Conspiracy culture,blame culture,and rationalisation1

This paper outlines an approach to conspiracy culture that attempts to resolve the conundrum posed by the parallel logics of conspiracy and sociological theorising, without reducing the former to an irrational response to hidden social forces. Rather, from a re‐crafting of Weber's rationalisation thesis as an analysis of the developmental logic of theories of suffering, it argues that conspiracy culture is an outcome of the means of moral accounting, or blame attribution, that inform mundane reasoning in modernity, as also are the human sciences. As part of this, the paper sketches a tentative framework of moral accounting in relation to the notion of ‘blame culture’ based in part on a distinction between a culture of blaming and the blaming of culture. This is used to argue that there is nothing irrational about conspiracy culture – or at least no more so than there is about sociology.     

The culture of gangs in the culture of the school

The complex relation between gangs and the schools in which they are found is explored in this paper. It is argued that gangs can exist quite well within the limits posed by the official school culture. How gangs relate to schools depends in no small way on the type of community from which they emerge. Under some circumstances the schools can soften or make worse the frequency and nature of gang activity that occurs in them.     

Against culture versus structure

Contemporary sociology is saddled with a culture–structure binary but the fault for its existence lies mostly with cultural sociology. This article is devoted to four related assertions: (1) There has never been any agreement on the definition of culture, making cultural sociology a field unable to define its central concept. (2) The binary ignores the fact that the proper explanation of social behaviour requires both structure and culture; culture cannot be its own cause. (3) Cultural sociology is soft and sentimental, avoiding conflict as well as politics. (4) It neglects policy and policy-relevant research even more than the rest of sociology. Structural sociology has some shortcomings as well, however, and the culture–structure binary should be abandoned.     

A matter of culture

Abstract

The nature of culture as the symbolic expression of inarticulate matter is explored from a range of different cultural perspectives. Raymond Williams's work on culture, especially his ideas on material and symbolic production, serves to introduce an analysis of matter and its place in cultural production. The mutable nature of matter is explored through the modern physics of quantum theory as well as modern art, especially the work of Jasper Johns. Late‐modern culture is viewed in terms of a mutable space of matter that resists meaning and location. The implications of this resistance for understanding the cultivation of knowledge and subject‐object relations are then pursued in the contexts of art history (Michael Baxandall), the ‘social body’ (Jean‐Frangois Lyotard), the society of generalized communication (Gianni Vattimo), multi‐media culture (J. Hillis Miller), and computerization.     

Rethinking the circuit of culture: How participatory culture has transformed cross-cultural communication

This paper explores the influence of digital communication ? and in particular social media ? on cross-cultural communication, based on the Circuit of Culture model. Scholarly literature supports the notion that social media has changed the speed at which we communicate, as well as removed traditional (geographical) boundaries around cross-cultural campaigns. Since the introduction of digital media, the role of the public relations practitioner has become more strategic in order to maintain relevance with even more diverse ? and dispersed ? audiences. Large scale campaigns, like the Human Rights Campaign to support Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights, have seen messages spread far beyond the country of origin, and with that, demonstrate the ability to affect advocacy campaigns in other countries. The authors argue that instead of acting as cultural intermediaries, public relations practitioners must become cultural curators, with the skills to create meaning from audiences, who are now content creators in their own rights, and encourage a true participatory environment that sees cultural values shared as part of an organic exchange process.     

上海文化产业发展与文化体制改革协同推进研究

当前,上海文化产业总值在全国名列前茅,但后劲乏力;上海文化产业体制改革步子较快,但成效不明显。上海文化产业发展与其体制改革缺乏必要的协同性。未来3年,上海文化产业发展与文化体制改革应协同推进,确立文化产业发展目标及重点领域。惟有改革创新,才能实现上海文化产业发展及其体制改革协同目标。     

Scapegoating culture: Misunderstanding organizational culture as the problem in carceral institutions and beyond

Organizational culture is an obscure and poorly understood part of organizational life. In scholarly work, researchers use organizational culture as both a catch‐all term and a black box of intrigue. The former suggests its omnipresence and ability to take the blame for all that ills organizations. The latter denotes a mythical and misunderstood invisible cloak that covers organizations and organizational life, yet is misconstrued, complex, and confusing. This paper presents a brief summary of the multidisciplinary history of organizational culture as a concept and operationalized term while simultaneously suggesting our knowledge of organizational culture remains at its infancy. Using prisons as a case study example, the authors consider how better to unpack organizational culture using sound and rigorous qualitative methods with careful attention to sampling and researcher–subject collaboration. Concluding thoughts note the importance of using culture as a dependent, rather than independent variable, so scholars will stop scapegoating culture as the answer to why organizational processes and outcomes fail and will instead recognize the study of culture as the problem itself.     

A cultural approach to culture

Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display takes a global approach to how museums make sense of increased globalization and migration. Museums construct narratives that link their locality to the nation and to the world. Peggy Levitt’s major book explains how museums imagine themselves and how they work towards composing a kind of visitor experience. It is about museum visions, missions, and exhibitions as told through the eyes of those who create and are responsible for them, namely, top administrators, curators, politicians, and more. Her analysis explains why museums only a few hundred miles apart can have such different conceptions of how to create the proper citizen. As such, the book illuminates the power of a cultural sociological approach.     

Stating culture: colonial matrices

Delineating the complex relationship between state, nation and culture in India, the paper examines the discourses that are produced to define what culture is in the life of the nation. Shared epistemic assumptions in colonial and postcolonial writings tend to constitute a veritable silence on structural social inequalities and marginalized identities. Articulated in a deceptively self‐evident and “neutral” framework, this silence disavows real divisions in the body politic and then, in a contradictory reversal, celebrates them as natural and inevitable. It is the discursive regularities in the movement from the colonial to the national that the paper mainly takes issue with and shows how notions of the “people” and “nation” are installed.     

The feeling edge of culture

During the 1960s, the new generation changed the American Creed by deemphasizing sensitivity to evidence, emphasizing feelings and deductive thought, while assuming an adversarial position against the sociopolitical order and embracing the American Black's struggle against racism. Driven by pain, fueled by fear and anger and oriented by existential values of being, the Civil Rights Movement, sought to actualize political values of justice and equality. As peaceful demonstrations dwindled, violence increased, converting individual anger to social rage. Anger's cognitive structure changed the concept of society into a dichotomy of Black victims and White oppressors, forming an ethic of sensitivity with victims occupying the moral high ground. Pain and tragedy were banished from view and blamed on oppressors as individual identities divested civil traits and acquired cultural identity, disuniting the civil society. Rubbing against the American Creed, the ethic of sensitivity produced a feeling of malaise posing a threat to mental health.     

Institutional processes of organizational culture

Queries into the creation of collective meaning through social processes arise in both organization culture and institutional theory. This paper applies DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983 DiMaggio, P.J. and Powell, W.W. 1983. The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48: 147–60. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) three isomorphic processes (mimetic, normative and coercive) from institutional theory to re‐think how structural and dynamic aspects of culture become nested, taken‐for‐granted and transmitted. We consider both acquiescence and resistance to isomorphic pressures in an effort to understand cultural persistence and transmission, forms of resistance to culture, change, the role of sub‐cultures and power usage through Oliver’s (1992 Oliver, C. 1992. The antecedents of de‐institutionalization. Organization Studies, 13: 563–88. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) de‐institutionalization thesis. Our purpose in applying isomorphic processes to organizational culture is to offer another layer of understanding enhanced by the growing body of research in institutional theory, bridge one division between micro and macro theory and provide some suggestions for future research.     

Kinging in Hungarian lesbian culture

This article looks at the position of the drag king in Hungarian lesbian culture. It focuses on Bandage, Socks and Facial Hair (2006), a documentary about a drag king workshop. The film documents the historical moment when the Hungarian workshop participants encounter the drag king as a lesbian tool for parodying and repoliticizing mainstream masculinity. I examine the ways in which the participants interpret their performances of masculinity and the film negotiates heteronormativity. I argue that the political merits of the film can be spelled out by reading the participants' (trans)gender politics from the perspective of the cultural specificities of post-socialist Hungary.