Search

Sociological research on human rights analyzes the degree to which states engage with international human rights commitments over time. Yet we have a limited understanding of how specific events shape the long-term trajectory of human rights norms. This paper explores the effect of the Arab Spring on voting in the UN Human Rights Council. Using multiple growth curve models, I find that the emergence of the Arab Spring changed the voting patterns of most non-free states, but only temporarily, and that this holds even when controlling for protest events facing a given country. In contrast, a small set of non-free states did not change their votes during the Arab Spring. Drawing on research from cultural sociology, this paper explains these divergent voting patterns as heterogenous performances in the face of an event causing deep uncertainty such as the Arab Spring. The paper concludes that commitments to human rights norms must account for how events puncture broader trends, and that engagement with the human rights regime – and perhaps other performances of state legitimacy — requires an understanding of the multiple audiences, events, and policy possibilities to which states are attuned in international forums.

The sociology of disaster has paid scant attention to states’ cultural response—states’ effort to use meaningful narratives and symbolic actions to address issues about citizens’ suffering and death to enhance their legitimacy and secure citizens’ support. Our paper starts to address this gap by asking: How do states culturally respond to massive disasters? How effective are their responses? What can explain the efficacy of their cultural responses? We propose a perspective based on the cultural sociology of the state and cultural theories of trauma, theodicy, and performance. We illustrate this perspective in a comparative study of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the United States. We argue that the efficacy of their cultural responses depended on whether and how effectively they addressed the key components of the meaning structure of disasters through compassionate reaction to citizens’ suffering and death, convincing accounts of states’ accountability, and cogent narratives about the long-term consequences of disasters on citizens. Both states struggled to address these issues at various points in their respective disasters, and their cultural responses were shaped by their political structures. The findings also speak to an enduring debate over whether democratic or authoritarian regimes perform better in disaster responses. We eschew the exclusive focus of the debate on administrative responses and its simplistic correlation between regime type and responses.

One of the most exciting formal approaches in the sociology of culture involves the exploration of duality–that the meaning of any of one set of elements (for example, choices of cultural consumption) is the subset of persons to which it is linked (for example, the occupations of the persons who make this choice). We here generalize this notion of duality, which we call “Breiger classic,” to the case in which similarities between persons are constructed not on the basis of which cultural elements they choose or deploy, but how these cultural elements are themselves connected, which we call “Mega-Breiger.” We then consider how to look at the duality between cultural and social units within cultural formations, treating each cultural formation as a virtual social structure among cultural elements, which we call “Mondo Breiger.” We finally discuss the “Full Breiger” duality as the complete use of a person-to-person and person-to-cultural element data set to arrange relations among one set of cultural elements. We illustrate with an analysis of all the texts of the members of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

Cultural sociologists frequently theorize about choices and decisions, although we tend to shy away from this language, and from concepts that are used by the judgment and decision-making (JDM) sciences. We show that cultural sociology and JDM are compatible and complementary fields by dispelling some common misunderstandings about JDM. We advocate for a strategic assimilation approach in which cultural sociologists are able to translate their work into key JDM terms like beliefs, preferences, and endowments. Learning to speak the JDM language will allow cultural sociologists to make important, and uniquely sociological, contributions to social scientific explanations of choices and decisions.

Recent work in cultural sociology has called attention to constraints imposed by material objects on interpretive processes, but is unclear as to how actors use such constraints to produce new meanings. In this article, we use novel newspaper data of people attempting to pay with large amounts of small cash and coins as a form of protest to highlight the material conditions under which actors are able to convey an alternative meaning of an object to an audience. We use computational linguistic and quantitative methods to examine when changes in the meaning of money are more likely to lead to emotionally-charged media reception. We find that emotionally-charged media reception is more likely when, typically, actors consciously attend to money and yet do not have to put in much cognitive work to assign meaning to it in the setting where the protest is attempted. We conclude by considering the implications of the study for broader projects within cultural sociology, economic sociology, organizational theory, political sociology, and social movement studies.

Cultural sociology has reached conclusions about the properties of dispositions based on analyses of aesthetic principles external to the individual. I challenge this approach, and I reflect on two assumptions regarding the structure of dispositions prevalent in cultural sociology that ensue from this approach: (1) Dispositions are transposable across aesthetic domains (e.g., music, literature, visual arts), and (2) there exists one hegemonic configuration of dispositions which can be derived from the structure of the cultural field. I use data from an audience survey in two art museums in Flanders (Belgium) (n = 1448) and analyse aesthetic dispositions towards visual arts and towards music. Applying Relational Class Analysis, I find different dispositional configurations. These configurations are characterised by oppositions between aesthetic principles that do not coincide with the oppositions between aesthetic principles in the cultural field. Moreover, these configurations suggest that dispositions vary to the extent that they are transposable across aesthetic domains.

While the social-structural construction of cultural taste has been a sustained subject of inquiry within the sociology of culture, its temporal dynamics have not received the same treatment. Using repeated cross-sectional survey data (1982-2012) and a novel age-period-cohort estimation strategy that treats cohort effects as age-by-period interaction effects, we detail how (a) age-graded trajectories, (b) historic fluctuations, and (c) generational acculturation jointly determine the temporal dynamics of cultural omnivorousness among Americans. First, we find that omnivorousness accumulates over the life-course in age-graded trajectories. Individuals experience their peak levels of omnivorousness in the mid-to-late stages of adulthood. Taste acquisition is most rapid in the early phases of adulthood, and slows down towards the late phases of adulthood. Second, omnivorousness is subject to unpredictable historic fluctuations. Sharp increases in the 1990s recess and stabilize in the two decades to follow. Third, generational acculturation affects omnivorousness in uneven ways. Baby boomers experience higher than expected levels of omnivorousness, while the cohorts preceding and succeeding the Baby Boomers instead experience lower than expected levels of omnivorousness. Generational acculturation may also manifest most strongly in the early and late stages of adulthood. Our results imply that any temporal analysis of culture cannot avoid dealing with the age, period and cohort identification problem, that the period affect associated with the 1992 wave of the SPPA persists even in an age-period-cohort analysis, and that generational differences are endogenous to any time-invariant index of cultural taste.

This study offers a reconceptualization of social and symbolic boundaries around music by specifying combinations of inclusion, exclusion, and ambivalence in musical tastes, producing eight ideal-typical forms of musical boundaries. These forms are investigated using data from a survey of students at the University of Mississippi measuring implicit boundary processes through respondent genre classifications of favorite and least favorite artists. These data are analyzed using comparative netfield analysis, a combination of comparative and relational methods that provides a mixed methods framework for connecting interpretations of individual-level processes to a map of the socio-musical field. The main opposition found in this musical field is between divider and ambivalent boundary forms, i.e., those who draw boundaries between versus within genres. A secondary opposition is defined by those who are indifferent to major genres. Case studies suggest that musical boundaries are often organized around racialized and gendered genre categories. I draw implications for studies of omnivorousness, genre classification, and mixed methods analysis in cultural sociology.

This article analyzes emerging entrepreneurial practices of travel journalists in the USA as a qualitative case study of the marketization of fields of cultural production. Today, the journalistic field is undergoing a radical transformation of practice and organization collectively framed as crisis. As a result, formerly solid lines separating business and editorial departments, print and online publishing spaces, professional journalists and amateur content are blurring. Drawing on interviewing and discourse analysis, this article analyzes how travel journalists react to these changes and the threats posed to their economic subsistence by folding publications, mass-layoffs and declining pay for freelancers. Situated at the intersection of the Sociology of Culture and Economic Sociology, this research shows how new opportunity structures significantly change the meaning of journalistic practice; how travel journalists today generate income and resources through entrepreneurial practices that have been previously deemed unethical. They do so by bridging the existing boundaries to publishing, marketing and travel industry. This article argues that travel journalists instrumentalize crisis narratives to justify shifting professional ethics as means of economic production, while they simultaneously maintain an order of prestige and create closure to outside challengers based on these ethics.

In recent years growing sociological interest in new forms of cultural distinction has led some to argue that the advantages previously conveyed by the consumption of ‘high’ culture ‘or ‘omnivorousness’ are being overwritten by the possession of what has been termed ‘emerging cultural capital’. So far, though, this term has only been discussed in passing within empirical work and remains in need of further analytical specification. This special issue seeks to both critically interrogate and develop this concept by bringing together the work of leading cultural sociologists around four key themes: the role of age and generation in the formation of cultural capital; the power of visual display for distinction; the significance of new elite cultures; and the need for methodological pluralism to apprehend the expressions and mechanisms of distinction. This editorial introduction outlines the descriptive terrain on which the concept of emerging cultural capital has rested until now before exploring the common themes that sit across all five papers in the special issue.

Do people change their cultural preferences in social interactions where social class is particularly salient? It remains unclear whether cultural preferences vary across interactions or whether they are stable over time. We argue that individuals may alter their cultural preferences over time and that this will be influenced by both the specifics of a particular social interaction and the ‘cultural politics of class’ in which that interaction is embedded. Using a lab-based split-ballot experiment in a research university in the East of England (n = 300), we examine preferences towards music genres depending on whether respondents are assigned to one of three experimental conditions: (1) a vignette describing someone who is working class, (2) a vignette describing someone who is middle class or (3) no vignette. Those born in the UK alter the strength of their preferences towards highbrow music genres when social class is made more salient. When the salience of class is increased it also activates particular cultural stereotypes and these stereotypes influence the strength of respondents’ preferences towards highbrow music genres. This mechanism suggests that individuals use cultural stereotypes in social interaction to position themselves and others in the social hierarchy through cultural preferences.

In this paper, we investigate how cultural ideals of race, class and gender are revealed and reproduced through celebrity chefs’ public identities. Celebrity-chef status appears attainable by diverse voices including self-trained cooks like Rachael Ray, prisoner turned high-end-chef Jeff Henderson, and Nascar-fan Guy Fieri. This paper investigates how food celebrities’ self-presentations – their culinary personas – relate to social hierarchies. Drawing from literature on the sociology of culture, personas, food, and gender, we carry out an inductive qualitative analysis of celebrity chef cookbooks written by stars with a significant multi-media presence. We identify seven distinct culinary personas: homebody, home stylist, pin-up, chef-artisan, maverick, gastrosexual, and self-made man. We find that culinary personas are highly gendered, but also classed and racialized. Relating these findings to the broader culinary field, we suggest that celebrity chef personas may serve to naturalize status inequities, and our findings contribute to theories of cultural, culinary and gender stratification. This paper supports the use of “persona” as an analytical tool that can aid understanding of cultural inequalities, as well as the limited opportunities for new entrants to gain authority in their respective fields.

This research examines how people watch “bad” television–television programs that the viewers themselves label as “trash,” “stupid,” and “awful.” Such viewers experience a normative contradiction; while they have created or embraced a symbolic boundary between “good” and “bad” television, they find themselves transgressing that boundary by consuming and, in some cases, enjoying the shows that they condemn. By conducting 40 in-depth interviews, this research identifies the strategies used by television viewers to deal with this normative contradiction. Beyond “traditional viewing,” we show how viewers employ “ironic consumption,” a “camp sensibility,” and frame their viewing as a “guilty pleasure” to consume “bad” television.

Responsible for selecting which new artists are brought to the public attention, talent scouts carry considerable influence in framing performing arts fields. Yet their practices are hidden from public view, and how and why they select fledgling producers remains mostly unexplored in cultural sociology. This article aims to demystify the work of such gatekeepers by examining temporary comedy scouts operating at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Fringe is the world's biggest arts festival and a central tradefair for the British comedy field. Drawing on ethnographic observation and interviews with nine comedy scouts, I examine the positions they occupy in the comedy field and, in turn, how this positioning affects which comedians they propel. I then interrogate the brokerage enacted by scouts. Centrally, I argue that, while some broker between artists and management, all scouts are implicated in mediating between artists and audiences. In particular, they act to intensify comedy taste boundaries—making judgments based on assumptions about imagined audiences and directing more legitimate comedians to privileged audiences and vice versa. In this way, scouts act as hidden tastemakers, intensifying the scarcity of certain tastes and strengthening the ability of privileged audiences to use comedy in the claiming of cultural distinction.

This paper examines the public discourse around cultural organizations under threat of closing. When discussing these crises, do people cling to old metaphors or find new ways to defend the arts? We compare the use of metaphor across the field of cultural organizations from high to popular culture and nonprofit to commercial. These questions are timely, with U.S. cultural policy under strain and rising rates of closure facing orchestras and theaters. Rather than forging a new path, we ultimately find that discourse around high culture nonprofits relies on old, elitist metaphors.

Taste makers lay down the rules of what constitutes good or legitimate taste and influence identifications and practices of producers. This paper examines roles played by gastronomic critics/guides as taste makers in the fine-dining restaurant industry of Britain and Germany, defined as Michelin-starred restaurants. A theoretical exploration—drawing on the fields of both sociology of culture and cultural economy relating to singular cultural goods—states what cultural influence consists of, how it is achieved and what symbolic and material consequences it may have. The empirical section examines three gastronomic guides in the British and German restaurant industry. The Michelin Guide is considered the most influential taste maker, seen to wield both symbolic and material power. Its authority is accepted by most high-level chefs in the field. This has enabled the Guide to prolong the hegemony of French culinary culture and, at the same time, exclude other national cuisines , as well as regional cooking from recognition as “ haute cuisine .” The paper employs qualitative research methods relying on three data sources: an analysis of Guides; 30 in-depth interviews with restaurateurs/head chefs; two interviews with Michelin inspectors/editors in Britain and Germany; and a data archive on all restaurants with multiple stars.

Based on a comparison of the French cultural practices surveys of 1981 and 2008, this article shows a strong inertia of the structuring principles of the inequalities in cultural participation—despite the changes that occurred meanwhile in cultural policies. Beyond the theoretical controversies in the sociology of culture that developed during this same period, the retrospective analysis also suggests the prevalence of class inequalities that neither reduces to a simple inequality in the volume of cultural consumption nor to a simple opposition between highbrow and lowbrow repertoires, but rather should be considered as a combination of the two.

Political behavior is often explained on the basis of the general presupposition that an individual's life experiences generate interests that, in turn, influence voting. The alternative conception, based on cultural sociology, explains ways of feeling, thinking, and doing (e.g., voting) on the basis of a social-symbolic text that creates a symbolic order, that influences a person's perception of his situation, and that establishes a legitimate link between this perception and a way to politically act upon it. A cultural sociology of politics has therefore, first, to answer the question whether today the private and the public spheres are fused or compartmentalized and, if compartmentalized, then which of the two influences voting. Hypotheses that can be derived from those different theoretical positions are tested on the basis of a purely random sample collected in 2006 of 2656 Dutch-speaking inhabitants of Belgium, aged 19–81. Findings indicate that the private and the public realms are compartmentalized—and it is not the degree of satisfaction with the private realm, but the evaluation of the public realm, that influences important electoral decisions. These findings run counter the hypotheses derived from rational choice theory, illustrating the importance of a cultural sociology of politics.

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 often use consumer culture to belong—both to connect to others, and to achieve visibility in their social worlds. I contend that children's common desires make inequality, particularly in their access to consumer goods, a challenge to the accomplishment of the connection for which they strive. Using insights from Erving Goffman and Randall Collins, I find children use processes of facework to navigate the problems arising from their differences from others, including those stemming from discrepancies in commodity possession. Out of five facework processes that I identify, I elaborate upon two that seem to challenge the notion that children seek sameness. Children's goals for consumer culture also differed from those of (particularly affluent) adults. I suggest scholars need to reconsider their theoretical emphasis on exclusion over inclusion, and document the circumstances under which each is particularly salient.

Sociology has long identified place as an important theoretical category, and a basic element of social life, but the discipline has largely left implicit the role of place as a structuring element of social perception. We reinterpret two debates in cultural sociology-cosmopolitan omnivorism and cultural reception-to show how place has been used as a static category, not a productive source of meanings, in these fields. We then introduce how scholars can further develop an analysis of place meanings, and apply this fresh perspective to our empirical study, a discourse analysis of elite music critics' taste for rap music. We find that critics base their judgments of the genre on three place-based criteria, that: (1) rap must be "emplaced" to be meaningful, (2) "ghettoes" are central to rap's meaningfulness and (3) international scenes are privileged as politically and aesthetically more important than American scenes. These data suggest that the omnivorous taste pattern among American elites follows an intra-genre logic of appropriation that incorporates or rejects cultural objects influenced by the meanings associated with their context of production. We conclude by highlighting the analytic benefit of recognizing place as a constituent element of social perception in cultural sociology. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The sociology of culture has happily been able to get by without any strict definitions of culture, but most of us seem to assume that culture is some sort of complex cognitive web (say of signs or symbols) that is largely shared across persons and mirrored in aspects of their interiority. I argue that this is unlikely, because of what we know about the limitations to our cognitive powers. I present a selective review of such results and make a few arguments for the implications regarding our understanding of culture.

In this paper we attempt to characterize the key differences and points of convergence between two contemporary approaches to the relationship between culture and cognition in sociology which we label the toolkit and strong practice theory perspectives. We follow recent work at the intersection of culture and cognition in attempting to explicitly formulate the cognitive underpinnings of these two approaches in terms of the assumptions that they make about cultural acquisition, transmission and externalization. Our analysis suggests that in spite of very important differences in emphasis and explanatory range, toolkit and strong practice-theoretical approaches are complementary, although the specific types of modal situation for which each of them is best suited need to be more clearly specified. We develop a framework that shows how the two approaches can be deployed in conjunction as well as specifying the modal settings and situations that each will be more likely to handle best as well as those in which they will run into trouble.

Studies of children and childhood are increasingly common but little is known about children and religion and specifically about the mechanisms by which religious socialization happens. This paper takes a dynamic approach to the study of religion and childhood and considers how children via their role as audience might help reflect and shape adult culture and religiosity. Through the lens of cultural sociology, the paper examines 19th century Sunday school books as cultural products and seeks to answer two fundamental questions: what can the content and form of materials produced for use by children tell us about “adult” religion and culture? and what does religion tell us about childhood as a social category? Content analysis of a sample of 100 Sunday school books published in the 19th century provides evidence that adults engage in boundary work to separate adults from children and the religious from the secular. Religion is presented in a child-specific format. This suggests both that adult religion is malleable and domain specific and that childhood is both a distinct stage in the life course and a social category.

This article compares the classification systems between the American and French wine industries and reveals striking differences: American wines are classified primarily by grape variety, while French wines are classified primarily by appellation based on geographic origin; the classification in appellation is horizontally structured in the American wine industry, while it is vertically structured in the French wine industry. These findings demonstrate that classification systems are socially constructed. Building upon the literature and drawing empirical evidence from these two wine industries, this article develops several theoretical arguments on implications and consequences of classifications. First, classifications confer identities on social actors (or objects), and inherently imply social control. Second, classifications create social boundaries and signify social standing of actors (or objects). Third, classification making often involves political struggles between different interest groups, and classification systems embody the political power. This article further presents a sociological framework to understand classifications, stressing the multi-dimensionality and complexity of classifications. Finally, it discusses the significance of the study of classification in sociology and, in particular, its relations with several prominent lines of research in cultural sociology.

This article illustrates how more intensive exchanges between migration scholars and cultural sociologists would yield greater analytical purchase in both fields. It uses tools from cultural sociology to illuminate aspects of the transnational migration experience and, in turn, brings to light additional dimensions and levels of cultural production that cultural sociologists could profitably take into account. Cultural sociology asks migration scholars to take culture seriously and to pay more explicit attention to the dynamics of meaning-making and boundary construction. It asks researchers to look not only at the process of adaptation from one culture to another but at what is inside the “black box” and how it changes over time. On the other hand, transnational migration studies complicate cultural sociology by encouraging researchers to move beyond the expectation that the nation is the natural container for social life. Instead, transnational migration scholarship foregrounds how boundary creation and meaning-making can involve multiple cultural repertoires that transcend national contexts and are available at multiple levels.

This article examines two questions. First, what difference does it make when approaches developed in cultural sociology are applied more broadly? We suggest here that such applications subject theoretical assumptions in other sub-fields to investigation, challenge, and development by providing the conceptual resources for empirically linking micro- and macro-analysis: cultural processes, shaping the possibilities and limits of meaning-making, are understood as the practical intersection of structure and agency, the switchpoint between them. Conversely, what do such applications then imply for the further development of cultural sociology? Four issues are highlighted. Empirically, they suggest that cultural sociologists should remedy their under-emphasis of transnational processes, and also that the influence of specialized cultural institutions like art on broader culture processes should be reconsidered. Theoretically, they encourage a renewed emphasis on understanding the causal significance of culture. Finally, the articles here suggest that the proliferation of theoretical concepts in cultural sociology creates a productive ambiguity encouraging the development and diffusion of the field, but also calls for better articulation of the pertinence of divergent analytic tools to particular research problems.

Musical boundaries mark distinctions between what is valued and what is shunned among cultural objects. One prominent line of research on musical boundaries investigates variations of inclusiveness and exclusiveness – identifying cultural omnivores and univores – but has not fully considered the role of ambivalence toward genres that are neither liked nor disliked categorically. Another line of research deepens our understanding of the rhetorics, discourses, and cultural schemas organizing boundary work, but it has yet to map the combinatorial logic through which specific taste evaluations are made. In this study, I bridge research on boundary forms and organizing principles through a comparative and relational approach, combining Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Correspondence Analysis (CA) to analyze musical tastes in the U.S. Results confirm the general associations of highbrows and omnivores, lowbrows and univores, but they also show a diversity of musical boundary configurations: the largest group of omnivores do not exclude lowbrow musics; a significant subset of univores are highbrows; and those with indecisive or ambivalent boundaries favor popular music. I conclude by noting that the musical taste structure is shaped more like a parabola than a pyramid and by proposing future directions for integrating qualitative and quantitative cultural sociology.

This article examines the formation and popularity of hillbilly music in the US South of the 1930s, drawing from perspectives on social change and within the sociology of culture. Archival accounts, first-hand interviews, geographical data on radio station foundings, and historical literature are used to explore production and reception perspectives on cultural formation—specifically the interplay among musicians, audiences, and station personnel. Technological innovation during the Depression era was crucial in affording performance opportunities and in changing how musicians from textile mill villages played and sang. In the process of finding stable employment as musicians rather than mill workers and through a geographic cluster of radio stations, musicians interacted with one another and with their audiences in a manner that fundamentally shaped the content and character of what they created.

This has been written in response to the editors' question, ‘how did you get into the sociology of culture and how do you see what you have done?’ The answer is that in trying to be what was then called an industrial sociologist, I stumbled on ‘culture’, a word that wasn't then being employed in a useful way. With others I tried to make something out of it that a wide range of serious sociologists could use in finding their own way. The strategic idea was to turn from culture as ‘normative values’ or ‘abstract norms’ and view it as ‘expressive symbols’. This paper shows the origins of the observation that culture in this sense is produced and explores how that idea moved from a focus on the institutionalized culture industry worlds to the auto-production that takes place as individuals and collectivies adopt expressive symbols and, in recombining them, make them the source of their identity.

Within the discipline of sociology, approaches to studying culture have shifted markedly over the last forty years. In this article, we review these changes as well as Richard Peterson's contributions to the field, arguing that his work played a vital role in developing the study of culture as a legitimate subject. While studies of culture were marginal during sociology's structural period of the 1960s, the ‘production of culture’ perspective of the 1970s established the arts as a legitimate topic by applying structural analysis to the popular culture industry and focusing on the organizational processes that constrain aesthetic choices. This depoliticizing of culture opened up the field for the developments of the 1980s and 1990s, which saw a rapid growth of interest in the analysis of cultural meaning as well as a broader conceptualization of culture. By considering Peterson's contributions along this time line, we show how his work contributed to current theories of culture, and how these theories have been applied to the arts in general, and to the music industry in particular.

The production perspective posits that the content of formally produced symbol systems is shaped by the social context of their production, distribution and use. I draw on the insights of the ‘production of culture’ perspective introduced by Richard Peterson in 1974 to analyze the development and influence of that same perspective. Using a combination of intellectual history and citation analysis, I demonstrate that the production perspective rapidly acquired a central position in the new sociology of culture that emerged in the 1970s; that it became hegemonic within the sociology of art and media; and that, by the 1990s, its influence could be seen in the study of informally produced culture and in the humanities. The production perspective's success is explicable as a function of (a) its intrinsic merit in generating compelling explanations; (b) the environment into which it was introduced, which lacked seriously competitive paradigms in the areas of arts, media, and informally produced culture; (c) Peterson's use of institutions to disseminate the perspective and create an academic minisocial movement on its behalf; and (d) his framing of the perspective, which at once located it in the great tradition of sociological theory but at the same time left it sufficiently unfinished that others could appropriate it to their own uses.

This paper argues that current challenges for the sociology of culture are more conceptual and the theoretical than methodological in nature. It discusses persistent issues in the conceptualization of culture, the quasi-hierarchic linkages between different cultural elements, and the importance of attention to levels of analysis for the measurement of cultural properties.

Recent theoretical advances in the sociology of culture have reconceptualized the relationship between culture and behavior. While earlier models focused on the provision of values or end goals, newer models have shifted attention toward conceptions of culture as affecting behavior by providing repertoires of practices, skills, and capacities. Given these new theoretical models, traditional methods of measuring culture's effects by surveying values are inadequate. This essay suggests an alternative method for studying culture's effects on behavior. The proposed model involves four steps. Step One is the videotaping of a social interaction or event. Step Two is the solicitation of cultural ‘insider’ explanations of the taped event. Step Three involves gathering cross-cultural ‘outsider’ reactions to both the original event and to insiders' explanations. Step Four completes the process of cross-cultural illumination by returning to the original audience of insiders for reactions to the outsiders' commentary. The method is illustrated using Tobin, Wu, and Davidson's (1989) videotapes of preschools in the U.S. and Japan. The essay concludes with suggestions for this method's applicability to other types of cultural research.

This paper gives the results of a research project on how Dutch filmmakers practiced their profession during the period 1960–1983. The focus is on the conditions under which a number of them succeeded in pursuing their activities on a continuous basis. The two major research questions are (i) what were the socioeconomic conditions under which Dutch filmmakers developed their activities into a profession? (ii) what is the contribution of Dutch filmmakers to the professionalization of their activities? Practicing a profession means that activities are undertaken on a continuous basis. A professional filmmaker was defined in this research project as a person who has spent at least half of his or her career on making films. This means that there are financial resources, the possibility of receiving training for a future profession and that there is a union that unites most professionals. The development of professional careers shows differentiated patterns. In part, these points of view have also been developed within the sociology of professions and the sociology of culture. It should be noted, however, that very few studies in either field recognize the central role of financial resources in the development of (artistic) activities into a profession. One of these studies is La naissance de l'ecrivain by Alain Viala.

This article attemps to set forth some general properties of the cultural field and to explain the symbolic struggles waged within it. Far from being a simple aggregate of isolated agents, the cultural field consists of a set of systems of interrelated agents and institutions functionally defined by their role in the division of labour (of production, reproduction and diffusion of cultural goods). Besides being a commodity that has a commercial value, any cultural object is also a symbolic good, having a specifically cultural value. Depending on whether symbolic or economic considerations come first, the field of cultural production — as market symbolic goods — can be schematically divided into two sectors: The field of restricted production (FRP) and the field of large-scale cultural production (FLP). In FRP properly economic profit is secondary to enhancement of the product's symbolic value and to (long-term) accumulation and gestation of symbolic capital by producers and consumers alike. Producers who seek to take a position within FRP should keep clear of the suspicion that they submit to external demands, as is the case in FLP. The output of FLP is hardly rated at all on the scale of symbolic values; its products are rather short-lived, managed as they are like ordinary economic goods. They are destined for consumers who, in contrast with those of FRP, are nonproducers and noncompetitors. The FRP is fairly closed on itself and enjoys a high degree of autonomy; this is evident from the power it has to develop its own criteria for the production and evaluation of its products. But even the producer within FRP has to define himself in relation to the public meaning of his work. This meaning orginates in the process of circulation and consumption through which the work achieves cultural recognition. This process is dominated by agents and institutions of consecration, such as criticism and the educational system. Members of theseinstitutions are authorized (or rather compete for the authority) to endow works with certain properties and thus to rank them on a scale of legitimacy. Along different lines, they also ensure the reproduction not only of consecrating agents and of producers of a determinate type of cultural goods, but also of consumers capable of adopting the posture socially designated as specifically aesthetic, by providing them with the instruments required for the appropriation of these legitimized symbolic goods. The latter owe their cultural rarity in no small degree to the very scarcity of these instruments. As a matter of fact, the extent to which consumption of symbolic goods depends upon the educational level of consumers markedly varies from one sector to the other. Whichever properties are assigned to a cultural good, they cannot be assimilated to intrinsic properties. The point is that the properties involved are positional ones: They derive their nature and weight from the relative positions held by agents who, urged on by fairy different (and partly semi-conscious) interests, participate in this dynamic field. Hence, in constructing this field, the sociology of culture should not disregard the fact that the two modes of production, as opposed as they are, coexist so as to be definable only in terms of their hierarchic and objectively hierarchized relations with each other.

Police work relies fundamentally on non-declarative how-to knowledge, such as embodied skills (Lizardo, 2017). While there is a longstanding tradition of research on forms of police culture, knowledge, and narratives, insights from cultural sociology have only recently been introduced in this tradition. Forms of police culture are predominantly studied through ethnographies and interviews to arrive at the (re)creation of meanings and experiences in situ, although recently, other researchers have introduced video-analysis to understand the situational dynamics of police work. Whereas the former methodology does not allow for showing sequences of bodily action, the latter does not focus on social meanings and officers’ lived experiences. This article addresses this problem by combining narrative and visual techniques through video elicitation to explore police officers’ bodily knowledge of how and when to act. In 24 video interviews I watched, discussed, and examined video footage with Dutch police officers who participated in violent situations recorded on camera. This method reveals how officers read bodies to generate incentives for taking action. Theoretically, this article draws attention to bodily action knowledge which has received scarce attention in cultural sociology and policing studies alike. It contributes to cultural sociology more generally by demonstrating that collective bodily know-how is learned and plays an important role in collective co-creation of situations. I conclude by discussing how analyzing violent situations through examining videos with those recorded in these events allows us to make explicit embodied understanding and knowing, thus furthering our understanding of situated, in this case police, action.