Parenting,Uncertainty, and Expert Advice: How Privileged American Families Work with Private Counselors in Their Children's College Race

This article uses privileged families who hire Independent Educational Consultants (IECs) as an instance to examine how privileged parents collaborate with individuals whom they consider educational experts to support their children in the college race. We argue that advantaged parents' anxieties about their children have created a market for IECs who provide expert advice in order to mitigate the uncertainties that these parents experience and to manage various goals that they want to achieve at an important turning point in their children's lives. Drawing primarily on interviews with parents who work with IECs, we introduce the concept of “collaborative cultivation” to analyze the processes whereby advantaged parents rely on the expertise and expert status of private counselors to cope with their and their children's vulnerability in the college race while at the same time preparing their children for the unknown future. The parental method of “concerted cultivation” reveals how elite parents rely on individuals they perceive as experts to establish “bridges” between their own social worlds and the academic worlds that appear to beyond their control. This bridging labor points to the myriad cultural beliefs enacted to justify the child‐rearing goals that privileged parents wish to accomplish by working with IECs.     

Art Without A Market: Creating Artistic Value In A Provincial Art World

Symbolic interactionism is defined as the study of social acts and social objects. Paintings are social objects whose value is almost entirely created in the social acts called art worlds. Important art worlds are currently organized as art markets, in which art is created, exhibited, bought, sold and discussed by artists, museums, dealers, collectors, and critics. In St. Louis, where fieldwork was done, the art market is marginal; art schools and faculty artists replace dealers, collectors, museums, galleries, and critics in the local production of art, the creation of art value, and the determination of artistic status.     

Selling art to the world in Chelsea

This paper explores the dynamic interaction that occurs between large-scale social processes, urban development and the production of artistic expression and meaning through an analysis of art and urban change in the West Chelsea district of New York City. I begin my analysis with a discussion of specific works of art and expand to the local and global context to which these works respond and help to construct. Both urban space and artistic production, consumption and the social meaning attached to art by artists, critics, audiences and other art world actors have felt the impact of the turn to free market policies and ideology that have attended global economic restructuring and the rapid pace of globalisation. At the same time, art's new role as an engine of urban commerce and the accompanying expansion of the art market have helped to shape city districts like West Chelsea and have left their mark on the work that is exhibited and sold there. My analysis integrates a close study of two works of art exhibited in West Chelsea, interviews and other ethnographic data and recent literature on the arts and urban restructuring and the perspective of critical theory. I also provide photographic documentation of social interaction and the built environment of West Chelsea as it evolved in response to the expansion of the art worlds there. A secondary aim of this research is to contribute to a larger discussion about the social role and critical capacities of art in today's social, economic and political climate.     

A Social Comparison Perspective of Treatment Seeking by the Homeless

The homeless will readily list ailments they claim to have, yet they will also claim that such ailments are not a problem and do not warrant treatmente In an attempt to understand this apparent paradox, data from a sampLe of homeless individuals were re-analyzed from a social comparison perspective. It was hypothesized that increased entrenchment in homelessness (increased isolation from “nonhomeless” environments and further involvement in the homeless environment) — operationalized by longer time spent on the street and a greater number of street friends — would lead homeless individuals to alter their perceptions of what constitutes a problem worthy of treatment. Results supported this hypothesis, in direction, and in almost all tests conducted. The involvement of adaptation level theory in such a social comparison process and the implications for intelVention and treatment are discussed.     

Between art therapy and disability aesthetics: a sociological approach for understanding the intersection between art practice and disability discourse

What emerges as art and how it is categorised are parts of a collective process taking place in art worlds and involving a wide array of social actors. In this article, the relation between four ways of framing the intersection of disability and art is discussed. These frames are art therapy, outsider art, disability art, and disability aesthetics. The article suggests the frames and the way they relate to each other as important discourses in organising the relation between disability and art. The discourses’ relevance is demonstrated by discussing three cases of art practice among disabled people. The discussion of the cases demonstrates the importance of including more than one of the four identified discourses when analysing art practice involving disability. The concluding part discusses how the intersections of disability and art can be more closely linked to the mainstream art world through the concept of social practice art.     

Conceptions of Art Ownership as a Form of Wealth Accumulation Among the Black Middle-Class

While there is a rich sociological tradition of analyzing the consumption of middle-class blacks, theory and research have overwhelmingly conceptualized middle-class blacks as conspicuous consumers. This paper develops an alternative theoretical approach to black middle-class consumption. Using the case of art ownership, I elaborate how middle-class blacks understand consumption as a practice that maintains and reinforces their class position by building wealth. Drawing on 103 in-depth interviews with black middle-class consumers of visual art, I illustrate how middle-class blacks view art as an economic asset and consider investment potential when they purchase art. I also document how middle-class blacks view art as a source of wealth that can be transferred across generations. Theory which accounts for black middle-class consumption from the perspective of wealth building is critical given long-standing arguments that middle-class blacks are a group whose frivolous and status-driven consumption jeopardizes their accumulation of wealth. The theoretical approach outlined in this paper illustrates how middle-class blacks approach consumption with an eye to solidifying their economic position.     

FROM PRINTS TO POSTERS: THE PRODUCTION OF ARTISTIC VALUE IN A POPULAR ART WORLD

The activity of a gallery in an art world is centered not only on the distribution of works, but also on the development of a clientele. This involves convincing potential customers that works have both artistic and economic value. The traditional path of valuation of works is through the gatekeepers of the high art world. There are, however, art worlds whose works have not passed through these high art gatekeepers, but which are nevertheless successful in maintaining a clientele. This article examines the process by which this popular art world establishes a positive value for its art when it has no access to the legitimating institutions of the high art world. Data were gathered primarily through interviews with gallery directors, employees, and artists, both from the popular and high-art worlds. The sample includes 18 popular galleries and 10 high art galleries in the Chicago area. “Popular galleries” are defined as those galleries located in the shopping districts of cities or in suburban shopping malls. Many are part of larger chains, and all carry prints by well-known artists, works of lesser known artists, and some posters.     

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.     

Films and videos (evening screenings)

Photography and science have a symbiotic relationship; they always have. It was in the context of science that photography was first announced to the public by François Arago in 1839. And it was the rhetoric of observation and objectivity that was so beloved of scientists in the mid-nineteenth century that photography very soon acquired. It was, in fact, photography's close ties to science that hindered its bid to claim fine-art status. It is photography's close and continued ties to science that have also been utilised by artists through the decades, artists who played with the concepts of objectivity, truth, documentary and surveying. The author discusses the unique place that photography has taken up in the art of science and the science of art, dwelling on moments when the two appear to be one and the same, and moments where they appear to diverge. Rather than writing a sort of survey, the paper will dip in at various points in history, looking at the debates from various historical perspectives so as to consider the paradigm ‘art science’ as it has variously been applied to photography. The paper will take up the conflicting rhetorics of passivity and control, mechanical and creative, showing how each is used in its place, but always emphasising the back-and-forth, the give-and-take between science and art. It will be argued that photography's dual nature is exactly what makes it interesting to artists, and what makes it valuable to the sciences.     

College Prevention: A View of Present (and Future) Web-Based Approaches

College campuses in the United States may be the most electronically "wired" environments on earth. College students use the Internet not only to write term papers and receive correspondence but also to report (and keep track of) friends' personal status, download music, view classroom lectures, and receive emergency messages. In fact, college students spend considerably more time online than the average person. In a recent survey of U.S. college students (Jones et al. 2009), nearly all respondents (94 percent) stated that they spent at least 1 hour on the Internet each day, with the main tasks including social communication, entertainment, and class work. In keeping with this trend, Web-based programs that address alcohol consumption among college students have become widely available in the United States. This sidebar provides an overview of currently available programs as well as of the advantages and disadvantages of this approach and the future outlook of Web-based programs.     

A social comparison perspective of treatment seeking by the homeless

The homeless will readily list ailments they claim to have, yet they will also claim that such ailments are not a problem and do not warrant treatment. In an attempt to understand this apparentparadox, data from a sample of homeless individuals were re-analyzed from a social comparison perspective. It was hypothesized that increased entrenchment in homelessness (increased isolation from nonhomeless environments and further involvement in the homeless environment)—operationalized by longer time spent on the street and a greater number of street friends—would lead homeless individuals to alter their perceptions of what constitutes a problem worthy of treatment. Results supported this hypothesis, in direction, and in almost all tests conducted. The involvement of adaptation level theory in such a social comparison process and the implications for intervention and treatment are discussed.     

Immigrating for status in late life: Effects of globalization on Filipino American veterans

In this article we examine the late-life immigration of Filipino American veterans who have recently been awarded U.S. citizenship based on their military service to the United States during World War II. Based on data collected with 27 Filipino American veterans, we found that the primary motivation for veterans' immigration from the Philippines in late life is economic. When Filipino veterans decide to come to the United States, they do so to collect the financial benefits of citizenship and for the recognition and status it brings, especially within the family. In immigrating, Filipino American veterans live with considerable uncertainty about what the future holds, but at the same time they accrue power and status that ensures their continued centrality in their families. Such action enables them to maintain their independence in old age. The phenomenon of late-life immigration among Filipino American veterans is a case study in globalization and the fluid identities that elders maintain in moving back and forth between these linked worlds.     

Suburban landscape: Views of New Jersey artists 1

Suburban landscape predominates within New Jersey; people live in one suburb and drive to a job in another. Research on community ideologies suggests, however, that even suburban residents have vague images of suburbs. Vague images can mean, in turn, that the state's visual artists produce few images that incorporate the newly‐created suburban landscape that they see every day. Research on art worlds also suggests little encouragement for work that depicts the newer suburbs. Consistent with this, only a few of the visual artists living in New Jersey who have put slides in three large slide files include work that deals with the newer suburban landscape or with the process of creating suburbs. Instead, artists who depict New Jersey landscape concentrate on the state's “natural” landscape or on the state's older industrial suburbs. The privacy of newer suburbs no doubt also contributes to this pattern. In suburbs, even places designed for crowds, such as retail malls, are private.     

RACIALIZED AUTHENTICATION: Constructing Representations of the Florida Highwaymen

This article explores how art world professionals and cultural publicists construct representations of a group of “rediscovered” black artists, who painted from the end of the Jim Crow era to the present. Examining their writings, statements from interviews, and their interactions with audiences at public events, I show how they represented the artists as both exotic self‐taught artists and achievers of the American Dream. I introduce the term “racialized authentication” to frame a branch of racial rhetoric through which the various actors draw from both traditional racial stereotypes and new racism ideology to construct authentic artists. In conclusion, I address how these findings have implications for the integration of contemporary research on race and sociological studies of art worlds.     

Fabricating Japaneseness? The Identity Politics of Young Designers and Artists in Global Cities

The present study explores the identity politics of young Japanese designers and artists working across national boundaries today. It addresses the following research questions: (i) Do young designers and artists aim to produce works with “universal” appeal or strategically make use of “Japaneseness”? (ii) Do they develop new transnational identities or regard themselves as “Japanese”? and (iii) Who do they think has the power to label their works as “Japanese” in the art worlds? For this purpose, I conducted in‐depth interviews with professional designers and artists who have migrated from Japan to London, New York, or Paris. The results show that most designers and artists who were interviewed indeed aim to produce works with “universal” appeal, while only a few respondents attempt to strategically express “Japaneseness” in their works. However, regardless of whether they make use of “Japaneseness” or not, all respondents regard themselves as “Japanese” without developing new transnational identities. Even so, they do not search for or hold onto Japaneseness; but rather the media, as well as a certain part of the art world, persistently attempt to emphasize “Japaneseness,” due to the structure of the art world, where whiteness continues to be the “norm.” While designers and artists are increasingly oriented toward creating works with new forms and values through the transnational production system, gatekeepers and legitimators of the art world continue to fabricate “the nation” and reinforce boundaries of national culture.     

Tradition and novelty in concert programming: Bringing the artist back into cultural analysis

Participation in many cultural activity systems, such as art worlds or scientific communities, is highly skewed toward an elite creating a pattern of activity that emphasizes rationality and repeated events. At the same time, the introduction of new works and participants in these systems promotes the opposite, that is, innovation. Rationality and innovative interests are usually approached and analyzed separately, but this article examines a social context in which they are jointly produced—concert music programming. To analyze the dominance of repertory, this paper documents concert programming over a single season and describes a model to illustrate the observed distribution of events. The skewed distribution of programming is then explained through reference to the aesthetic interests of concert artists, that is, composers and performers, and the congruence of a rationalized aesthetic to the recruitment of audiences and administrative rationality.An earlier version was presented at the Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts conference in New York, October 1990.     

Marriage Caretaking and Territorial Justice in an Australian State

Australian Marriage Guidance Councils are rarely considered avant garde. Yet contemporary emphasis on the importance of citizen participation in social service delivery programmes¹ unexpectedly shows them in the vanguard of the new art of mobilizing participatory community services. For more than a quarter of a century now they have been operating as expert guides and counsellors in the difficult territory of marital therapy, mainly using staffs of part-time counsellors drawn from the general community. The magnitude of this feat of maintaining the participatory character of this community service in a potentially rich field for professional exploitation goes largely unacknowledged. It has been pointed out that the professional, “because of his status, commitment and knowledge”,² is in most cases successful in converting citizen participation programmes into the service of his own professional interest. This has always been one of the most intractable problems of any participatory scheme. So far the Marriage Guidance Councils have stayed right on top of this problem.     

Discipline & style

Conclusion The formation of a professional discipline of design in the United States was not a foregone conclusion. It was a particular achievement carried out by particular agents, taking advantage of particular social and cultural resources to construct a coherent practice. As a strategy that organized the efforts of widely dispersed practitioners, however, this formation displayed a discernible logic. It was not simply a question of the impact of external constraints nor of the working out of the internal logic of particular architectural traditions, but of the specific ways the latter could be mapped on to the former by practitioners operating within certain immediate social and institutional contexts.The Beaux-Arts episode is a particularly clear example of the dynamic of architectural development that resulted from efforts to maintain a discipline of design under changing historical circumstances. These efforts were shaped in fundamental ways by the social basis of the practice of architectural design as it first emerged in the United States. At the core of professional design, there has been a persistent tension between countervailing forces of eclecticism and discipline. The structure of the market produced a centrifugal tendency that eroded standards and disrupted the organization of the professional production of architecture. At their core, the projects typically associated with professionalization reflected a strategic counter-tendency toward a purification of disciplinary ideals, and away from unmediated reflection of the social conditions of practice.Throughout the history of American architecture, these contradictory tendencies have produced an oscillation in the balance between the expression of formal ideals and responsiveness to the needs of client and society, each swing an expression of recurrent reforming tendencies in the profession. Discipline could be achieved only with effort against the tendency of individualized practice towards eclectic, idiosyncratic responses to particular local clienteles. Modernist criticisms of Beaux-Arts design (in the 1930s) and postmodernist criticisms of modernist design (in the 1970s–1980s) suggest that incorporation of various forms of responsiveness has typically set in motion a dynamic of stylization and a move toward abstracted formalism. It is no accident that postmodernist complaints with regard to the architecture of the modern movement echo the modernists' own criticisms of Beaux-Arts formalism. This recurrent cycle of formalism and reform has been driven by tensions inherent in the disciplinary structure of professional design, tensions that reflect the problematic nature of the profession's efforts to contain an awkwardly broad and culturally diffuse jurisdiction within a certain kind of social structure: a professional labor market.The structure of professional status set up tensions that have been played out in the practices of design and that are evident in the patterns of development of architectural style. At each point in the history of the profession, the disciplinary effort to contain these tensions within a rhetoric of style has mediated the effects of large-scale historical developments originating outside the discipline. Demands and pressures from outside the profession elicit responses from individual practitioners, in pursuit of their function and their careers. These responses are what presents these pressures to the discipline as a whole as a problem of integration. Innovations have to be both ideologically and socially located before they become significant.As the discipline moves toward the abstract and architectural, it moves away from problems that immediately concern clients but also from those that plague practitioners. The irony of the American Renaissance is that while allowing the profession to establish a clear identity and an authoritative jurisdiction, it came at the cost of the discipline's capacity to respond in coherent ways to the pressing social, economic, and technological problems that the architect had to confront as practical problems. The reception of European Modernism in the thirties can be understood as a response to dilemmas set up by the Beaux-Arts construction of the discipline. European Modernism offered precisely the same advantages as the Ecole model: a rational and unified conception of design that drew on contemporary high cultural aesthetic conceptions, a systematic approach to design education, an established language of form with the mystique of an avantgarde that could also be codified for broad diffusion of its principles (the International Style), and an elite of expatriate Europeans to focus its introduction into the academy (Gropius, Breuer, Moholy-Nagy). In addition, it offered something Beaux-Arts historicism could not: a final abstraction from history and a modus vivendi with industrial technology that was anything but submission to its pressures. It represented a final reification of the medium of architecture into a symbolic practice abstracted from cultural traditions, a final step toward the separation of the rhetorical framework within which the designer's intentions were formulated from the framework within which the users' experience might be interpreted. The dominance of Beaux-Arts design in the American architectural profession was a crucial step in the transition from the eclecticism of High Victorian architecture to construction of a modern discipline of design - for sociological reasons. It represented a routinization of the charisma of eclecticism that was necessary for the construction of the social and institutional foundation on which a distinctive discipline could be sustained.This analysis of the sociological determinants of the reception of Beaux-Arts architecture in the United States suggests some general consequences for a sociology of cultural production. In his essay, Art as a Cultural System, Geertz argues that it is necessary to get away from a narrow focus on art as a specialized cultural institution, and to regard it in its broader cultural context. It is out of participation in the general system of symbolic forms we call culture that participation in the particular form we call art, which is in fact but a sector of it, is possible. A theory of art is thus at the same time a theory of culture, not an autonomous enterprise. Geertz's concern is to situate art as one manifestation of the seamless web of meaning that makes up a particular culture. Forms of art have power and purpose because of their connection (or their ability to make connections) to a general cultural sensibility that they participate in creating.Although Geertz's general point is well taken, the location of art in the web of cultural meaning is not seamless. In fact, much of the meaning of artworks and the significance of art in general depend on particular arrangements of the seams between art and general culture, the particular ways that art stitches itself into the fabric of social life. In modern western societies, artists have developed specialized professional skills: techniques, notions of genre, stylistic conventions, and their own sensibilities related to specific techniques and materials. As Geertz points out, following the vivid example provided by Baxandall, artists rely on the perceptual and interpretative capacities of their audiences; these capacities reflect, derive from, and depend on skills and knowledge available in the broader culture. Artists also rely, however, on the ability and willingness of their audience to apply these skills within an interpretative framework that is specifie to art; it is this framework that grafts an additional level of significance, additional possibilities for the activation of meanings, on to the objects produced. Baxandall, for example, examines specific capacities for looking at pictures that were relevant to the institution of fifteenth-century painting, capacities that emerged as part of changes in the relation between painters and patrons. Painters made use of what Baxandall refers to as the period eye, but they worked with the capacities of the audience to produce a relatively specialized taste for paintings. Much of what we call taste lies in this, the conformity between discriminations demanded by a painting and skills of discrimination possessed by the beholder. Artists, as creative workers, co-opt cultural material and incorporate it into practices that make sense within the specialized cultural institution of art.As the institutional theories of art have made clear, the context in which art is interpreted includes the art world itself, in which specialized aesthetic practices are generated and sustained. This production of a distinctive body of practices has both an ideological and a sociological side: an art world is a cultural enclave in which works refer to each other within a specialized context of interpretation and producers can establish identity and reputations both among themselves and for a relevant public. These processes cannot be reduced to direct reflections of material conditions or simple instances of a culture-wide sensibility. If architecture can be seen as an expression of more general cultural sensibilities and in some way, as Geertz puts it, inseparable from the feeling for life that animates it, this relation is mediated by historically specific forms of cultural expression and by specific institutional contexts that make these forms of creativity possible.Sociological studies of art worlds have been either phenomonological in focus, zooming in on the art world itself, or they have tended to focus on contextual factors as a structure of external constraints. The tendency has been to view art worlds either from the inside or the outside. Many analyses, however, point to the importance of the boundary itself as a potential object of analysis and explanation. Becker, for example, has proposed a view of art as collective action, and has called attention to the importance of conventions in art worlds. His focus is on the way people in art worlds use conventions to communicate with their audiences and to organize cooperation within the art world. Becker also notes that aesthetic values are closely tied to structures of status in art worlds, that conventions both enable and constrain artistic production as they are built in to institutionalized structures, suggesting that this dual communication might be seen in more structural terms. His discussion of the distinction of art and craft focuses attention on the social construction of the distinction as a folk category used to identify kinds of work within art worlds, and he uses changes in usage to give the notion of an art world a historical dimension. From a more macro-structural perspective, Mukerji has argued in favor of recognition of continuities between fine art and commercial culture, and focuses attention on the way the discontinuities between the two are constructed, using the example of the transformation of film from industrial production to art work in the United States. She provides an illuminating discussion of the both the ideological articulation and social bases of the discontinuities of art, craft, and industrial design. Where Becker's analysis emphasizes the use of conventional understandings as part of the organization of art work, Mukerji focuses on contextual conditions that stimulated and made a redefinition of existing objects possible in the American film industry.A third alternative is to focus on the boundary itself as a social production, and on the specific way that a relatively autonomous field of cultural production is produced as practitioners actively situate themselves within broad structures of constraint and opportunity. In the case of science, Gieryn has noted that as sociologists and philosophers argue over the uniqueness of science among intellectual activities, demarcation is routinely accomplished in practical, everyday settings... He focuses on the boundary work carried out by scientists: the attribution of selected characteristics to the institution of science ... for purposes of constructing a social boundary that distinguishes some intellectual work as non-science. Boundary-work appears empirically, for Gieryn, in the explicitly invoked ideologies of science. Boundary-work, however, can also be seen as implicit in any practice, in the conventions that define and sustain it. The attribution of selected characteristics to the institution can be seen not only in explicit ideological claims made to the public, but in the work itself, in the articulation of stylistic codes that signify the status of any particular work by signifying the claimed characteristics of the institution. This communication is carried on most significantly among practitioners, who must collectively sustain the rhetorical structure that makes their work possible.The boundaries that articulate art worlds are not produced simply by intentional definition (although there are such efforts) or by being explicitly defended when attacked; they are actively reproduced in and through the practices in which the constitutive conventions of the cultural form are manifested, and by the way in which these practices are structured by their institutional situation. It is this practical articulation of a boundary, furthermore, that is the point at which the intersection of culture and social structure can be examined.Sociological studies of culture commonly focus on material or social structural constraints on the production and distribution of particular cultural objects. Studies of the production of culture typically look at the work of artists as productive labor like any other, at cultural productions as objects that are produced, sold, distributed. Some have suggested that these effects are mediated at the level of aesthetic codes, by the specific forms of cultural production. I suggest that this mediation can be located not in reified forms, or in the codes and conventions that define them, but in form-giving practices in which these codes are activated, as they are situated and organized within particular, historically formed fields. Analytical focus is shifted from the production of particular objects to the production of a structure of justification within which the practice of giving significance to objects can be sustained as a form of expert authority.The social production of an architecture (or any cultural form) is a form of collective action organized within a structure of constraints. Creative workers produce not only cultural objects of a certain kind, but at the same time collectively produce and reproduce the immediate practical contexts in which their productions can be registered as meaningful. In other words, they produce and reproduce a certain kind of cultural capacity: in this case, practices of design through which certain kinds of formal order can be imposed on the built environment. A sociology of art as cultural production might, therefore, focus on the specific ways in which materials drawn from the more general culture are organized into distinctive practices within specific art worlds, and the ways in which these practices contribute to the reproduction of the semi-autonomous field that makes them possible. In examining the production of culture at this level, the key questions focus not on the constraining effects of social and material conditions, but on the way a particular cultural practice is organized within the limits and according to a logic determined by specific social contexts.The key problem of an art world is the problem of autonomy. Artists and art worlds need the social and cultural space to develop and maintain the standards and conventions of their art. They must be able to define their own problems and seek appropriate solutions within the operative structures of justification. At the same time, they have to maintain some controlled connection with broader social contexts, if only to maintain the flow of material and symbolic resources. The structural problem of relative autonomy of an art world is reflected in the works themselves, in the tension between reference to external structures of meaning and legitimation and the self-referential qualities of a distinctive field of practice. This tension is manifested particularly clearly in architecture, because of the limitations on its autonomy created by the need to respond to the functional dimensions of most building tasks and by its generally public nature.The case of architectural design suggests ways in which creative workers' construction of a system of occupational control, within a particular market context, are linked to the substantive construction of the nature of the work. This process might be analyzed historically by focusing on the formation of a discipline, and the way a particular culture of production, manifested in a rhetoric of style, is implicated in a system of occupational control. Such a perspective integrates analysis of the structural context of resources and constraints with an analysis of the processes of actively constructing a practice that makes sense within this context. In this way, one can bring into focus the structural determination of a cultural form without losing grasp of the active, creative, and historically contingent dimensions of cultural production.

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Questions on ethics for research in the virtually connected world

In this paper the need of awareness for and even of change in the rules of how we conduct ourselves as researchers and participants in the virtual worlds of the internet is proposed. The focus of this paper is on the ethics for online research. Our aim is to reignite the discussion about the way the availability and consequent (mis)use of ‘social’ data, e.g. social network site profiles or newsgroup postings by researchers is about to necessitate a new definition of and fight for the right for a private sphere that each individual may claim in the public of the virtual worlds. We conclude with an approach on how to accomplish that.