‘relations’ between ‘positions’, as prioritized by Bourdieu, from data on concrete interactions and relations....

206 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argued that both reproduction and social change, constraint and freedom, are at the heart of Bourdieu's project, and argued that the historical nature of history and sociologists can be traced to his teachers at the Ecole Normale Superieure and to the long-standing aspirations among French historians and sociology to unify the two disciplines.
Abstract: This article examines Bourdieu’s contributions to history and historical sociology. Bourdieu has often been misread as an ahistorical ‘reproduction theorist’ whose work does not allow for diachronic change or human agency. The article argues that both reproduction and social change, constraint and freedom, are at the heart of Bourdieu’s project. Bourdieu’s key concepts – habitus, field, cultural and symbolic capital – are all inherently historical. Bourdieu deploys his basic categories using a distinctly historicist social epistemology organized around the ideas of conjuncture, contingency, overdetermination, and radical discontinuity. The origins of Bourdieu’s historicism are traced to his teachers at the Ecole Normale Superieure and to the long-standing aspirations among French historians and sociologists to unify the two disciplines. The historical nature of Bourdieu’s work is also signalled by its pervasive influence on historians and the historical work of his former students and colleagues. Bourdieu allowed sociology to historicize itself to a greater extent than other French sociologists.

106 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the status, position and legacy of Bourdieu in the sociology of music, the waxing and waning of his influence and the recent move away from Bourdieus towards something like a post-critical engagement with musical forms and practices are reviewed.
Abstract: This paper reviews the status, position and legacy of Bourdieu in the sociology of music, the waxing and waning of his influence and the recent move away from Bourdieu towards something like a post-critical engagement with musical forms and practices. The idea is to show the reaction to and treatment of Bourdieu’s ideas as a gauge of where we are in the sociology of culture, the various strands of influence that emanate from his work, and to assess what is at stake in a ‘post-Bourdieu’ moment when a position once considered progressive and critical now acts as the foil against which new work is being conducted. The article engages with some recent contributions to the music/society debate from figures in the UK and France, and points to the ways these contributions move debates on musico-social relations into territories more sensitive to the complex mediating qualities of music. Such work is better placed, it is argued, to represent music as an animating force in everyday life, including its specific med...

95 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Instead of trying to locate the economic sociology of Bourdieu, the authors argue that his analysis of the economy was developed over such a long time period, is so rich and goes in so many interesting direc...
Abstract: Instead of trying to locate the economic sociology of Bourdieu, I argue that his analysis of the economy was developed over such a long time period, is so rich and goes in so many interesting direc...

73 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The relationship between the British version of the reality television programme The Apprentice and the shifting working cultures of contemporary neoliberalism is explored in this paper, where the authors argue against overly deterministic deployments of governmentality theory, suggesting it be both supplemented by media rituals and reoriented back towards a Foucauldian emphasis upon the instability of power.
Abstract: This article addresses the relationship between the British version of the reality television programme The Apprentice and the shifting working cultures of contemporary neoliberalism. It explores how the programme enacts, through ritualized play, many skills required by the ‘flexible’ work economy: emotional commitment, entrepreneurial adaptability, a combination of team conformity and personal ambition. In particular, it highlights how newly calibrated requirements of sociality, ‘passion’, and power-as-charisma are negotiated by the programme in relation to broader emergent norms of neoliberal governmentality. However, the article simultaneously argues against overly deterministic deployments of governmentality theory, suggesting it be both supplemented by other tools (media rituals and the affective role of passion), and reoriented back towards a Foucauldian emphasis upon the instability of power. This can, it argues, both enable the programme’s appeal to be more effectively understood and help us comprehend the spaces and places where neoliberal governmentality fails, wholly or partly, to be foregrounded.

52 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors review the double reception of Bourdieu's anthropological and sociological work, and examine these unacknowledged strands of his thinking on culture, concluding that the anthropological reception is more faithful to the outlines of his late-career intellectual development while the sociological portrayal is fundamentally misleading.
Abstract: Pierre Bourdieu is without doubt one of the main figures in the sociological study of culture today. Yet, for a theorist so central to the subject matter of cultural studies, it is clear that there is no coherent account of Bourdieu stance in relation to the ‘concept of culture’ among current commentators. More importantly, in the sister-discipline of anthropology, Bourdieu is thought of as a central figure precisely because he helped move contemporary anthropological theory away from the centrality of the culture concept. This paper reviews this peculiar double reception of Bourdieu’s anthropological and sociological work, closely examining these unacknowledged strands of Bourdieu’s thinking on culture. The basic argument is that the anthropological reception of Bourdieu’s work is more faithful to the outlines of his late-career intellectual development while the sociological portrayal — Bourdieu as a Sausserean culture theorist with a ‘Weberian power twist’— is fundamentally misleading. I close by outli...

52 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify an "optimism" of everyday life and propose that it performs significant psychological, social and cultural functions, with particular reference to psychological and physical health, family and social relationships and the pursuit of goals in different contexts.
Abstract: Drawing on material from a broad range of fields, this article identifies an ‘optimism of everyday life’ and proposes that it performs significant psychological, social and cultural functions. These functions are briefly reviewed, with particular reference to psychological and physical health, family and social relationships and the achievement of goals in different contexts. It is argued that the necessity of optimism has given rise to a complex of optimism promoters, which function as agents of implicit cultural policy. The family, religious institutions, the medical profession, psychotherapists and counsellors, businesses and political leaders are, amongst others, all seen to be part of this complex, deeply engaged in the reproduction of a culture of optimism. Whilst a multiplicity of values is reflected in individual expressions of optimism, a kind of meta-value is expressed in its common, cognitive form: of energy over entropy, of living over dying.

43 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
Asia Friedman1
TL;DR: The authors analyzed visual perception as a process of "socio-mental filtration" in the context of social construction, and demonstrated that using filter analysis to identify the specific dynamics of visual perception may help scholars to more effectively account for some of the ‘hard problems' of constructionist theory, such as the body.
Abstract: Many theories of social construction make some reference to sight, yet few offer sustained examinations of perception. In light of this, I highlight the visual dimension of the social construction of reality by analyzing visual perception as a process of ‘socio-mental filtration’. Building on theories of social construction — most notably those using the concepts ‘frame’, ‘paradigm’ and ‘schema’ — in which expectations are the organizing force of experience, I focus on how social construction happens. One key effect of expectations is to enact selective attention, which is evocatively captured by the metaphor of a filter. Drawing on the case of sex and gender, I demonstrate that using filter analysis to identify the specific dynamics of ‘socio-optical construction’ — adding a concrete analysis of visual perception to the general idea of social construction — may help scholars to more effectively account for some of the ‘hard problems’ of constructionist theory, such as the body.

39 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors offer an account of Bourdieu's rise to sociological "stardom" in the last 30 years, giving special attention to the transnational dimensions of this process.
Abstract: This paper offers an account of Bourdieu’s rise to sociological ‘stardom’ in the last 30 years, giving special attention to the transnational dimensions of this process. It discusses the scope and relevance of his work to the field (in the making) of cultural sociology, showing how he contributed to its current form. It also presents the articles which constitute the contents of the journal special issue. The paper insists on the importance of assessing both the virtues and limits of Bourdieu’s intellectual legacy through the means of historicization and sociological self-understanding, these being preconditions that allow the furthering of the ‘progress of reason’ which Bourdieu himself located as at the core of scientific endeavours.

38 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examine progressively more precisely specified versions of the cultural hostility thesis and, using data from a survey of cultural practice in Britain, apply different operationalizations in order to estimate the prevalence of cultural hostility.
Abstract: It is often remarked that dislikes are more revealing of taste than likes. The evidential basis of this insight, which can be found in the work of Bourdieu (1984) and of Douglas (1996), who called it ‘cultural hostility’, is slight. This paper specifies and evaluates the thesis, ‘the cultural hostility thesis’, that people share strong, symbolically significant, dislikes which function to demarcate cultural boundaries between antagonistic social groups. I examine progressively more precisely specified versions of the thesis and, using data from a survey of cultural practice in Britain, apply different operationalizations in order to estimate the prevalence of cultural hostility. I show that: expressed dislikes are probably not the primary indicator of meaningful social boundaries; evidence for overt generalized cultural hostility is relatively weak; even the best indicators of hostility suggest limited antagonism; class differences are evident, but more because cultural omnivorousness has become a princip...

37 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that socioeconomic classes and class stratification constituted in the context of post-communist capitalism are simultaneously denied and distinguished, and the critical discourse of class has virtually disappeared from the mainstream, linked to a widespread rejection of the legacies of Soviet communism and associated institutions, symbols and vocabularies.
Abstract: Using the country of Latvia as a case study, I argue that socioeconomic classes and class stratification constituted in the context of post-communist capitalism are simultaneously denied and distinguished. Class was a central component of discourse in Soviet communism even though classes in their capitalist incarnation did not exist. With the advent of post-communism’s neoliberal capitalist order and the concurrent rise in stratification, the critical discourse of class has virtually disappeared from the mainstream. This silence is linked to a widespread rejection of the legacies of Soviet communism and associated institutions, symbols, and vocabularies. At the same time, stratified class positions are rendered apparent through the means of consumption. They are presented not in terms of class, but in terms of distinction, style, and lifestyle. The post-communist socioeconomic hierarchy is represented through a discourse derived from an uncritical (or anti-critical) consumer culture, which has produced a ...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the power of celebrity culture in relation to the rise of cosmetic surgery is examined, and a perspective developed is one that attempts to bridge certain developments in social media.
Abstract: This article critically examines the power of celebrity culture in relation to the rise of cosmetic surgery. The perspective developed is one that attempts to bridge certain developments in social ...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, Bourdieu articulated a framework for a sociology of science, derived mostly from a priori reasoning about scientific actors in competition for capital, which he called the "bourdieu framework".
Abstract: At several points over his career, Pierre Bourdieu articulated a framework for a sociology of science, derived mostly from a priori reasoning about scientific actors in competition for capital. Thi...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article present an alternative reading of the English seaside, one that centralizes race, specifically the effects of whiteness and racialized notions of belonging and exclusion, and addresse...
Abstract: This article presents an alternative reading of the English seaside – one that centralizes race, specifically the effects of whiteness and racialized notions of belonging and exclusion. It addresse...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the consequences of the detraditionalization of naming practices and the social meanings imputed to first names are investigated on the basis of an exploratory, qualitative study designed to investigate contemporary naming practices.
Abstract: This article investigates the consequences of the detraditionalization of naming practices and the social meanings imputed to first names. It does so on the basis of an exploratory, qualitative study designed to investigate contemporary naming practices and the social meanings assigned to first names, as well as data taken from a representative quantitative study designed to test the relationships between social background and cultural practice and the choice of first names along with the consequences of the names’ social meanings. Strong relationships persist between social background (class) and choice of first name. Because the latter is strongly related to taste patterns and cultural dispositions, first names are strongly suggestive of the social characteristics and levels of cultural capital pertaining to the child’s parents. The results highlight a strong relationship between parents’ level of education and cultural tastes and practices, on the one hand, and the first names they select for their chi...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors provide a synoptic account of the cultural writings of the West Indian intellectual and activist C.L.R. James, and make a case for greater recognition of his work among cu...
Abstract: This article aims to provide a synoptic account of the cultural writings of the West Indian intellectual and activist C.L.R. James. I aim to make a case for greater recognition of his work among cu...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that representations of generations of emigrants have been subsumed under hegemonic images of post-Famine emigration with their overarching motif of exile.
Abstract: This article critically engages with the concepts of home, nationality and belonging by evaluating explanations of (e)migration of mid-20th century Irish working class men. We do this by suggesting that contemporary approaches to Irish (e)migration employ ‘containing’ categories that frame the possibilities of knowing and understanding. We problematize such approaches by examining notions of home/homelessness and the ambivalent racialization of the diasporian Irish male subject within the dynamic intersection of categories of ‘self’ identification. Within an Irish context, this article recognizes that representations of generations of emigrants have been subsumed under hegemonic images of post-Famine emigration with their overarching motif of exile. Within a British context this analysis is located within a broader epistemological frame of the cultural production of the conceptual invisibility of Irish transnational migrants. Finally, the article concludes by suggesting that theoretical and conceptual fra...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors sketch a culturalist account of the ascendance of the gay and lesbian movement in the US in the 1970s and 1990s, concluding that "the abiding reality has been a politics centered on rights, identity normalization, pride, and social integration, or what we simply call a politics of normalization".
Abstract: Scholars and activists often assume that liberationism is the originating and guiding force in the gay and lesbian movement in the US. In fact, liberationism was but an ‘episode’ in the late 1960s and then again in the early 1990s. The abiding reality has been a politics centered on rights, identity normalization, pride, and social integration, or what we simply call a politics of normalization. Curiously, and perhaps expressing the above normative position, the research literature tends to ignore this rather stunning reality; instead researchers seem more disposed to explaining the waning of liberationism and lesbian feminism and their sustaining cultural force. With a few exceptions, social scientists have only recently addressed the social movement debates. We are encouraged by the promising and important research of sociologists and others. However, much of this recent social movement research has been one-sidedly social structural. In this article, we sketch a culturalist account of the ascendance of...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a study of women's first-hand narrations of domestic and symbolic violence in their lives reveals that many women continue to live under the patriarchal authority of the "honour code" and the Turkish ruling elite have until recently neglected the needs of these women.
Abstract: This study discusses Habermas’s notions of ‘public sphere‘ and ‘power’, and suggests a novel approach by complementing Habermas’s limited take on the ‘political’ with Bourdieu’s notion of ‘symbolic power’. To this end, ‘cultural citizenship’ is used as a helpful concept. The study draws on the analysis of a Turkish talk show format ‘woman’s voice’ (WV) and its audience. It is proposed that viewing WV should be considered a political activity. An analysis of women’s first-hand narrations of the domestic and symbolic violence in their lives reveals that many women continue to live under the patriarchal authority of the ‘honour code’ and the Turkish ruling elite have until recently neglected the needs of these women. WV provides a sphere where the needs and problems of these women are discussed for the first time in Turkish broadcasting history. It is shown with examples from field research that WV may potentially create subversive subject-positions among the disadvantaged groups of women, such as rural-urba...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The concept of energy in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a socio-cultural phenomenon in the area of healthcare and lifestyle that has spread rapidly in recent decades using Latour's nature-culture hybrid concept as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a socio-cultural phenomenon in the area of healthcare and lifestyle that has spread rapidly in recent decades Using Latour’s nature–culture hybrid concept, the article addresses one of the most commonly and widely used, and at the same time puzzling concepts of CAM: ‘energy’ Based on research that analysed publications dealing with Energy Medicine, the article shows that this concept serves as the axis of an internal linguistic mechanism around which CAM knowledge is constructed as a hybrid of modern knowledge categories such as body–mind and objective–subjective ‘Energy’ is used as the embodiment of intangible tacit knowledge and as a linguistic bridge between science and spirituality, and between nature and culture ‘Energy’ in CAM is thus not merely a practical concept denoting a bundle of healthcare practices but serves to indicate the possibility of forming new cultural-epistemological rules of discourse Proposing the concept of ‘hybrid knowledge’,

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors analyzed the discursive themes that framed the contention over the music by connecting the notion of boundary-work to fields of cultural production and demonstrated that the content of boundary work is shaped by the field in which a speaker is positioned "High" and popular artists, civic and political leaders, and general cultural critics defined differently the alleged impact of jazz.
Abstract: The diffusion of jazz into the musical mainstream during the 1920s served as a site for the struggle to define ongoing changes both in the arts and in the broader society I analyze the discursive themes that framed the contention over the music by connecting the notion of boundary-work to fields of cultural production In doing so, I demonstrate that the content of boundary-work is shaped by the field in which a speaker is positioned ‘High’ and popular artists, civic and political leaders, and general cultural critics defined differently the alleged impact of jazz These differences in content fueled the dynamism of the contention by giving expression to the different interests at stake, interests that reflect the specific authority to name the truth generated by a given field

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a sociological re-evaluation of the auction house, a central institution of the secondary art market, is presented as a structuring mechanism through which symbolic, economic and cultural values are shaped and reinforced.
Abstract: This article is a sociological re-evaluation of the auction house, a central institution of the secondary art market. As an intermediary between buyers and sellers, the auction house is portrayed as an institution that straddles the poles of economic (calculative) and social (aesthetic) life. Relying on the work of Michel Callon and Barry Barnes, the process of the commoditization that takes place within auction houses is presented as a structuring mechanism through which symbolic, economic and cultural values are shaped and reinforced. In particular, the finitist calculative practices associated with commoditization (through the generation of estimated auction prices) are presented as responsible for reproducing the secondary art market and the aesthetic judgements on which it is based.

Journal ArticleDOI
Serena Liu1
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyze information censorship in China and adopt a theoretical approach which perceives rules and resources as the rudimentary elements that constitute social action and comprise so-called social action.
Abstract: This article analyses information censorship in China. It adopts a theoretical approach which perceives rules and resources as the rudimentary elements that constitute social action and comprise so...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, an analysis of how users choose and design personalized ringtones is presented as an example of subjects' current concerns with the management of social accessibility. But the authors do not consider the role of the phone call in the design of ringtones.
Abstract: I provide here an analysis of how users choose and design personalized ringtones as an example of subjects’ current concerns with the management of social accessibility. As a result of the growing demands of ‘connected presence’ mobile phone users are faced with the proliferation of ringing phones in their soundscapes. They therefore exploit the new resources for customizing their ringtones with an orientation towards the management of the interactional problems which the development of ‘ubiquitous summoning’ may entail. Musical ringtones are chosen or designed by users, so that the shaping of the summons becomes a personal project of the recipients. They are shaped as ambiguous cues inviting two kinds of responsive actions, that is, treating them as a summons (inviting their being answered to) or as a music (inviting their being listened to). Their design becomes the locus of diverging rationales, with some users trying to exacerbate the summoning power of their phone ring and others to maximize their am...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The German sociologist Dirk Baecker is one of the most prominent voices within contemporary social systems theory and German sociology, but is not well known within the wider circles of international sociology.
Abstract: The German sociologist Dirk Baecker is one of the most prominent voices within contemporary social systems theory and German sociology, but is not well known within the wider circles of international sociology. He follows in the footsteps of Niklas Luhmann, yet in marked contrast with his ‘sociological master’ Baecker also gives ample attention to the notion of culture. This paper first summarizes some of the main lines in his writings on the notion of culture and on contemporary culture. It then continues with a succinct presentation of Baecker’s approach to artistic communication against the background of this more general characterization of the relationship between the individual and society, conscious sensory perception and communication, in terms of an ‘aesthetic coupling’. It will be shown that a recurrent figure of thought links up Baecker’s various considerations on culture and art, i.e. the inclusion of the excluded.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the reception and appropriation of three critically acclaimed, best-selling novels about Bengali-Americans by Bengali immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area are discussed. But the reception of ethnic literature is inextricably linked with the processes of adaptation and identification.
Abstract: In this article I focus on the reception and appropriation of three critically acclaimed, best-selling novels about Bengali-Americans by Bengali immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area. The three novels are: Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters (2002); Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Queen of Dreams (2004); and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2004). Using data from interviews and participant observation, I argue that questions concerning the reception of ethnic literature are inextricably linked with the processes of adaptation and identification. This article seeks to contextualize fiction by Bengali-Americans in relation to the continually debated issue of multicultural politics in the USA. The novels provide immigrants with appealing themes of nostalgia, empowerment, dissonance and self-determination to construct an internal ethnic identity. Immigrants actively use these themes to reconcile apparently contradictory impulses and to draw boundaries that safeguard their class privilege, assuage gender ...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article explored how nationality is articulated as a form of art value in the art market, where art is defined in two related ways: instrumentally, in terms of its economic value, and culturally, by defining its meaning and significance.
Abstract: This article explores how nationality is articulated as a form of art value in the art market, where art is defined in two related ways: instrumentally, in terms of its economic value, and culturally, by defining its meaning and significance. Focusing on the auction market of Irish art in London and in Dublin, and drawing upon interviews with auctioneers in both capitals, it investigates how nationality is produced and marketed as a form of cultural value for Irish art, comparing the specific dynamics of this process in both London and Dublin auction markets. Whilst the findings in this article agree with existing literature on the economic and cultural forms of art value prevalent in art markets, they add to the literature by arguing that the cultural, national element of value-making for Irish art is very pronounced.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors look beyond a UK, US, and Australian axis to think about how the genre becomes reproduced and reworked in non-Anglo contexts; thinking more ethnographically about the genre, both in terms of production of shows and their reception by audiences; and reconsidering the roles of instruction and surveillance as top-down frames for understanding the genre to look also at emotion, sociality, ritual and other more bottom-up engagements with lifestyle television.
Abstract: already cover much of this theoretical work in the same or similar shows. There seems like a wilful parochialism in much of this anthology, especially among the authors focusing on British programming who seem unaware of existing arguments on the same theme, for example from Ouellette (2004; see also Ouellette and Hay, 2008) on governmentality and Andrejevic (2004) on surveillance – though I admit that US-based scholars can be similarly oblivious to existing scholarship across the pond. There is a strong and necessary emphasis here on class and gender, but with almost no consideration of how race also structures the shows and their norms. New work in lifestyle television must move forward debates about what this genre is and does to escape what is beginning to feel like an intellectual impasse. Suggestions for this might include looking beyond a UK, US, and Australian axis to think about how the genre becomes reproduced and reworked in nonAnglo contexts; thinking more ethnographically about the genre, both in terms of production of shows and their reception by audiences; and reconsidering the roles of instruction and surveillance as top-down frames for understanding the genre to look also at emotion, sociality, ritual, and other more bottom-up engagements with lifestyle television.