POSTMODERNISM; OR,THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF POST-FORDISM?

This article examines attempts by Marxist thinkers such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey to explain the cultural transition from modernism to postmodernism by the economic transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. They argue that the movement of advanced industrial societies from standardized mass production to diverse flexible production has created a new culture that stresses difference, superficiality, and ahistoricality. But in their attempts to portray a synchronous development of economy and culture, these thinkers ignore the uneven developments between and within each realm. I argue that in the United States the popular arts like automobile design developed postmodern traits long before the high arts like architecture. Instead of this change in popular culture resulting from post-Fordism, it dialectically influenced this economic change.     

Diversity of exposure in television viewing: audience fragmentation and polarization in Guangzhou

Chinese television has gone through tremendous growth and change recently. The new media environment has the potential to reshape patterns of television consumption and, in turn, affect the democratic development of Chinese society. This study examines audience fragmentation and polarization, two measures of diversity of exposure, in Guangzhou by conducting a secondary analysis of people meter data. The results show that structural changes have increased the degree of audience fragmentation and polarization in Guangzhou. Most notably, the rapid development of both overseas and local television services has greatly diminished the audience for national, government operated channels in the market. Overall, though, patterns of audience fragmentation and polarization are more limited than analogous audience behaviors reported in the West. Guangzhou audiences still concentrate on popular programs with general appeals and show very little evidence of forming into “enclaves” that confine their television consumption to a limited diet of like‐minded speech.     

A question of perception: Bourdieu, art and the postmodern

Bourdieu and Darbel's classic study of European art museum audiences, The Love of Art (1991), remains one of the most influential academic studies of the social indices of art perception. Its findings were central to Bourdieu's on-going study of culture-mediated power relations, as found in the book Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), as well as social surveys of the behaviour of museum audiences across the world. Much in Bourdieu's account of art perception, however, has begun to appear dated and in need of supplementation. This paper will be a critical but sympathetic re-reading of Bourdieu's sociology of art perception in the light of recent criticisms of his approach. Whilst fine art and its institutions continue to function as sources of social identification and differentiation, this paper argues that the relationship between perception and stratification is somewhat looser than connoted in Bourdieu's work. Beyond the shift to a less rigid taxonomy of social formations, the immense expansion of the visual arts complex has opened up possibilities for the dissemination of art knowledge beyond the cultivated bourgeois. The erosion of boundaries between the aesthetic and the economic, between art and popular culture, are the result of processes of commodification that have placed museums alongside shopping malls within the realms of consumption and entertainment. New audiences have emerged from this mix with less dichotomized - that is, either cultivated or popular - ways of seeing culture that suggest a revision of Bourdieu's overly integrated account of class and cognition. An alternative, 'postmodern', approach to art perception is entertained, where an aesthetics of distinction is replaced by a culture of distraction, but this abstracts culture from any structural grounding. Capturing the shift to an accelerated cultural present, instead, requires a warping of Bourdieu's categories to account for broader patterns of culture and economy and the accentuation of modern visual culture.     

An opera house for the “Paris of South America”: pathways to the institutionalization of high culture

Who has the power to institutionalize culture? How is it that cultural forms become legitimated and appropriated by certain groups? And what are the organizational forms that guarantee the continuity of the interlocks among classifications, etiquette, and resources in the long run? This article explores these questions by observing the struggle over the institutionalization of opera as high culture during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Buenos Aires, a region of the world understudied by cultural sociologists. It contends that to answer these questions we need to observe the contested dynamics though which the process of institutionalization happens. It also shows how this contestation affects, in the long-term, the processes of evaluation and legitimation of the classification upheld, and the consequences it has in terms of audience stratification. In the Discussion section, I present a novel framework for the study of pathways to high culture institutionalization that highlights how the role of the state and competing stakeholders can introduce variable relationships among the elites, the arts, and social closure.     

Popular Music Cultures, Media and Youth Consumption: Towards an Integration of Structure, Culture and Agency

Youth, media and popular music studies have developed in separate fields of research, resulting in a lack of integration of key areas of enquiry, such as the relationship between the cultural and structural in youth music consumption and the role of media industries in 'framing' such a process. A more recent focus on popular music as a media culture suggest a way forward in exploring links between production, mediation and consumption of music and youth consumer practices. This article reviews three such frameworks: (i) the production of consumption, (ii) production of culture/cultures of production and (iii) cultures of consumption, evaluating their contribution to a more integrated understanding of how youth consume music as a structurally and culturally mediated process. Controversies over youth 'download culture' and evidence of regulatory changes in the global music industry and its impact on how youth consumers can access music media, underlines the need to pursue a research integration agenda, drawing popular music and youth consumption research closer together. Yet it remains the case that both approaches exhibit a structural vs. cultural divide over youth consumption and its relationship to the global music industry, offering optimism and pessimism in equal measure.     

CULTURAL CAPITAL AND THE VARIETY OF MODES OF CULTURAL CONSUMPTION IN THE OPERA AUDIENCE

Research on cultural consumption and its social conditions mainly focuses on tastes and on products consumed rather than on modes of consumption. This article takes up this desideratum and studies the modes of listening to classical music in opera audiences based on a visitor survey. In contrast to the prevailing image of the silent and intellectual audience in high‐brow institutions, the study shows there is a broad array of modes people use to listen to classical music. With respect to Bourdieu's theory of arts perception, in particular his notion of cultural capital, one can show empirically that the modes of cultural consumption in this case are determined by listeners' cultural capital.     

娱乐文化产业对美国经济增长贡献的实证分析

娱乐文化产业的定义众说纷纭。娱乐文化产业关注市场经济中的艺术、文化、娱乐及许多其他类型的活动。本文主要考察娱乐文化产业的其中一个方面,即其对经济的影响。之前也有学者探讨过这个问题,而本文笔者从官方数据出发,指出1995年娱乐文化产业为美国带来了2510亿美元的经济效益,而到2004年时,这一数字已经达到5650亿美元。     

Listening to Audiences: A Brief Rationale and History of Audience Research in Popular Media Studies

Popular media may be described as television, film, radio, and print media primarily offered for the purpose of entertainment. Such popular media have been the object of critical analysis for decades, both for academic scholars and popular pundits. Our focus is not on quantitative or experimental research concerning popular media effects, but instead on qualitative scholarship that seeks to interpret and critically engage such media. For the past several decades, scholarship informed only by the critic's analysis of the so-called texts of popular media has been augmented by scholarship that recognizes the need to listen to audience members. The point of this article is to provide a brief rationale and history of such audience research.     

Globalization of Culture and the Arts

This article examines the state of the field in the sociological literature on the globalization of culture and focuses on key empirical works in the globalization of the arts. The first part of the article presents the main trends in theorizing about the globalization of culture in its broadest terms, that is, the large-scale changes in worldviews that both facilitate and are made possible by globalization such as modernization, universalism, consumerism, and McDonaldization. The second part of the article examines empirical work on television, music, and the performing arts in light of theorizing about globalization and commodification, audience reception, localization and glocalization, the role of the state, imperialism, global cultural fields, and global norms. In terms of theory, the article explores the tension between globalization's homogenizing and diversifying tendencies. The review of the empirical literature includes research conducted in Cuba, Israel, Italy, Japan, Russia, Singapore, the USA, and Uzbekistan.     

When the University Went 'Pop': Exploring Cultural Studies, Sociology of Culture, and the Rising Interest in the Study of Popular Culture

This article examines why the study of popular culture has taken off as a subject of university course offerings and as a topic of scholarly inquiry since the 1980s. Placing the current explorations of popular culture in historical context, the article argues that popular culture's study and studies in the sociology of culture can illuminate many of the classic concerns that animate sociology and related fields, such as the social organization and power of institutions, debates about public life and the formation of public opinion, concerns about the relationship between consumption, social status, and politics of the privileged elite, and the role of media in the development of social movements and in individual and subcultural understandings. The article considers how popular cultural studies are currently shaping the study of social life, and concludes by considering trends that might be encouraged among students and emergent scholars seeking to study in this area.     

WORKING WITH PIERRE BOURDIEU IN THE TOURISM FIELD MAKING A CASE FOR ‘THIRD WORLD’ TOURISM

Tourism in the ‘third world’ is seen as a consumption of culture, and attempts at investigating it within a cultural studies framework have not adequately addressed key social and cultural aspects. Bourdieu's analytical legacy which is significant as a cultural legacy is largely misappropriated. This article, reviewing recent research in cultural studies in tourism, highlights and critically interrogates the treatment Bourdieu's theory has received in tourism studies. Arguing that Bourdieu's sociological framework is often misinterpreted, this article sketches out the key components of a Bourdieusian approach to a cultural analysis of tourism. Reflexive return in tourism research remains largely unexplored. This conceptual paper emphasizes the significance of working with Bourdieusian methodological approach and explores the possibilities of employing a reflexive sociology in tourism studies. The paper further highlights the difficulties of pursuing such a theoretical approach and proposes the need to accommodate recent theoretical and empirical challenges to Bourdieu's paradigm.     

创新、升级与培育——2013上海文化消费报告

在全国文化消费方兴未艾的背景下,上海文化消费尤为繁盛。在载体方面,创新与多元化趋势增强。由政府主导的基础型公共文化服务体系进一步完善,消费产品更加多样化,但仍存在公共文化机构数量不足、消费理念薄弱等问题。电影节、书展、动漫节、艺术节、艺博会五大节庆类公共文化平台在消费产品多元化、亲民化、国际化方面的趋势更加明显。新媒体作为市场主导的自主型文化消费载体,发展迅猛。网购、APP、微博经济、网络文学消费稳步增长。在客体方面,假日旅游和出境游消费火爆,私人影院等体验式消费备受青睐,演艺、奢侈品消费呈爆发式增长。在主体方面,上海已形成高、中、低3类消费主体并存的文化消费格局,阶层化倾向日趋明显。     

@GaddafisGhost: on the popular memoro-politics of a dead dictator

Qaddafi was widely lampooned in American popular culture before his death. This paper addresses this, together with representations after his death on Twitter and other social media sites, to explore the figure of the ‘dead dictator.’ It argues that the display of the gruesome body of a ‘dead dictator’ is enabled by the material and discursive construction of ‘dictators’ in contemporary narratives, which posit them as easily deposed with Western assistance and internal protests, thereby legitimating the triumph of democracy. It explores these constructions via a comprehensive analysis of Twitter accounts satirizing Qaddafi, which invoke a particular audience that ‘gets the joke.’ In this instance, jokes about Qaddafi’s death circulated in popular culture media enabled the display of his dead body, together constructing the figure of the dead dictator for a Western audience marked by being part of the in-group who were preconditioned to assume dictatorship as a form of political deviance. The paper seeks to contribute to literature on visual culture and visual politics by exploring the popular construction of memorial narratives, and to contribute a theorization that blends materiality and visuality by looking at the dead body and the way it is visually reproduced.     

Immigrants,Immigration, and Sociology: Reflecting on the State of the Discipline*

The growth of the field of immigration in multiple directions and across disciplines and areas presents an opportune juncture to pause and reflect on the central role sociology has played in the study of immigrants and immigration, as well as to assess the contributions that immigration research has made to sociology. This essay discusses three subfields in sociology in which the sociological study of immigrants has contributed to bring new light to long‐standing questions: family, religion, and ethnic and racial studies. At the same time, it brings up areas – culture and arts, social movements and civic engagement, and citizenship, belonging and the state – in which immigration scholars in sociology could establish a more vibrant intellectual dialog with those subfields. Far from exhausting the discussion, these comments are intended to offer potential avenues for further research and discussion.     

WEB PAGES, AUTHORS AND AUDIENCES: The meaning of a mouse click

One popular framework for analysing web pages has been to think of them as identity performances on the part of the author. This framework opens up possibilities for analysis of the ways in which identity performances are composed. The personal web pages to which this perspective is most immediately applicable, are, however, now only a small proportion of the overall amount of information available on the World Wide Web. It would be possible, by extension, to analyse institutional web pages as performances of the institutional identity. It is the contention of this paper that to do so is to miss out on some important aspects of web page design: namely that the production of a web page involves understandings not only of the audience for the page but also of the capacities of the technology. In addition, web page production has to become a socially meaningful act for the individual web page developer and the institution concerned. It is, therefore, argued that the analysis of web pages can usefully learn from media studies and the sociology of technology in this respect. An interview-based study of the developers of web pages for the service departments of a UK university is described. The ideas of audience which the authors use are far from homogeneous: they include an institutional offline audience for the page, a pre-existing imagined audience, developers themselves as audience, and the technology of the browser as a stand-in audience. The audience and the capacities of the technology are developed in context through the practices of designers.     

Culture and Stigma: Popular Culture and the Case of Comic Books

This paper argues that a better articulated conception of stigma can enhance the analysis of popular culture. Beginning with the work on stigma by Erving Goffman and other scholars, the article contends that the stigma sometimes attached to the production and consumption of popular culture is distinct from the low status associated with certain forms of popular culture. Unlike low status, stigma discredits cultural forms and practitioners often rendering them problematic. This reassessment of stigma is applied and developed further through a study of comic books, showing the various ways stigma can operate in popular culture. The analysis suggests that stigma significantly impeded the evolution of the comic book as an art form, illustrating the potential negative effects of stigma in popular culture.

Researching the Social Impact of Arts and Disability: Applying a New Empirical Tool and Method

This paper has a twofold focus: to establish a method of assessing the potential social impact of arts and disability projects and to apply this method to ten such projects. It does so by using a newly developed ‘ripple’ model that conceptualises social impact in terms of the development of active citizenship on the part of all participants over time. The model identifies ten factors (programme activity, welcoming, belonging, programme social values, individual social values, programme networks, individual networks, skills and creativity, programme wider social impact, and individual wider social impact) which evolve through four progressive stages. The original model is empirically adapted for application to arts and disability projects. Qualitative data were collected in the form of interviews, surveys and media reports across ten case studies, each representing a major arts and disability project offering a professional outcome for an external audience. The qualitative data were coded to provide a simple scoring tool for each case. The results support the application of the model in this context. Furthermore, findings indicate three critical conditions which enable projects to generate considerable positive social impact beyond the individual; ensemble in nature; project embeddedness; and networks and partnerships.     

Blindspots and Blurred Lines: Dallas Smythe,the Audience Commodity,and the Transformation of Labor in the Digital Age

Dallas Smythe's notion of the audience commodity provides a starting point for much work within the political economy of communication. First advanced when commercial television was the dominant medium, the controversial idea has proven to be an increasingly useful way of conceptualizing media economics in the digital age. Originally posited as a critique of Western Marxism's concern with ideology over materiality, two generations of media scholars have elaborated upon the idea. First, scholars offered it greater specificity and utility by connecting the political economy of media to more general concerns regarding labor, gender, and race. More recently, the audience commodity has become an increasingly useful theoretical tool, demonstrating how digital technologies enable new forms of economic exploitation. Rather than binding media studies to a rigid structuralism, the audience commodity helps illuminate the fluidity of media economies and culture under neoliberalism. I conclude that scholars may productively utilize and expand upon the audience commodity to answer contemporary questions about media and alienation, the state, and social movements.     

PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH

During the last decade, the phrase ‘visual culture’ has come to identify a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to the visual in everyday life. While analytic perspectives may come from gender, race or media theory, political economy, psychoanalysis, and so forth, there is an apparent agreement about the critical relation the visual has to subjectivity and social organization. The travelling of critical and cultural theory across disciplinary boundaries has given ‘visual culture’ an institutional form through new degrees, programmes, cross-faculty appointments, courses, introductory textbooks, and research publications. This paper comments on the intellectual history of ‘visual culture’, identifies cultural aspects of visual performance that have been understated in recent formulations of visual culture and visual studies, and argues that the current institutional form of visual culture research has contributed to the disappearance of cultural and anthropological approaches within visual culture. The paper is developed in relation to a case study involving popular photography as a cultural performance of the Canadian north, and considers the contribution of performance to visual culture.