Culture,Region, and Cross‐National Violent Crime

Past cross‐national crime research has focused on structural factors with considerably less attention paid to cultural predictors. We extend the culture of honor thesis by identifying the importance of cultural gender inequality and test a direct measure of it on cross‐national violent crime rates. While prior research typically uses regional variables as proxies for culture, by using a direct cultural measure we are also able to identify whether culture contributes to explaining the regional associations found previously. Based on national surveys of 153 nations and more than a million respondents, this study is able to explore cultural, structural, and regional predictors of violent crime rates cross‐nationally. Two regions, Latin America and sub‐Saharan Africa, are far above the rest of the world in terms of violent crime rates. It turns out that most of the standard structural variables found to be important in previous cross‐national studies no longer have significant effects when controls for these two regions are imposed. On the other hand, we find that our measure of cultural gender inequality has one of the largest associations with violent crime rates, net of region, and also explains portions of both regional associations.     

Postmodernism and Popularisation: The Cultural Life of Chaos Theory

Popular accounts of science have helped to stimulate greater public interest in the role of science in contemporary society. For example, chaos theory and complexity theory have proven to be highly marketable science "products". These concepts have increasingly travelled into wider culture and, notably, the study of organization. Through an interpretation that promotes a leaning towards uncertainty, unpredictability and ambiguity, these accounts of science have been seen to provoke a (postmodern) re-conceptualisation of our view of the world. Indeed the overtly philosophical style of many of these stories has provided a rich source of material for social scientists seeking to explain and legitimise developments in organization and cultural studies. Concentrating upon the treatment of chaos theory as a "postmodern science", this paper examines and questions the historical and cultural influences that have encouraged the appropriation of theories from the natural science.     

Speed up or slow down? Social theory in the information age

Extreme processes of social and cultural acceleration lie at the heart of the information age but social theory, for the most part, continues to be a slow and patient affair. In view of this, this paper asks how such theory is to respond to the speed-up of social life and culture. Should it attempt to keep pace with a world that is changing faster than ever? Or is the strength of theory that it is a slow, detached and reflective form that lies outside the accelerated logic of contemporary capitalist culture? In an attempt to address such questions, this paper considers two main alternatives: first, that theory should follow the speed-up of the world by technologizing itself (as argued by Scott Lash and Peter Lunenfeld), and second, and seemingly contrary to this, that in times of cultural speed-up theory should either call for social and cultural slow-down (Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio), slow down itself (Jean Baudrillard), or perhaps both. In considering these alternatives, media theory (associated with the above figures) is used as a resource for questioning the focus and form of social theory today.     

Notes on contributors

This article focuses on the organizational practices of the music industry to contribute a neglected dimension to our understanding of rap as a commercial activity and cultural form. It initially situates the production of rap within the context of the corporate strategies and business practices of musical entertainment companies, stressing how rap production is located within the context of corporate ‘black music divisions’ and the major labels' relationships to smaller companies. At the same time, the study considers how musical production is shaped by broader culture processes and practices that are not directly within the control or understanding of the company. As corporate organization intersects with and attempts to make sense of surrounding culture, I argue that the actions of recording companies are a direct intervention into and contribution to the way in which the social world is rationalized and fragmented and through which different cultural experiences are separated and treated unequally. This argument is focused on the theme of ‘the street’ and ‘executive suite’ through which I suggest that, while it is important to acknowledge the struggles of rap artists and entrepreneurs for both recognition and independence from the corporate world, it is also important to highlight deliberate attempts to maintain a distance between the corporate world and the genre culture of rap. This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the articulations between musical genre, occupational practices and broader cultural formations, highlighting a significant series of connections and relational practices which connect production and consumption and the articulations through which corporate organization is linked to broader cultural formations.     

Theory in Ethno-Logic*

Because thought processes underlie all human action and can distinguish one culture from another, the social sciences must face the problem of determining how people think. Reasoning can be viewed as abstract and not connected to any particular human activity, as it is in philosophical logic, or it can be seen as a process in a particular linguistic, social and cultural setting, as it is in ethno-logic. Recently anthropologists, developmental psychologists and other scholars working under the general rubric of cognitive science have studied issues in ethno-logic but these studies are flawed because the researchers accepted philosophical logic as the norm under which they judged the actions of their subjects. Good theory in ethno-logic can only come from study which describes thought processes from the natives point of view. One such theory states that conclusions are logically established on the semantic structure of the argument. This theory accounts for both universal and culture specific aspects of reasoning, is testable, opens new areas of research and provides researchers with a firmly grounded method for using meaning to account for behavior.     

Neutralizing Problematic Frames in the Culture Wars: Anti‐Evolutionists Grapple with Religion

This article contributes to the literature on culture wars work by examining how anti‐evolutionists neutralize the framing of their position as religious. Their efforts are uncovered by analyzing 570 letters to the editor published in American newspapers in the months surrounding a nationally covered 2005 federal judicial decision on the legality of the Dover PA, school board's decision to undermine evolutionary theory in the classroom. Anti‐evolutionists neutralized the framing of their position as religious through the processes of selective acknowledgement and disagreement with the problematic framing. These findings provide insights into the anti‐evolutionist movement, the nature of the culture wars, and the basic ways in which problematic frames are neutralized. First, it shows how public anti‐evolutionist discourse has not followed its leaders' efforts to minimize the religious motivations of the movement. Second, the wide variety of neutralizations partially explains the persistence of many cultural disputes. Third, this study calls attention to the under theorized role of disagreement and agreement in undoing problematic definitions of the situation.     

Making the Perfect Queen: The Cultural Production of Identities in Beauty Pageants

Beauty queens are symbolic representations of collective cultural indentities and beauty pageants are fields of active 'cultural production'. This article surveys the growing literature on beauty pageants to better understand how culture is produced within the contexts of pageants. To do so, the article examines how beauty pageants operate as sites of commodification and consumption in a world increasingly influenced by global markets and media institutions. It also illustrates how culture is produced in beauty pageants by examining beauty pageants as sites of oppression, sites to articulate cultural agency, and sites of ethnic, gender, cultural, and sexual identity production.     

EPISTEMOLOGICAL IDENTITY THEORY: RECONCEPTUALIZING COMMITMENT AS SELF-KNOWLEDGE

This article presents Epistemological Identity Theory (EIT) that explains how individuals enhance their knowledge of self and the world by creating and maintaining identities. Using cognitive and affective processes previously ignored by identity theorists, this theory reconceptualizes commitment to an identity as the degree to which that identity organizes and clarifies one's experience of the world and him/herself. The theory is derived from two previously developed theories by Demerath based on epistemological principles. First, Knowledge-Based Affect Theory describes our affective response to gains and losses in meaning, and identifies the determinants of meaningfulness as frequency, stability, and impact. Second, Epistemological Culture Theory extends those principles, arguing individuals actively increase meaningfulness by creating culture as they collaboratively articulate, typify, and orient their experiences to create shared meaning. Extending these principles to commitment, EIT asserts that individuals are committed to organizations, roles, or experiences to the extent those experiences are frequent, stable, and impactful, and to the extent those experiences have been articulated, typified, and oriented. This article outlines the theory in the course of showing how it builds on the insights of previous conceptions of commitment, while providing determinants that are more precise and more unified and grounded theoretically.     

Copyright Culture and Pirate Politics

This article approaches the recent debates about copyright and piracy from a cultural and historical perspective, discussing how problems surrounding intellectual property rights (IPR) reflect cultural conflicts that are central to cultural studies. It sets out with a study of how international copyright norms developed in nineteenth-century Europe were implemented in two different national contexts: Sweden and the USA. This historical background shows how copyright has been embedded in the cultural history of Europe and intertwined with the idea of an evolving Western civilization. The examples from the past are thus used to highlight the underlying cultural implications that affect the contemporary discussions. Particular interest is paid to how the historical association between the spread of copyright and the development of civilization affects the understanding of Asian piracy and Western file sharing today, and how a multitude of social movements both in the West and the Third World simultaneously challenge the cultural legitimacy of the current system of IPR. Eventually this is also taken as an example of how law and culture intersect and how the broad, interdisciplinary field of copyright studies that has emerged over the last decade can be seen as an extension of the cultural studies tradition.     

Religious Culture and Political Action

Recent work by political sociologists and social movement theorists extend our understanding of how religious institutions contribute to expanding democracy, but nearly all analyze religious institutions as institutions; few focus directly on what religion qua religion might contribute. This article strives to illuminate the impact of religious culture per se, extending recent work on religion and democratic life by a small group of social movement scholars trained also in the sociology of religion. In examining religion's democratic impact, an explicitly cultural analysis inspired by the new approach to political culture developed by historical sociologists and cultural analysts of democracy is used to show the power of this approach and to provide a fuller theoretical account of how cultural dynamics shape political outcomes. The article examines religious institutions as generators of religious culture, presents a theoretical model of how religious cultural elements are incorporated into social movements and so shape their internal political cultures, and discusses how this in turn shapes their impact in the public realm. This model is then applied to a key site of democratic struggle: four efforts to promote social justice among low-income urban residents of the United States, including the most widespread such effort—faith-based community organizing.     

Disability Culture and Cultural Competency in Social Work

Despite recognition of the importance of cultural and social diversity in social work education and practice there is a dearth of social work literature related to disability culture. A review of disability studies literature indicates that the disabled people's movement already affirms and celebrates the existence of disability culture as characterized by several agreed upon assumptions: disability culture is cross-cultural; it emerged out of a disability arts movement and its positive portrayal of disabled people; it is not just a shared experience of oppression but includes art, humour, history, evolving language and beliefs, values and strategies for surviving and thriving. Essentialist concepts of culture, as represented in assimilationist and pluralist social work approaches, provide social workers with the false belief that there are cultural competencies that one can develop that are sufficient to become more culturally sensitive. However, analysis of the critical theory underpinning disability culture demonstrates that an understanding of cultural politics is fundamental to social work education if it is to support the work of the disabled people's movement in demystifying and deconstructing the norms, discourses and practices of dominant culture which are represented as neutral and universal.     

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.     

Culture,Development, and Social Theory: On Cultural Studies and the Place of Culture in Development

Debates in development theory have recently swung back to taking seriously the relationship of culture to development, especially in the face of manifest failures of conventional approaches to economic growth and social transformation. This has happened at a moment when, especially within anthropology, the concept of culture itself is undergoing critical examination, and when cultural studies has emerged as a major challenge to anthropology's self-defined specialisation in the social-scientific analysis of culture. Few attempts have been made, however, to relate cultural studies and development studies, despite the fact that the relatively recent ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences has derived largely from the currently fashionable status of cultural studies and its multidisciplinary nature. This paper explores this relationship and suggests that a cultural studies approach, despite its weaknesses, potentially revitalises the significance of culture in relationship to development.     

广府民俗与培育世界文化名城

广州作为历史文化名城，与广府民俗有不解之缘。广州要建设文化强市和培育世界文化名城、更新广州形象，离不开广府民俗。广府民俗不仅深刻影响到广州商都的形象，更造就了广州文化的特质和风格。认识广州商都和民俗文化的关系，对建设广州世界文化名城有重要意义。     

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.

On the Impossibility of Getting It Right the First Time: Cultural Determinants of Theory

Although our very name, social work announces that this profession is attentive to the socio-cultural surround and the ways in which environment plays its role in the shaping of our psyches, the clinicians among us have drawn extensively on psychoanalytic theory, although they were aware that until very recently its theories remained rather culture-blind. Perhaps in some measure due to the increasing proportion of social workers trained as analysts, there now exists in the analytic world an intention to integrate into its practices and theories that fourth leg, the culture (or cultures) in which we are born and live. It may be that the largely female social work profession may play an important role in enabling psychoanalysis to overcome its previous unconsciousness about that component.     

The Paradox of Disability Culture: the need to combine versus the imperative to let go

This article seeks to demonstrate that, to function as a truly emancipatory phenomenon, disability culture must be relieved of the paradox that keeps it trapped in modernist assumptions that serve to reinforce its marginalised status. The paradox of disability culture may be stated as follows. How can we claim unity without falling into the same exclusionary practices that have served to create our divisive identifications in the first place? Conversely, how can we relinquish the practices of identification that are based on binary oppositions without losing the ability to claim identities at all? I argue that, by extricating it from its origins in essentialist assumptions, disability culture can be reinvigo rated as a truly emancipatory device, which is capable of devising positive identities which, rather than celebrating the 'disabled identity', rely on its dissolution.     

The cosmopolitan imagination: critical cosmopolitanism and social theory

Critical cosmopolitanism is an emerging direction in social theory and reflects both an object of study and a distinctive methodological approach to the social world. It differs from normative political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity or universalistic culture in its conception of cosmopolitanism as socially situated and as part of the self-constituting nature of the social world itself. It is an approach that shifts the emphasis to internal developmental processes within the social world rather than seeing globalization as the primary mechanism. This signals a post-universalistic kind of cosmopolitanism, which is not merely a condition of diversity but is articulated in cultural models of world openness through which societies undergo transformation. The cosmopolitan imagination is articulated in framing processes and cultural models by which the social world is constituted; it is therefore not reducible to concrete identities, but should be understood as a form of cultural contestation in which the logic of translation plays a central role. The cosmopolitan imagination can arise in any kind of society and at any time but it is integral to modernity, in so far as this is a condition of self-problematization, incompleteness and the awareness that certainty can never be established once and for all. As a methodologically grounded approach, critical cosmopolitan sociology has a very specific task: to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities.