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A key ingredient of the production of popular music involves making decisions about the distinct character type of a particular artist. But there is a dearth of scientific studies that empirically examine artist images in a macro context, thus the range of gendered and sexualized artist types available in the marketplace is only known through interpretive studies contextually confined in scope. After...
Much existing work in the sociology of culture implicitly assumes actor motivations of status and domination. Yet this theoretical consensus attends only glancingly to the flip side of such behavior: those moments when people deploy culture, not only in a mobility project, but to connect. Based on a three-year ethnography of children's consumer culture in three diverse communities, I find that children...
As the graying of America progresses and the baby boomers begin to enter their twilight years, government and other agencies are deep in discussion over issues of physical and mental health care, Social Security, retirement, and attitudes and policies toward aging. The Research Center for Arts and Culture's study of aging visual artists in New York's four boroughs, using a method called Respondent-Driven...
Literary theorists and cultural sociologists alike acknowledge that there are no universal standards for appraising the value of a book. Yet, book critics regularly pronounce the literary merits and failures of novels in their reviews. Research on cultural criticism has shed considerable light on how reviewers are able to assess the meaning and value of novels in the absence of objective indicators...
Previous research on the relationship between television viewing and fear of crime has not paid much attention to explanatory processes and has concentrated mainly on socio-demographic variables and direct experience. This study looked at personal risk perception and ability to cope as predictors of fear most likely to be influenced by the vivid images of violence presented on television. A random...
How does class intersect with claims of digital democracy? Most digital inequality research focuses on digital consumption or participation, but this study uses a production lens to examine who is creating digital content for the public sphere. My results point to a class-based gap among producers of online content. A critical mechanism of this inequality is control of digital tools and an elite Internet-in-practice...
This article goes beyond a dichotomous view of music as either control or resistance by developing a theory of music use in routinized structures as a dialectical cultural practice that simultaneously enacts, and expresses an embodied sense of resistance to, the repetitively patterned social order. The findings from an ethnographic analysis of how workers used music in a Taylorized blinds factory...
This paper focuses on one of the factors that appears to be important in several conceptualizations of how to approach the digital divide: the differential possession of so-called Internet skills. Three large-scale performance tests are conducted to reveal the contributions of gender, age, educational level of attainment, Internet experience, and amount of Internet use on both medium- and content-related...
This paper contributes to the growing qualitative counter-attack against the statistics-based thesis that musical tastes are increasingly ‘omnivorous’ in character, at least amongst the privileged, and that this can be explained via the quasi-Bourdieusian notion of a new ‘open’ or ‘cosmopolitan disposition’. Drawing on a research project examining life histories and lifestyles in the UK city of Bristol,...
This paper studies television-viewing adolescents within their spatial and social contexts, using the Uses and Gratifications approach as a typology of uses. Because previous research suggests the importance of gender-based differences in both the frequency of watching TV and the frequency of content preferences—but lacks an examination of the social- and spatial-viewing contexts for boys and girls,...
Books are an important factor of cultural transmission, but often need to be translated to achieve this goal. English is sometimes accused of dominating in terms of translations. We develop a theoretical model, which is estimated using UNESCO translation data. We show that if account is taken of factors such as production in the source and the destination languages, as well as distances between cultures,...
This article contributes to existing research on knowledge production and popular racial discourse. Specifically, it explores the production and circulation of conspiracy theories and other stigmatized knowledge in popular culture. The article investigates how hip hop culture uses conspiratorial ideas to challenge racial inequality. The analysis draws on rap lyrics, news articles, and Internet websites...
New scholarship on movements focuses on the role of art in mobilization and, relatedly, documents a shift toward a model of politics in which culture is central and constitutive. Nevertheless, researchers seldom combine the study of the changing politics of mobilization with the study of contemporary uses of art in movements. We bridge this gap by examining an attempt by performing arts service organizations...
This paper analyzes how cultural classification has changed, during the period 1970–2007, in France, Germany and the United States for one particular case: fiction book bestseller lists. Drawing on recent studies in the material production (the publishing field) and symbolic production (the literary field) of literature, I examine the impact of the market logic and cultural consecration on the content...
Gatekeepers play a critical role in determining what creative products eventually reach audiences. Although they have been discussed in the literature on cultural production, they have rarely been studied systematically. In particular, we know little about how gatekeepers use their social networks to manage search and selection processes in markets characterized by excess supply, demand uncertainty,...
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