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In recent years local governments in many North American cities have engaged in “land value capture,” which involves state actors exchanging greater density for condominium developers through rezoning as a way to build social housing and affordable rental units. This paper focuses on how these policies are framed and implemented by developers, planners and politicians in two large Canadian cities, Toronto and Vancouver, to address a long-standing but under-theorized question: what is the relationship between altruism and profitability for private development companies? Drawing on concepts from economic and cultural sociology, including Beckert's fictional expectations, Goffman's frame analysis, and Bourdieu's forms of capital, I challenge existing accounts of developers as either following the logic of profit maximization, or “giving back” through charitable acts. Instead, I argue that land value capture policies involve the process of “giving back to get ahead;” through acts of gift-giving developers enhance their symbolic capital, or reputational prestige, leading to new opportunities for profit-making. Thus I show how meaning and symbolism accompany the pursuit of monetary gains and mystify “giving back” as a strategy of accumulation for the private sector. This research holds implications for understanding “condo-ization” as a form of urbanism, as well as the increasing privatization of affordable housing in North America.

Research on mental health pays increasing attention to the influence of social institutions on subjective well-being over the life course. Yet little research has considered how belief in the promise of legal institutions may have beneficial effects for well-being. Through structural equation models of longitudinal data, our findings suggest that belief in the neutrality and fairness of legal institutions has salutary effects for mental health net of social and economic status and across individuals from a wide range of ethnic groups. By combining research in the sociology of mental health, cultural sociology, social psychology, and the sociology of law, we extend the emerging literature on the institutional determinants of mental health by including attention to law as one of the central organizing institutions of social life.

Paul DiMaggio's (1997) Annual Review of Sociology article urged integration of the cognitive and the cultural, triggering a cognitive turn in cultural sociology. Since then, a burgeoning literature in cultural sociology has incorporated ideas from the cognitive sciences—cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy—significantly reshaping sociologists’ approach to culture, both theoretically and methodologically. This article reviews work published since DiMaggio's agenda-setting piece—research that builds on cross-disciplinary links between cultural sociology and the cognitive sciences. These works present new ideas on the acquisition, storage, and retrieval of culture, on how forms of personal culture interact, on how culture becomes shared, and on how social interaction and cultural environments inform cognitive processes. Within our discussion, we point to research questions that remain unsettled. We then conclude with issues for future research in culture and cognition that can enrich sociological analysis about action more generally.

“Propagames,” or games with propagandistic content, have been emerging in the past two decades. They operate as a part of digital authoritarianism, together with other forms of new soft propaganda, to legitimate populist authoritarian states around the world. The contemporary democratic struggle against global authoritarian resurgence will require knowledge on how propagames and other digital propaganda work. But knowledge on propagames is seriously lacking compared to the voluminous scholarship on politically progressive, educational, and serious games. This study fills this research gap by analyzing the most popular propagame in China, Kangzhan Online (War of Resistance against Japan Online), and gamers’ reception of it. We begin with theoretical explorations of how to define propagames, how to demarcate them from other games with political content, and what role they play in digital authoritarianism. We eclectically borrow from four frameworks to analyze Kangzhan Online: the dual-process perspective, imaginary world studies, the sociology of collective memory, and the sociology of emotions. Our data include participant observation in the game for 3 months, formal interviews of 30 gamers, informal interviews with dozens of gamers, and documentary data from the official forum and the Chinese game media. The data were collected in 2009, 2010, and 2019.

This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a primitivism that would be transformed by the rationality and universalism of modernity. While the barbarisms of the 20th century cast doubt on such predictions, only an intellectual revolution could provide the foundations for an alternative social theory. The cultural turn in philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology erased the division between primitive and modern; in sociology, the classical writings of Durkheim were recentered around his later, religious sociology. These intellectual currents fed into a cultural sociology that challenged the sociology of culture, creating radically new research programs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Since 2015, the latest so-called migration crisis has become a major discursive topic in the EU, even in countries like Czechia, which have not received many migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. While researchers have looked at anti-migration discourses in the country, highlighting the ways in which symbolic boundaries around migrants are brightened, there exists a gap in looking at the other side, namely, how migrant rights advocates legitimate the potential acceptance of migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. In this article, we adopt a cultural sociological approach to explore how two Czech initiatives to accept refugees, including Syrian orphans, variously blur and solidify symbolic boundaries. Our findings show that the migrant rights advocates involved in these two initiatives, who gained the attention of decision makers, follow mainstream discursive narratives, legitimating the acceptance of refugees based on similar arguments and symbols (both religious and security based) as those instrumentalised by the opponents of migration.

Sociologists often neglect aesthetic and moral factors in explaining the rise and fall of artists’ reputations. Their focus has often been on more ostentatiously “sociological” variables such as politics, networks, organizations, and power. In this study we make central a pollution dynamic and explore the overlooked phenomenon of “literary degradation.” We identify two pathways—the downward aesthetic and downward moral classification. We exemplify both these pathways on the case of the Danish writer known as Sven Hassel, once an acclaimed new writer compared to Hemingway in the 1950s. Yet by the 1970s his books were generally seen as militaristic pulp flirting with Nazi sympathies. We show the forces of degradation are divergently activated according to context.

The year 2019 was the year of “OK Boomer” (OKb). From The New York Times to the New Zealand legislature, OKb emerged as a pop cultural phenomenon. For some, this phrase represents a battle of the generations wherein Baby Boomers are fed up with the utopian demands of younger generations, while younger generations see Baby Boomers as stubbornly conservative and out of touch. Alternatively, some dismiss the generational warfare trope and demand we see society for what it “really is”—one defined by class warfare. By deploying theories of politics, ideology, and cultural change from Mark Fisher, Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek, and Franco Berardi, we offer a theoretical framework through which the emergence and proliferation of OKb can be understood. We find OKb to be embedded within the logic of capitalist realism, where younger generations’ cynical usage of this meme represents a muddled attempt to cognitively map within 21st century postmodernity.

Positing Muslim positionality in Europe as an undercaste helps to make sense of how cultural stratification, rooted in associations with incivility, has resulted in deep and unrelenting inequalities experienced by diverse Muslims. Based on two years of ethnographic research with a Muslim community in Berlin as well as a survey of secondary research, this paper both theorizes and empirically showcases the process by which Muslims have become synonymous with incivility, and how this affects opportunities and inclusion across the educational, economic, residential, and private spheres. By drawing parallels with other instances of caste-based status differentiation in the West, specifically the Jewish experience in Europe and Black experience in the USA, it further illuminates how cultural stratification through associations with incivility (as a modern secular coding of impurity) that endures for generations functions in the contemporary world. Employing the concept of caste deepens the cultural turn that has replaced economic or legal explanations of Muslim marginality in Europe. And it awakens a dormant sociological vocabulary that allows for a more precise theoretical understanding of this empirical social phenomenon and thereby the possibilities—and limits—of pluralism in modernity.

This treatise conflates cultural sociology, media theory, and Japanese philology in order to better understand the way media scandals are produced in contemporary Japan. In cultural sociology, scandal is understood as a social performance between ritual and strategy. In my previous research I focused on the ritual aspect, analyzing Japanese scandals as dramatic public performances of confession, exclusion, and reintegration. In this treatise, I focus on the strategy aspect, approaching scandals as symbolic products of media routines and journalistic practices. The former part of this treatise examines how the actor-network of power circles co-defines the way scandals emerge and unfold in Japan. The latter part focuses on the role of Japanese media organizations in the process of transforming leaks into scandals.

This paper aims to understand how young Muslims in the super-diverse city of Antwerp negotiate the tensions between their religious identification and the broader cultural framework of individualism. Young Muslims in Antwerp face the challenge to present themselves as autonomous, while maintaining their religious identification. Based on 26 interviews with Muslim students in two secondary schools, we describe how presenting a dignified self to both non-Muslim and Muslim audiences requires a delicate balancing act. Drawing conceptually from cultural sociology, we explore how our respondents present themselves towards various audiences by selectively employing elements from the cultural repertoire of ‘religious individualism’. In our analysis, we examine four ways in which respondents employ this repertoire to rework the potential tensions and present themselves as agentive within their religious framework. We also discuss how negotiating a contested identity requires more taxing boundary work for girls, and how they challenge gender norms without denying their religious identification. Overall, our analysis demonstrates how young Muslims in a West European context engage in complex boundary work and creatively draw on the cultural repertoire of religious individualism to negotiate their multiple identifications.

The controversy in the Mexican media is analyzed for the alleged relationship of the #Metoo movement with the suicide of a musician accused of harassment. This controversy opened a debate on the relevance of the anonymous report of the harassment, its legal, social and personal implications, both for the victims and for the accused. Following the theoretical-methodological proposal of cultural sociology, a review was made of the opinion columns that dealt with the subject. The movement was interpreted in the media as: a) an expression of legitimate justice; b) a justified manifestation but contaminated by rancor and revenge; c) as an expression that sought from the beginning the digital lynching of alleged harassers. This dispute allows us to understand the challenges of feminist justice in cases of violence against women.

Bourdieu argues that legitimate or ‘highbrow’ cultural products depend for their appreciation on a style of consumption grounded in cultural knowledge acquired through formal education. To explore this idea, all available customer reviews of two Man Booker prize-winning novels—Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008)—were collected from the Amazon.co.uk website. Analysis of these reviews focussed on styles of cultural consumption, as implied by the relationship between the words in the reviews and the numeric ‘star ratings’ that accompany those reviews. Positive reviews resemble discourse on the same novels by what Bourdieu calls ‘professional interpreters’ or ‘professional commentator[s] on texts’ in their tendency to interpret formal features in relation to political and philosophical themes, while negative reviews instead express disappointment that these novels do not measure up to ‘middlebrow’ standards, highlighting the novels’ lack of characteristics apparently considered conducive to readerly enjoyment. Mentions of the Man Booker Prize itself were associated with negative evaluations of both novels, often featuring in expressions of confusion or anger.

Following the strong program in cultural sociology, I propose a “literary turn” to recognize literary texts “as relatively autonomous cultural entities” with their own agency. This article is part of a larger project connecting cultural sociology with the sociology of literature and literary theory to develop a strong program in the sociology of literature. Instead of approaching literary fiction as an object of analysis, sociology and literature can contribute to social knowledge in a symmetrical way, where fiction is not devalued vis-a-vis social scientific inquiry. Just the opposite: recognizing the specificities of literary communication, we can access textures of social life that are only hardly graspable by sociology. A crucial step is to examine how social knowledge comes into existence when reading a fictional text. Embracing the structural aesthetics of Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukařovský, I modify the concept of iconicity to capture the iconic experience of reading through which literature mediates social experience that is iconic of broader social phenomena. I demonstrate my approach by analyzing the Czech novel Bliss was it in Bohemia by Michal Viewegh (Bliss was it in Bohemia, Jantar Publishing, London, 1992). Building on social aesthetics, I discuss implications of my model for sociological theory, textual representation, and sociological explanation in general.

Reviewers help ease cultural products’ testing transition from the stage of production to that of circulation. Given their intermediate position between stages, reviewers have to deal with uncertainty when valuating new cultural products. How do reviewers in a transnational setting make sense of a novel product that challenges existing aesthetic boundaries, has commercial success, and is made by a little-known creator? Along with the strategies of description, accommodation, and rejection, this paper argues that reviewers’ most effective, long-term strategy to normalize the uncertainty of a brand-new product is to come up with an aesthetic label for it, either by rescuing one (recycling) or by proposing a new one (neo-labeling). These two strategies of resignification help to normalize the product’s aesthetic uncertainty. This paper studies reviewers’ initial valuation of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. They applied the above-mentioned strategies to read the text, especially as they could not agree on its aesthetics. A key strategy consisted in recycling the little-known label magical realism. In the long-run, magical realism turned into the normal label applied to the novel worldwide. This paper offers insights into actors’ perception of uncertain cultural products and the standardization of heterogeneous interpretations of such products.

Bringing together research from consumption, materiality, and economic sociology, I explain how real estate stagers attempt to construct persuasive spaces. I conceptualize real estate staging as a ...

Previous accounts of social performance have examined the difficulties associated with multiple audiences, but few describe situations in which a performer’s audiences are not only multiple but are also connected in ways that mean the reaction of one audience will influence that of the other. I lay out the necessary conditions for audiences to be considered connected, the potential configurations of connected audiences, and the challenges for performative success that come with such configurations. I argue that some performance structures are increasingly central to civil engagement as groups become less likely to interact but more likely to virtually observe one another and that conceptualizing these performances is essential to understanding recent political events in pluralistic societies.

Émile Durkheim’s late work focuses on représentations collectives, social facts that embody sui generis social forces and that direct behaviour in meaningful ways. The focus on représentations collectives raises questions, but also opens doors for Durkheimian sociology. Many would contend that Durkheim’s focus on représentations collectives introduces a hermeneutical and ideational element that is at odds with his positivist approach. His study of représentations collectives also point to a potentially broad application of his method to the study of culture as a causally autonomous factor in social life. This article will discuss the social fact in Durkheim’s late work in light of these issues. It will argue that représentations collectives are social facts, ‘things’ in Durkheim’s terminology, that are rooted in ritual. They have an objective existence and are causally efficacious, which makes them the object of positive sociology; there is thus no tension between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Durkheim on this point. It will also argue that due to the causally autonomous and inherently meaningful nature of représentations collectives, Durkheim’s approach adds to the Strong Program’s research agenda, albeit with more of a focus on ritual and emotional energy. In so doing the article seeks to build a bridge between the Strong Program and the interaction ritual approach developed by Randall Collins.

We integrated cosmetic and appearance-related scenario elicitation and in-depth interviews to explore aesthetic attitudes toward skin color in bicultural contexts among three groups of emerging Chinese adults. Results indicated that Chinese women, who grew up in China until age 18 and then moved to the US, generally leaned toward Chinese culture, found lighter skin more beautiful, and chose shades of makeup foundation lighter than their skin color. Chinese adoptees, raised in the US by Euro-American parents, leaned toward Euro-American culture, considered tanned skin more attractive, and chose darker colored foundations in most social contexts other than professional. Chinese Americans, raised in the US by first-generation Chinese parents, expressed mixed preferences. Women’s preferences revealed how everyday decisions reflect cultural beliefs and symbolic values behind skin color, suggesting that attitude formation is contextually dependent. People favor different shades of foundation makeup for different occasions, suggesting agentic awareness and the use of behavioral modification to gain acceptance in a given context. Appearance manipulation is a form of self-expression and conveys sociocultural cues. Understanding subtle sociocultural meanings and aesthetics in complex cultural contexts has significant implications for body image and colorism-related research, promoting the exploration of cultural influences on appearance, ideal skin color internalization, and decision-making.

Drawing on theories from the sociology of work and the sociology of culture, this article argues that members of nascent technical occupations construct their professional identity and claim status through an omnivorous approach to skills acquisition. Based on a discursive analysis of 56 semi-structured in-depth interviews with data scientists, data science professors and managers in Israel, it was found that data scientists mobilise the following five resources to construct their identity: (1) ability to bridge the gap between scientist’s and engineer’s identities; (2) multiplicity of theories; (3) intensive self-learning; (4) bridging technical and social skills; and (5) acquiring domain knowledge easily. These resources diverge from former generalist-specialist identity tensions described in the literature as they attribute a higher status to the generalist-omnivore and a lower one to the specialist-snob.

Cultural trauma after mass violence poses challenges in micro-social settings. Children and grandchildren of the perpetrator generation address these challenges in multiple, more or less fictionalized, biographies and family histories, explored here for the case of the Nazi Regime and the Holocaust. Their books serve, at one level, as quarries for harvesting depictions of interactive situations in which intra- and intergenerational sets of actors manage stigma through practices of silencing, denying and acknowledging in the context of family and friendship circles. At another level, biographies themselves constitute efforts at managing the authors’ spoiled identities through their conversation with an imagined audience. In retelling family history and reporting interactive situations, authors are torn between the desire to engage with—and cleanse themselves from—a polluting past and to maintain family loyalties and affective bonds.

Face-to-face (F2F) embodied interaction is the initial ingredient of interaction ritual (IR), the buildup of shared emotion, mutual focus of attention, and rhythmic entrainment that produces interpersonal solidarity. What happens when a natural experiment (the COVID-19 epidemic) prevents most F2F encounters or limits the modes of micro-interactional communication by masking? The paper examines evidence of the effects of masking and social distancing on public behavior, family life, remote schooling and remote work, prohibition of large audiences and assemblies, and attempts to substitute non-embodied electronic media. Most effects are consistent with IR theory predictions.

Pursuing a new theoretical link between sociology of culture and ‘categorization’ research, the article articulates the process whereby new categories emerge through bifurcation of pre-existing categories. The contribution is in conceptualizing and documenting the underlying interaction of endogenous and exogeneous factors. The assumption is that bifurcation is likely to occur where and when individual practices of contrast maximization interact with the internal tendency toward dichotomization. This form of interaction is instrumental in identifying and explaining ‘thresholds’ in cultural change. The framework is illustrated with the archetype of ‘modern ballet’ – The Rite of Spring, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, staged in 1913. By reversing the codes of ‘classical’ ballet, centered on elegance, lightness and flow, the Rite redefined movement, codifying a language of tension, interruption and constraint. It marked the key moment when a critical part of the audience interpreted ‘bad’ ballet as ‘new’ ballet. The analysis draws parallels with bifurcation processes in physics and system dynamics.

The roots of (im)politeness research in Durkheim’s sociology are neglected. Goffman is the go-to sociologist in (im)politeness research, and Goffman’s debt to Durkheim is substantial. This article argues that a renewed and broadened field of inquiry opens up around (im)politeness phenomena when we take seriously the centrality of Durkheim’s conception of the sacred to both the practice of everyday life and the analysis of everyday phenomena. To embed the sociology of the sacred into the analysis of (im)politeness phenomena, I develop an alternative conceptual architecture that both encompasses and expands the field. This involves two conceptual shifts that I draw out of contemporary Durkheimian cultural sociology. The first shift, from (im)politeness to (in)civility, brings a wider range of phenomena into our analytic purview, and the second, from face to ritual, displaces face as the central concept in (im)politeness research. The value of these conceptual shifts is illustrated using the example of an account of a racist encounter in public space. Consequences of these conceptual shifts for deeper and wider interdisciplinary exploration are explored.

This article investigates the relationship between history and the boundary-making process studied by cultural sociologists. Drawing on recent works on boundary-making in immigration societies, it ...

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic is puzzling from a visual point of view. There are millions of photographs published about the crisis every day, yet we can see the key actor, the virus, only in artistic representations. Most of us also have very restricted access to central sites of the crisis, as intensive care units, nursing homes, meat packing plants and prisons are often not available for photographic representation. At the same time, we are oversupplied by other images that try to capture the "essence" of the moment. This article analyzes three prevalent visual genres in connection with the ongoing pandemic: abstract representations of the virus and public responses to it, images of heroes and sinners, and photographs of the "stage": the iconic spaces including empty public buildings and busy domestic spaces. All these iconic representations try to grasp the "deep meaning" of the crisis through a particular scene or moment. Their expressive surfaces have become our key sources to imagine the coronavirus crisis, and to socially connect in a time of painful and prolonged physical distance.

This paper presents a case study of how a fringe idea moves into the cultural mainstream. In its cultural and political project to defend the Second Amendment, the National Rifle Association (NRA) embraced New War culture, a counter-cultural response to the trauma of the war in Vietnam, which extended warrior honor to armed men defending their families from an increasingly hostile world and a suspect government that might try to disarm them. Using textual analysis of the American Rifleman, we explore how the NRA co-opted narratives of soldiers' sacrifice for the nation to promote a New War cultural message. We find that magazine contributors retooled the traditional narrative to feature non-military protagonists, to differentiate the nation from the government, and to spotlight freedom as a sacrificial cause. With their strong civil religious overtones, the NRA's sacrifice narratives served as value-laden signposts that elevated the Second Amendment to a sacred God-given freedom, extended the consecration from sacrifice to encompass their mainstream audience of gun owners, and identified political and cultural enemies. These classic American narratives of soldiers’ sacrifice for the nation were thus co-opted to deliver a simultaneously patriotic and anti-government counter-cultural message that would resonate with mainstream American culture.

Using Chan and Goldthorpe’s theoretical framework of cultural consumption, this study analyses the patterns of social stratification in sports practice in Chile. Based on the data of the National Survey of Physical Activity and Sports Habits in the Population Aged 18 and Over 2015 in Chile ( n = 5511), a latent class analysis was used to identify and characterize types of sports practice in this country. After this, logistic and multinomial regressions were performed to relate the types of sports practice found and its social determinants. The results support current literature in sports participation, finding evidence in favour of both the homology hypothesis and omnivorous–univorous hypothesis. However, in the same way as previous studies, it is shown that these arguments are reconfigured in the field of sport.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the “gendering” of contamination in the context of COVID-19 where “gendering” is taken to include other, cross-cutting areas of disadvantage. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on secondary sources to explore gender and COVID-19. Findings The authors show that contamination is rooted in structural disadvantage, reproducing classed, gendered and racial difference in terms of how it is encountered and experienced. Practical implications This “thought piece” suggests a greater awareness of how pandemics and other public health emergencies impact of structural disadvantages. Originality/value This “thought piece” applies notions of taint to a contemporary pandemic that has had far-reaching consequences for issues of equality.

This article explores the meaning and materiality of contemporary zines. As do-it-yourself and profit-resistant publications seeing a sustained resurgence, zines are an interesting and valuable case within the cultural sociology of reading. Based on a thematic analysis of 73 zines collected from a 2019 zine fair, and qualitative interviews with 16 zine readers, in this article we consider the ‘felt value’ (Simmel 2005 [1916]) of zines. We explore how contemporary zines—via their content and form—intimately speak to both the weight and frivolity of life, how they intensively grapple with questions about relationships and ways of living, and what this means for how meaning is made material(ly) in the form. Conceptually, we bring together Thumala Olave’s (2017, 2020) work on affect and reading with Alexander’s (2008a, b) work on iconicity and immersion and Bennett’s (2018a, b) work on the significance and diversification of DIY projects in contemporary cultural practice. We identify four iconic properties of the contemporary form: a DIY ethos and aesthetic, anti-mainstream positioning, an intimacy, and an intensity. These iconic properties offer insight into how reading zines is made meaningful through the iconicity and immersive materiality of the analogue zine form.

This paper has two aims. The first is to introduce the concept of compressed cultural trauma, and the second is to apply the theory of cultural trauma in two case studies of the current covid-19 pandemic, Greece and Sweden. Our central question is whether the pandemic will evolve into a cultural trauma in these two countries. We believe the pandemic presents a challenge to cultural trauma theory, which the idea of compressed trauma is meant to address. We conclude that, while the ongoing covid-19 pandemic has had traumatic consequences in Sweden and Greece, it has not evolved into cultural trauma in either country.

This paper examines what arrested individuals expect from the police, and the moral grammars they rely on to evaluate police behavior. Drawing on interviews with recently arrested suspects in the Cleveland city jail, we analyze the moral grammars, or common worlds, that residents invoke to reflect on interactions with law enforcement. We find that respondents care about two different moral dimensions in policing. At one level, they want police to treat them with civility and politeness, and to respect their rights—thereby treating them equally with other residents in the city. Yet at a second level, they want police to show care and empathy for their local situation, and to recognize that policing the neighborhoods in which they live is different than policing other parts of the city. As a result, we find that residents who are arrested by the police deploy two orders of worth: a civic order, grounded in fairness, legal rules, equality, and civic belonging in the polity; and a domestic order, based on a politics of community and difference, emphasizing empathy, local knowledge, and personal experience. We demonstrate how individuals assess and test the moral promise of institutions to offer moral recognition, redress, and repair.

The article triangulates Schatzki’s practice theory (2002) and Thévenot’s (2001) ‘regimes of engagement’ with the nascent field of ‘social futures’ or future-oriented cultural sociology (e.g. Coleman and Tutton 2017; Mische 2009). We present a reading of Thévenot’s regimes of engagement that is ontologically compatible with Schatzki’s account of social practices and argue that practices are more or less enmeshed in distinct regimes of engagement. We aver that while people engage reality through distinct regimes of engagement they do so, to follow Schatzki, primarily in the context of social practices. We then articulate this account with Giuliana Mandich’s (2019) work on the different modes of engagement with the future, or forms of reflexive projectivity, that are expressed through Thévenot’s regimes: that of practical anticipation for the regime of the familiar; of probability for the regime of the plan; of possibility for the regime of justification; and of discovery for the regime of exploration. This synthesis enables a practice theoretical account of the different modes through which actors engage with the future that is, we suggest, analytically superior to both Thévenot’s and Schatzki’s tendency towards a mono-dimensional view of agents’ projectivity towards the future. We illustrate the synthesis of practices, regimes of engagement and modes of projectivity chiefly through a study of domestic laundry practice conducted by Southerton and Mylan (2018). We suggest this theoretical development may be productively applied to practice theoretical work informing understanding of issues such as sustainable consumption, mobility and energy use, as well as social change more broadly.

What accounts for name choices in a transnational context? What does the choice of ethnic or English names reveal about global identities and the desire to fit into a new culture? Drawing on the sociology of culture and migration, we examine the intersection of naming, assimilation, and self-presentation in light of international student mobility. Based on 25 semi-structured interviews with mainland Chinese students enrolled in an elite Midwestern university, we find that these students make name choices by engaging in both transnational processes and situated practices. First, Chinese international students negotiate between multiple names to deal with ethnic distinctions. While ethnic names can signal distance from other ethnic communities, they also distinguish individuals from others. For these students, names are multi-layered and temporal: their name choices evolve throughout school lives, shaped by power relations in American cultural contexts and channeled by images of their home country. Second, multiple names allow these students to practice situated performance, incorporating the reflective self, the distinctive self, and the imagined self. We address “cross-cultural naming” that accounts for identity in transnational social spaces.

The Scottish independence referendum in 2014 saw the breakthrough of online political campaigning in the UK. Despite the outcome, research and media alike concluded that the main pro-independence campaign, Yes Scotland (YS), outdid the main pro-union campaign, Better Together (BT), in the online battle. This article addresses this discrepancy by exploring how YS and BT used social media affordances in order to legitimize their own and de-legitimize their opponents’ positions. The material consists of multimodal tweets published by YS and BT in the run-up to the referendum. The article employs a model for multimodal legitimation that takes into consideration the construction of authority, moral evaluation and the construction and justifications of means and goals. The findings show that both campaigns made extensive use of de-legitimating strategies, although YS was more balanced. The article also shows that the campaigns’ communicative choices had implications for the construction and justification of goals and means, with YS running a more visionary campaign than BT.

The integration of social science with computer science and engineering fields has produced a new area of study: computational social science. This field applies computational methods to novel sources of digital data such as social media, administrative records, and historical archives to develop theories of human behavior. We review the evolution of this field within sociology via bibliometric analysis and in-depth analysis of the following subfields where this new work is appearing most rapidly: ( a) social network analysis and group formation; ( b) collective behavior and political sociology; ( c) the sociology of knowledge; ( d) cultural sociology, social psychology, and emotions; ( e) the production of culture; ( f) economic sociology and organizations; and ( g) demography and population studies. Our review reveals that sociologists are not only at the center of cutting-edge research that addresses longstanding questions about human behavior but also developing new lines of inquiry about digital spaces as well. We conclude by discussing challenging new obstacles in the field, calling for increased attention to sociological theory, and identifying new areas where computational social science might be further integrated into mainstream sociology.

This essay uses Charles Taylor’s theory of evaluative frameworks to solve a problem that has challenged literary theory and historiography for some time: how do we square the tension between the private uses and the public authority of reading? Taylor’s notion of strong value brings out literature’s often-overlooked similarities with religious-moral or civil-sacred domains, while his concept of weak value helps us to understand more mundane moods of purpose-rational reading. Combining the concept of evaluative frameworks with a socio-institutional account of literary authority, this essay sketches an alternative history of reading, with a focus on the shifting authority of “spatial reading” (defined as attention to formal and intertextual depth). Looking at developments from the 1780s to the present, I will show how the distinction between spatial and flat reading emerges in the eighteenth century, is transformed by the modernist institutionalization of high- and middlebrow notions of spatial form, and continues to provoke tensions between the civil sphere and the literary-artistic field (as the recent scandal around Peter Handke’s Nobel Prize attests).

A number of concepts and concerns from cultural sociology were thrown out as babies with the bathwater when the sociological study of consumption became dominated by the use of practice theories. The concept of social interaction is one of them, perhaps due to assumptions about its association with symbolic and discursive interaction and reflexivity. In the field of sociological analysis of food conduct, however, there is a need for addressing both more culturally contested parts of food practices as well as more routinized parts. Food consumption and practices of provisioning, cooking and eating are both tacit, recursive, mundane activities, and at the same time discursively questioned through multiple, mediatized, cultural repertories of food. In the article, I will suggest how social interaction can be conceptualized as enabling the understanding of this intermingling of the culturally contested and routinized parts of consumption within a practice theoretical perspective. The conceptual suggestion consists in four analytical suggestions for how the culturally tacit and reflexive in food conduct become linked through social interaction. The four suggestions are about coordination, intersection, hybridity and normative accountability. The four suggestions are exemplified empirically on the basis of a number of qualitative studies of food conduct among Danish consumers.

Prevailing perspectives attribute higher education’s immense and increasing importance in modern societies nearly exclusively to the economic value of a college degree and role of higher education in the legitimation of stratification. This forecloses consideration of the possibility that higher education’s power and influence may derive, in part, from its own considerable moral or symbolic significance in modern culture. Through analysis of in-depth interviews with adult undergraduates in the United States I explore the meaning of higher education in contemporary culture, drawing principally on institutional theory. The bachelor’s degree emerges as the central and default indicator of not only intelligence but valued moral traits: responsibility, tenacity, and ambition. College completion confirms/constitutes graduates as agentic selves to both others and themselves, and indicates assimilation of scientific and cosmopolitan universalism. I suggest that these findings can be explained through three interrelated, institutionalized interpretation rules: education is a strong moral good, education changes the self, and education accesses the universal. And I argue that we must take seriously the insight—often made but little-explored—that higher education is a quasi-religious as well as an economic institution.

This article seeks to understand how values enter into political discourse via justification and how those values are negotiated over time. The article maps out the terrain of diversity discourses, both as a specific type of discourse and as an example of ethical, moral and pragmatic modes of argumentation. The author examines Swedish “diversity discourses” in the periods of 1968–1975 and 1991–1995 in an effort to tease out the pragmatic, moral and ethical aspects of these discourses. Diversity discourses are defined as discourses regarding how much and what kind of diversity is acceptable or desirable in a society, as well as how such diversity should be handled. I find that values, both contextually-dependent ethical values and universal moral values, rather than being “prior” to politics, arise out of the intersection of pragmatic, ethical and moral discourses. What is moral and ethical, then is colored by the particular nexus of moral, ethical and pragmatic concerns such that what is acceptable at one particular time and location, may be unacceptable in another, even coming from the same actors with the same ideological commitments. Shifts in the ethical/moral modes of justification, then, lead to shifts in who is included in a democratic community.

En: Doxa Comunicación: revista interdisciplinar de estudios de comunicación y ciencias sociales. e-ISSN 2386-3978 n. 30, 2020, pp 127-143. Este estudio presenta una tipología de espectadores teatrales que contempla la influencia de los medios de comunicación y otras instancias de prescripción en sus decisiones de asistencia al teatro, un aspecto no abordado por ninguna investigación previa. La investigación se basa en una encuesta a 210 asistentes a representaciones teatrales de tres salas de la ciudad de Valencia. La aplicación de diversas técnicas estadísticas multivariables ha permitido identificar una tipología de cuatro perfiles de consumidores escénicos: los informados-alternativos, los documentados-receptivos, los distantes- independientes y los convencionales-comerciales. Esta tipología pone de manifiesto que los consumidores escénicos difieren en la influencia que sobre ellos tiene la presión mediática, el contenido temático de la representación o el prestigio y la notoriedad de la dirección y el reparto de la obra, así como en la intensidad con la que buscan información y consultan noticias y reseñas en los medios de comunicación. This study presents a typology of theatre audiences that contemplates the impact of the mass media and other influential agents on the decision to attend the theatre, an aspect that has not been examined in previous research. The study is based on a survey of 210 spectators in three theatres in the city of Valencia. The application of various multivariate statistical techniques made it possible to identify a typology with four profiles of theatregoers: informed-alternative; documented-receptive; distant-independent; and conventionalcommercial. This typology reveals that members of the theatre audience are differentially influenced by the media, the thematic content of the representation, the prestige and notoriety of the director and actors, and the intensity with which they search for information and consult opinions and reviews in the media.

Over the past decade, a community of strong program cultural sociologists has developed from Latin America against the background of local traditions in the study of culture that mostly have been influenced by Gramsci and Bourdieu. Here, we will provide an overview of this community—its members, sites of production, and recent publications which mark the leading edges of iconic power theory, cultural trauma theory, social performance theory, and civil sphere theory. In particular, we will try to flesh out how the members of this emerging community have gone about extending the horizon of strong program cultural sociology while seeking to maintain their tune with local intellectual sensibilities in the study of culture across the region.

Micro-sociological theory has traditionally stressed interactional pressures towards alignment: actors’ attempts to co-construct a shared definition of the situation. We argue that this model provides an insufficient account of the coordination of action and of the emergence of intersubjectivity among actors. To complement the focus on alignment, we develop a theory of disruption—a perceived misalignment of the dramaturgical structure of interaction in coordinating expected lines of action. We develop a theory of the interaction order that takes the interplay between interactional alignment and disruption as a foundational challenge both for sociology and for actors in their everyday lives. We focus on the practical ways in which actors negotiate both interactional breaches and wider relational ruptures, and how they differentiate between disruptions-of relations and disruptions-for them. By doing so, we connect the interaction order to a wider relational order, providing a bridge between micro-level interactionism and the sociology of culture.

In this article, I analyse how Brazilian sociology articulates the relationship between culture and power, which is one of the central problems of cultural sociology. I analyse two theoretical traditions, culturalism and institutionalism, which traverse different areas of Brazilian sociology. Broadly speaking, the approach of culturalism takes culture as a dimension that structures power relations (culture over power), while institutionalism considers that the structure lies in the institutionalised power relations that produce the cultural codes of political culture (power over culture). I conceive of political culture as an expression of an Ethos, and show how it is considered either as a cause or an effect of the historical nation building process. In Brazilian sociology, the notions of culture and power pose a permanent interpretational challenge for both classical and contemporary scholars. This makes the discussion about the relationship between culture and power a key element in understanding past and present historical processes in Brazil. I seek to understand the variations of meaning regarding these notions and their implications for Brazilian sociology. In this sense, this article is a cultural sociology of cultural sociology in Brazil, or, in other words, an analysis of the cultural foundations of Brazilian sociology.

This article provides a critical analysis of “#thatPOWER”—a music video featuring will.i.am and Justin Bieber. This analysis focuses on the tensions and binary oppositions depicted in the video that pertain to social and geographic placement (e.g., “race,” gender, religion). Social science scholarship on youth and Wendy Brown’s account of neoliberalism are drawn on to argue that while “#thatPOWER” emphasizes individual agency and social advancement via will.i.am’s own achievements and aspirations, what is unintentionally promoted is an ironic vision of what we call the "Bieber Republic,” where agency via participatory democracy is erased. “#thatPOWER” neatly serves neoliberalism by tacitly “teaching” that social problems can be solved by individual achievement and mobility secured by inner energy and grit, backgrounded by market competition, consumerism, and technology. In this way “#thatPOWER” is complicit with what Brown calls the “stealth revolution” of neoliberalism.

Starting with George Orwell’s liberal problem of meaning, this article investigates liberalism as cultural structure and myth, drawing on the theory of civil sphere by Jeffrey C. Alexander and the science fiction novels of Ian M. Banks. Following Alexander, it is argued that liberal societies are built around a sacred core described by the cultural structures of the civil sphere, which are structures of meaning as well as feeling. Civil discourses and movements in liberal (and not so liberal) societies mobilize powerful sym-bols of the sacred and profane and are thus able to inspire an almost religious devotion. The article then continues to explore the meaning structure, cultural contradictions and possible future of the liberal order discussing Bank’s Culture series. These novels are set in the borderlands of “the Culture”, a galactic civili-zation and liberal utopia. It is precisely this utopian setting, which allows Banks to probe the internal dilemmas of liberalism, for example between pacifism and interventionism, while addressing issues of contemporary relevance, such as the liberal problem of meaning, the allure of authoritarianism or the social status of artificial intelligence. With their literary imagination, science fiction writers construct “a myth of the future” (Banks), which may often reflect the myths of their time, but which can also—as in the case of Banks—reflect on those myths, their implications and contradictions. Finally, the fictional possibilities of social order in science fiction can be a valuable source for our imagination as sociologists contemplat-ing the very possibility of social order.

Based on ethnographic reception analysis, cultural sociology, and psychoanalytic film analysis, this article explores a group of Scandinavian adult female fans of the gay couple Even and Isak from the teen serial SKAM. The aim is to acquire knowledge about what pleasures this group gains from watching and chatting online about this serial. We argue that through their pondering of the gay couple as a romantic fantasy, these women address and negotiate social contradictions regarding gender and sexuality that they encounter in Scandinavian post-feminist societies. acceptedVersion

This article proposes a possible path for a materialist cultural sociology of art, focusing on the dynamics of art(s) domains and harnessing Adorno’s dialectical notion of material anew. I seek to establish links between dynamics of the arts domains and the fostering of specific modes of engagement with them – and, potentially, stances in other domains of life. I argue that a return to Adorno’s notion of (musical) material allows for such connections to be made: the ‘material’ is where the dynamics of the specific arts domains are inscribed; but it is also what is engaged with – by composers and artists as well as by interpreters, performers and publics. A dialectical material lens seems well suited for the critical study of the dynamic of arts domains in the 20th and 21st centuries, given the multiple artistic ‘breaks’ proclaimed. Focusing on some well-known movements in music and cuisine which sought to ‘emancipate’, ‘democratise’, and ‘diversify’ sounds and flavours, I analyse the processes through which they produced sound and flavour anew. I suggest that sounds and flavours themselves have become the carriers of logics relevant to music and cuisine, and that they have come to imperiously command modes of commitment (from composers and chefs, performers, listeners and diners alike) that evince specific stances. Through this necessarily sketchy survey, I provide indications that broader, cross-cutting cultural dynamics may be at stake. Overall, I seek to make clear what theoretical steps are afforded by the joint attention to materiality and the dynamic of art domains.

While scholarly work on Europe’s latest “refugee crisis” has blossomed, less attention has focused on the United States and Canada. My research centers on newspaper coverage of refugees entering th...

Localization has largely been assessed, by both its supporters and critics, with its local-global sociocultural dynamics. The local sociocultural dynamics of localization have either been ignored o...