Diaspora and Development? London‐based Nigerian Organisations and the Transnational Politics of Socio‐economic Status and Gender

Diaspora organisations are increasingly being lauded as important actors in the development of their communities and countries of origin. Focusing on London‐based Nigerian organisations and their interventions in Nigeria, this article assesses the particular claims that diaspora organisations reach, benefit and ‘empower’ women and ‘the poor’ at ‘home’. It argues that, while many London‐based Nigerian organisations do connect with and support these groups, they often do so in ways that reinforce rather than transform established gender relations and socio‐economic inequalities. If international agencies are to support the progressive potential of the organised diaspora, it will be necessary to acknowledge the alternative and socially mediated ways in which development might be imagined and enacted both in diaspora and at ‘home’.     

Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Consumption: A Critical Assessment of Recent Developments

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has been an extraordinarily influential figure in the sociology of music. For over three decades, his concepts have helped to generate both empirical and theoretical interventions in the field of study. His impact on the sociology of music taste, in particular, has been profound, his ideas directly informing our understandings of how musical preferences reflect and reproduce inequalities between social classes. But, recently his legacy has been under question and newer approaches to the music/society problematic have emerged. These have made important claims about the nature of the sociological enterprise when confronted with the specificity of cultural works, as well as how social change impacts on our relations with musical forms. This paper takes stock of the impact of Bourdieu’s ideas on the sociology of music, the debates sparked in their wake and the attempt at something like a “post‐Bourdieusian” sociology more faithful to music’s material properties. It will ask to what extent Bourdieu’s claims about social stratification and music consumption are still relevant and whether they are sophisticated enough to deal with the specific ways that we interact with musical forms.     

Visions of power: ideology and practice in the American garage sale

In this article, we examine ideological statements reflected in, and to a small extent created by, people's participation in garage sales.¹ Although the article touches upon the economics of garage sales, its focus is on ideology, about how people understand what they are doing when they buy and sell, and how this relates to their more general perception of the social world and their position in it. The way people discuss their participation in garage sales tells a great deal about how they understand their worlds: patterns of work and consumption, claims (especially by women and the aged) that their daily activities have more dignity than is normally afforded them within society, a felt need for moral and practical networks. The expression of ‘oppositional culture’in the statements garage sale participants make to describe their lives is certainly underdeveloped. It is not free of the dominant ideology, cannot be the basis of class-conscious political practice and in present form poses little danger to any social institution (except perhaps department stores). Still it does contain, in shadowy form, seminal statements in contradiction to what is generally regarded as the dominant ideology. We will call these emerging elements ‘prefigurative cultural formations’, as in vague form they connote emergent social values. Further, we will argue that these prefigurative cultural formations are grouped into discrete ideological claims that we call ‘Visions of Power, each of which speaks to the empowerment of subordinate groups. We will discuss four specific Visions of Power: reclaiming control of one's work, creating a sense of social justice, beating the system, and feeling oneself a part of a nurturing community. Before attempting to demonstrate the utility of these concepts in understanding forms of belief reflected in garage sales and other informal economic activities, we will briefly explore our approach to ideology, and will attempt to situate it within the contemporary debate on the nature of ideology.     

Friendships with benefits? Examining the role of friendship in semi-structured interviews within music research

This article explores the ‘methodology of friendship’ and its wider potential within music research. Drawing on two research examples that made use of ‘friendship’ in distinct fashions – one that explores music listening practices in everyday life and the other, music as a site for racialisation – the article discusses how friendship can be incorporated within semi-structured interviews. The case studies act as examples of how to negotiate alterity in music research and how friendship represents a potential for gathering more detailed data. The notion of ‘alterity’, at the core of research relationships is critical to shift the conversation to an informal tone and improve the depth of the discourses gathered from informants. Consequently, this article addresses debates within qualitative (music) sociology by reconsidering friendship as an axis of power and examines the nature of the data gathered in semi-structured interviews through the methodology of friendship.     

The musical composition of social reality? Music,action and reflexivity1

Developments in the sociology of music during the 1980s have brought the sub-field more firmly in to the center of sociological concerns, The ‘worlds’ concept, and the concern with music and social status have helped to ground and specify links between music and society. Meanwhile however, questions concerning music's social content have been sidelined. This paper explores music as an active ingredient in the constitution of lived experience. As with other cultural/technical forms, music provides a resource for the articulation of thought and activity. Bodily conduct and movement, the experience of time, and social character within opera are used to illustrate this point. Recent developments in feminist music analysis have been suggestive for the ways in which music metaphorizes social processes and categories of being. These developments can enrich the sociology of music. However, as with all attempts to ‘read’ music's social content, they should be conceived as claims made by analysts who are themselves engaged in social projects. Analytical readings of music have no a priori claim of privilege. A constructivist sociology of music should therefore be devoted to the question of how specific music users forge links between musical significance and social life. A sociology of the construction and deployment of musical realities is capable of avoiding the naive positivism otherwise implicit in attempts to ‘read’ music's social content.     

One-dimensional times: a dialectical response to the Irish Times’ coverage of the global financial crisis

A growing literature claims that critique of neoliberal capitalism after the global financial crisis (GFC) has been ‘captured’ within the logic of capital. Such research argues that ‘capture’ is achieved through a process whereby critique of neoliberalism is transformed into arguments for more neoliberalism. This creates a one-dimensional ‘recovery’ discourse. Drawing on Marcuse’s theory outlining ‘one-dimensional society’ and critical discourse analysis, this study assesses the relevancy of such claims for an Irish medium, the Irish Times, through an examination of GFC-related discourse during 2009–2010. This study finds that economic discourse in the Irish Times is captured when organisational bias allows pro-neoliberal actors from business and government privileged access to discourse production. We engage a call from organisation studies for a dialectical reading of captured discourse. We end with a discussion of the limits of this reflexive approach to capitalism’s contradictions for disrupting its ongoing hegemony.     

Changing Indigeneity Politics in Indonesia: From Revival to Projects

Through the discourse of indigeneity, rural communities around the world are joining a global network of rural justice seekers. By articulating grievances collectively, they demand state recognition while seeking support from NGOs and international development organisations. In Indonesia, the manifestation of indigenous ‘adat’ politics is no longer confined to the national struggle for the recognition of land rights, but instead, has proliferated into many localised short term ‘adat projects’. This introduction to the TAPJA special issue on adat demonstrates that both the rural poor and local elites can be the initiators or recipients of these adat projects but, at the current juncture, the latter are better positioned to benefit from such projects. The special issue shows that in Indonesia, where adat is often firmly entrenched in the state, the promotion of indigeneity claims can work in contradictory ways. Findings from across the special issue show that adat projects tend to reinforce the power of the state, rather than challenging it.     

Centring labour in financialization

ABSTRACT

This article draws on an engagement with Marx’s notes on money and finance to reconsider the relationships between labour, working classes, and financial accumulation. In recent years, these dynamics have often been understood through the lens of ‘financialization’ – referring to a trend towards the growing prominence of financial sector profits, logics, and power at the expense of productive activity. This lens has tended to produce analyses of labour and finance that are (1) unidirectional and (2) that often lump a wide range of developments under a single heading without considering how these trends might intersect in potentially contradictory ways. Marx offers a useful alternative insofar as his approach to money and finance centres on a continual and fraught dynamic between the ‘abstract’ social labour embodied in money and the ‘concrete’ labour performed in particular places at particular times. This argument is illustrated through brief vignettes from South Africa.     

Richard Davis 1943-1981

This article examines some of the key issues discussed and debated in the literature on ‘world music’ in anthropology and ethnomusicology. In particular, it focuses on the kinds of aesthetic and musical decisions made by non-Western musicians as they produce music for a global market; as both producers and consumers of global music, musicians labelled by the term ‘world music’ must consider both local and global audiences when they take the stage or enter the recording studio. The article then relates these issues to the other articles in this issue of TAPJA, which explore a variety of local responses to the world music phenomenon.     

Live audience responses to live televised election debates: time series analysis of issue salience and party salience on audience behavior

Televised political debates are the platforms for party leaders to outline their party's political programs and to attack those of their political opponents. At the same time journalists who moderate the debates are testing the party leaders’ ability to clearly outline and defend their programs. Television audiences of election debates evaluate these party leaders and political parties based on their television performances. Prior to the social media era, viewers’ evaluations were collected through phone surveys or web questionnaires. Nowadays viewers share their opinions in real-time on social media. Particularly Twitter is used in the Netherlands as the platform to share these opinions. In this study tweets produced by the audiences of five different televised debates that took place during the campaign for the Dutch 2012 parliamentary elections are analyzed in terms of tweeting about politicians and parties as well as political issues, as well as the content of the debates. This allowed us, using time series analysis, to test the relation between issue salience in debates and issue salience of the audience on Twitter. The issues of ‘Employment and income’ and ‘Europe’ were the most tweeted about, roughly aligning with the attention these issues received in televised debates. Findings further show there are consistent audience reactions to issues discussed in the debates: issues of ‘Housing’, ‘Care for the needy', and ‘Europe’ showing the strongest effects. However, candidates and parties are not explicitly associated by people active on Twitter when certain political issues are being debated on TV.     

Performing the limits of finance

Recent financial turmoil has put emphasis once again on the very meaning and reach of ‘finance’. In doing so, recent financial crises have also provoked questions about the very ‘ends’ of finance: Where are the borders of finance? Given the expansive reach of financial innovation over the past two decades, are there any serious limits to the kinds of practices that can be converted into financial objects? Does the culture of finance (expansive and all encompassing) encounter meaningful interruptions? This paper explores these questions by reviewing a cluster of public-art responses to the 2008 financial crisis mounted by artists critical of the expansive logic of financial abstraction. This paper pays particular attention to the work of Fergal McCarthy and Fred Forest, two public artists who have confronted finance and its rational culture with practices of gameplay, whimsy, and carnival. In doing so, these artists invoke a strategy designed to lay the all-encompassing claims of financial abstraction alongside its own impossibility; alongside performances which undermine the expansive claims of financial abstraction. These are strategies, I conclude, which can interrupt the technocratic discourses which dominate the contemporary cultures of finance; strategies which, in the words of one artist, evoke ‘plausible states of uncertainty’ about our faith in financial abstraction.     

What the digitalisation of music tells us about capitalism,culture and the power of the information technology sector

This article examines a striking but under-analysed feature of culture under capitalism, using the example of music: that the main ways in which people gain access to cultural experiences are subject to frequent, radical and disorienting shifts. It has two main aims. The first is to provide a macro-historical, multi-causal explanation of changes in technologies of musical consumption, emphasising the mutual imbrication of the economic interests of corporations with sociocultural transformations. We identify a shift over the last twenty years from consumer electronics (CE) to information technology (IT) as the most powerful sectoral force shaping how music and culture are mediated and experienced, and argue that this shift from CE to IT drew upon, and in turn quickened, a shift from domestic consumption to personalised, mobile and connected consumption, and from dynamics of what Raymond Williams called ‘mobile privatisation’ to what we call ‘networked mobile personalisation’. The second aim is to assess change and continuity in the main means by which recorded music is consumed, in long-term perspective. We argue that disruptions caused by recent ‘digitalisation’ of music are consistent with longer term processes, whereby music has been something of a testing ground for the introduction of new cultural technologies. But we also recognise particularly high levels of disruption in recent times and relate these to the new dominance of the IT industries, and the particular dynamism or instability of that sector. We close by discussing the degree to which constant changes in how people access musical experiences might be read as instances of capitalism’s tendency to prioritise limiting notions of consumer preference over meaningful needs.     

The mourning after Hillsborough

There are continuing claims that in our society death is a taboo subject, and that bereaved people have lost touch with mourning rituals. This view seems to be challenged by the extensive mourning rituals on Merseyside in the fortnight in April 1989 following the Hillsborough tragedy, and by the simultaneous media debates about what would constitute appropriate mourning. The article analyses both the media debates and the rituals in order to ascertain whether these contradict the ‘taboo’ thesis, or whether they were unique to Merseyside and/or to a particular disaster.     

Reframing Tri Hita Karana: From ‘Balinese Culture’ to Politics

This article takes issue with the uncritical way in which claims of ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ or ‘local knowledge’ are used in science and policymaking around the Balinese irrigators' association (subak). The growing problems of Balinese irrigated agriculture are increasingly framed in ‘cultural’ ways that are not neutral: such accounts of irrigated agriculture in relation to Balinese culture deeply influence the world of policymaking. In this article we discuss the emergence of Tri Hita Karana (THK; ‘the three causes of well-being’) as an ideology, scientific concept and policy concept in irrigated agriculture and the subak domain. We argue that this ideological concept is not simply ‘local wisdom’, ‘tradition’ or ‘culture’ but requires critical scientific scrutiny as part of wider processes of socio-political change. How is it mobilised? What does its growing popularity mean for our knowledge of Balinese irrigated agriculture, of policy processes directed at the subak and of the workings of policies in real-life contexts?     

‘Black holes in the fabric of the nation’: refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

ABSTRACT

This article explores the representation of refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, a novel which has been widely celebrated for its response to the refugee crisis of its contemporary moment. In a distinct echo of Salman Rushdie’s claim, thirty-five years earlier, that it ‘may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated’, Hamid’s novel similarly claims that ‘we are all migrants through time.’ Moreover, like Rushdie’s fiction, Hamid’s novel incorporates elements of magical realism: its protagonists escape their unnamed war-torn city through a ‘door’ that instantaneously transports them to Mykonos, and they subsequently travel through other such ‘doors’ to London and California. Their story is interspersed with a series of vignettes in which other migrants also find themselves magically transported across national borders. As well as considering the ways in which Hamid’s novel seeks to humanise refugees, this article considers the novel’s evocation of a world in which human beings – like capital, images, and (mis)information – have gained access to largely ungovernable networks of instantaneous travel across vast distances. It argues that Hamid’s novel is not just ‘about’ refugees but also constitutes a reflection on how they and their journeys are represented and mediated by actually-existing technologies.     

Introduction: making the case for qualitative interviews

ABSTRACT

We introduce four papers comprising a Themed Section for this issue of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, which together ‘Make the Case for Qualitative Interviews’. Here our aim is to show how this collection provides a timely contribution to key debates concerning the value of qualitative interviews, particularly as these are employed and analysed in much recent social scientific thinking. We explore ways to move beyond recent, sometimes constraining and occasionally dismissive, approaches to interviews in the social sciences through reframing and reconfiguring central questions germane to these debates. We also seek to challenge a broader neo-liberal trend towards valuing quantitative over depth qualitative research. Through this Introduction, and the collection of papers that follows, we seek to re-establish the value of qualitative interviews by shifting the focus from a preoccupation with what interviews can be said to do, towards questions centring on what can be done with interviews.     

Sea breeze: Globalisation and cook islands popular music

This paper examines the dynamics of Cook Islands popular music, most commonly referred to as ‘island music’. Among Cook Islands communities at home and abroad, island music is performed at informal gatherings, at nightclubs and bars. It is also a central component of large functions such as weddings and island fundraising events. String bands—who perform island music—undertake performance tours through New Zealand, the Cook Islands and French Polynesia. These bands also record audiotapes and CDs of their music, which are extremely popular among Cook Islander communities across the region. Despite island music's centrality in many social contexts it is also the subject of much critical debate. It is viewed by some both as a ‘bastardisation’ of ‘traditional’ expressive forms and as an indicator of ‘global’ corruption; local music is seen as ‘swamped’ by Western popular music. I argue that these debates are symptomatic of anxiety about globalisation and related notions of authenticity, cultural ownership and loss. They are also ultimately concerned with negotiating locality and identity across the Cook Islands diaspora.     

What suicide and Greece tell us about precarity and capitalism

ABSTRACT

Many see precarity and precariousness as a ‘global condition', others do not. Most of these authors share the idea that populations suffer from economic displacements and ought to be at the forefront of states’ economic and labor policy agendas. However, these same authors, from different disciplines, presume an equivalency in precarity, missing that many peoples are racially exposed to injury, violence, and death. This article problematizes some of these disciplinarian notions and logics and argues that raciality is a global structure and a set of institutions of ordering and differencing through which the state resolves its contradictory demands by ‘checking claims’ about justice. Second, this article expands an analytics about subjectification and biofinancialization by reading how suicide and Greece are not projects but rather sites that expose the works of global raciality which aids, through the logics of precarity and the logics of ‘obliteration,’ the state’s work for global capital.