Music in Movement: Cultural Politics and Old and New Social Movements

After a period of interdisciplinary openness, contemporary sociology has only recently rediscovered culture. This is especially true of political sociology, where institutional and network analyses, as well as rational choice models, have dominated. This article will offer another approach by focusing on the role of music and the visual arts in relation to the formation of collective identity, collective memory and collective action. Drawing on my own research on the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the memory of slavery in the formation of African-American identity, and its opposite, the place of white power music in contemporary neo-fascist movements, I will outline a model of culture as more than a mobilization resource and of the arts as political mediators.     

Cultural Consumption in the Fine and Popular Arts Realms

In this paper, we review recent sociological research dealing with the consumption of culture produced in the fine and popular arts realms. Most of the initial theoretical developments in the study of culture consumption were intended to explain audience segmentation in the fine arts realm under the 'cultural capital' paradigm developed by Pierre Bourdieu. This paradigm shift has led to the current dominance of the 'omnivore thesis' in the sociology of taste. The consumption of popular culture, however, remained for a long time dominated by the Birmingham 'resistance' and 'subculture' paradigms developed in the 1970s. Recent popular arts consumption research has moved beyond the limitations of the subculture paradigm by incorporating the theoretical legacy of the cultural capital paradigm in order to account for patterns in audience and producer differentiation in popular arts 'scenes'. This has brought the study of popular and fine arts culture consumption under a single conceptual framework after a long period of theoretical disengagement.     

Symbols,sentiments, and stories: Urban culture and social problems

Cultural approaches to the study of urban life have enjoyed brief bursts of popularity within the social sciences over the past century. Although many urban sociologists acknowledge that meanings, symbols, narratives, and feelings, in other words local culture, help shape urban places, relatively few take this notion any further. In this article, I first lay out the foundations of cultural approaches to the study of urban life. Second, I argue for the continued significance of the distinction between space and place. Third, I describe a contemporary stream of urban sociology called the urban culturalist perspective. Fourth, I describe important insights gleaned from studies embracing cultural urbanist approaches to an area of urban research receiving increasing attention: gentrification. Fifth, and finally, I outline a few ways in which micro‐cultural investigations of urban phenomena provide useful opportunities for public sociology.     

Digital media and cultural institutions in Russia: online magazines as aggregates of cultural services

ABSTRACT

Focusing on online magazines, this article sheds light on Russian cultural institutions from the perspective of digital media. My analysis concentrates on urban lifestyle magazines, a sub-category of consumer magazines and a media genre, which emerged in Russia in the glossy magazine format and is now experiencing a powerful ‘second rising’ on the internet. My article asks how the adaptation to the digital communication environment by lifestyle publications re-defines the very concept of a magazine and reorganizes the institutional ties between media and cultural industries. This focus enables me to analyse lifestyle magazines as a dynamic field of interaction in which cultural meanings are produced and negotiated. Based on new media studies, I see the cultural transcoding (Manovich 2002) of the networked and automatized information transmission into the magazines’ content as being a significant factor in the development of contemporary culture and media. Ultimately, my article introduces an attempt to analyse new media titles combining qualitative media analysis with the developing theory of ‘algorithmic culture’ (Striphas 2015). My argumentation is based on two case publications: Afisha, established in 1999 as a weekly glossy magazine introducing all cultural events in Moscow, and Inde, a digital-born regional lifestyle magazine focusing on urban culture in the Republic of Tatarstan. Urban lifestyle magazines are important for the institutional organization of Russian culture, as they direct their readers’ attention to a broad selection of arts, products and events; strengthen the link between consumers and cultural entrepreneurs and build on a long tradition of print journalism, thereby transmitting the values of reading and literacy to a popular public. Moreover, my analysis shows that, through their multi-platform publication strategy, online magazines (re)organize as aggregates of digital resources helping to manage cultural decision-making in a consumerist setting.     

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.     

Class,culture and politics: on the relevance of a Bourdieusian concept of class in political sociology

Even though contemporary discussions of class have moved forward towards recognizing a multidimensional concept of class, empirical analyses tend to focus on cultural practices in a rather narrow sense, that is, as practices of cultural consumption or practices of education. As a result, discussions within political sociology have not yet utilized the merits of a multidimensional conception of class. In light of this, the article suggests a comprehensive Bourdieusian framework for class analysis, integrating culture as both a structural phenomenon co‐constitutive of class and as symbolic practice. Further, the article explores this theoretical framework in a multiple correspondence analysis of a Danish survey, demonstrating how class and political practices are indeed homologous. However, the analysis also points at several elements of field autonomy, and the concluding discussion therefore suggests the need for further studies.     

Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn

In this paper we outline a critique of ‘decorative sociology’ as a trend in contemporary sociology where ‘culture’ has eclipsed the ‘social’ and where literary interpretation has marginalized sociological methods. By the term ‘decorative sociology’ we mean a branch of modernist aesthetics which is devoted to a politicized, textual reading of society and culture. Although we acknowledge slippage between the textual and material levels of cultural analysis, notably in the output of the Birmingham School, we propose that the intellectual roots of cultural studies inevitably mean that the textual level is pre‐eminent. In emphasizing the aesthetic dimension we seek to challenge the political self‐image of decorative sociology as a contribution to political intervention. We argue that while the cultural turn has contributed to revising approaches to the relationships between identity and power, race and class, ideology and representation, it has done so chiefly at an aesthetic level. Following Davies (1993), we submit that the greatest achievement of the cultural turn has been to teach students to ‘read politically’. The effect of this upon concrete political action is an empirical question. Without wishing to minimize the political importance of cultural studies, our hypothesis is that, what might be called the ‘aestheticization of life’ has not translated fully into the politicization of culture. We argue that an adequate cultural sociology would have to be driven by an empirical research agenda, embrace an historical and comparative framework, and have a genuinely sociological focus, that is, a focus on the changing balance of power in Western capitalism. We reject the attempt to submerge the social in the cultural and outline the development of an alternative, integrated perspective on body, self and society. We conclude by briefly commenting on three sociological contributions to the comparative and historical study of cultural institutions which approximate this research agenda: Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Sennett.     

Learning How to Make Life Swing

How do we explain the contradiction between the centrality of African-American culture in the U.S. and the simultaneous marginality of African-American people in contemporary American society? Pursuing an answer to this question through my ethnographic work on the Lindy Hop led to a radical rethinking of current approaches to cultural appropriation. This article serves as an intervention into ethnographic research on race and ethnicity by synthesizing Wacquant's carnal sociology with his call for the formation of an analytical theory of racial domination. This synthesis, in which theory and method work reciprocally, offers a new model for undertaking research in the areas of race and ethnicity by which we are able to differentiate and dissect the material and symbolic mechanisms that generate racial domination in particular historical contexts.     

The Conceptual Incoherence of “Culture” in American Sociology

The meaning of the concept “culture” as used in American sociology is incoherent. Despite the advances and maturing of cultural sociology, the central idea of “culture” itself remains conceptually muddled. This article demonstrates this critical point by analyzing the definitions, meanings, and uses of the word “culture” in the field of cultural sociology’s most significant, recent edited volumes, handbooks, readers, companions, annual review chapters, and award-winning books and journal articles. Arguing for the scholarly importance of conceptual coherence, this article calls for more disciplined and cooperative theoretical work to clarify and move toward a more standardized meaning of “culture” in American sociology.     

Religion as Cultural Power: The Role of Religion in Influencing Americans’ Symbolic Boundaries around Gender and Sexuality

In this article, we describe recent research that explores the power of religion to influence understandings of gender and sexuality in the United States. We argue that sociologists of religion should draw from symbolic boundaries theory, a theoretical innovation in the sociology of culture. In particular, we discuss a rich body of research in the sociology of religion to show how Americans use religious tools to draw boundaries around ideal and stigmatized gender norms, family forms and sexual identification. We combine symbolic boundaries literature and this literature to show that religion is a source of cultural power that assigns meaning to, and draws boundaries around, certain cultural categories. We end by describing some productive directions for future research in this area.     

Urban culture and physical and sports activities. The "sportification" of parkour and street golf as cultural mediation

The article explores the process of "sportification"--i.e., processing physical activity in a sport regulated by a set of rules and standards, legitimized by supervisory institutions--from two originals practices, parkour and urban golf. To study these practices, we crossed the contributions of urban sociology and of the contemporary sociology of sport while respecting the methodological principles of qualitative sociology. A first point concerns the process of"sport" itself, its definition, its various stages, and the role played by communication of stakeholders on public space. The cultural mediation shows us how to institutionalize the movement that represents the "sports" resulted in the same time reconfiguration of physical practices themselves. Recent events illustrate the ongoing reconfiguration, we will detail them. Finally, we show the effects produced by the process on the definition of urban culture and sports: setting sight of activities, enhanced cooperation with the media-cultural, polarization between different types of practical in the case of parkour, around a confrontation between two of the founders.     

Academic odyssey: The training of an African sociologist

This article describes my experience of graduate training in sociology at an elite American university. As an African, I faced cultural and intellectual pressures to adopt white middle class cultural norms and a Eurocentric worldview. The article critiques American sociology, including symbolic interactionism, the sociology of the Third World and the study of race and ethnic relations. I describe my personal encounter with American racism and the process that led me to conduct research on black immigrants. I argue that my exposure to American sociology and experience of American society transformed me into a black marginal sociologist, specializing in teaching and research on the African-American experience in the New World. His forthcoming book,Becoming Black American, is being published by AMS Press.     

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

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

The elephant in the newsroom: Current research on journalism and emotion

The article seeks to review current work on the obvious but complex entanglement of journalism and emotion. The field has been under‐theorized and under‐researched; however, in recent years, the body of studies that attempt to grasp the relationship between journalism, journalists, media content, and emotion is growing. The paper roughly systematizes the literature on journalism and emotion based on the Goffmanian distinction between front region and back region; that is, I consider both research on emotionality of the public outcomes of journalists' work marked by journalists' professional ideology and less visible journalists' emotional labour that is behind media content. Based on the review of the body of research and on a sociological conceptualization of emotions, I identify several blind spots. Most importantly, what is still largely missing from the emergent work is research that complies with the social character of journalists' emotions: acknowledges emotions as a force central to the contemporary networked, dynamic and increasingly precarious journalism work, and conceptualizes emotions in journalism as a sociologically relevant phenomenon articulated by the context including newswork, technologies, and media organizations.     

Raymond Williams and sociology

The purpose of this article is to recover Williams as a major theoretical inspiration for the social sciences, specifically, as the inaugurator of what might be regarded as a research paradigm, cultural materialism. In the first section, Williams's encounter with the discipline of sociology is traced and distinguished as a critical alternative to the presently ascendant – at least in the USA – neo‐Durkeimian school of ‘cultural sociology’. In the second section, his cultural‐materialist programme is proposed as a powerful analytical framework for the study of culture and society today. In the final section, a key concept of Williams's cultural materialism, mobile privatization, is selected illustratively and proposed as a powerful analytical tool for studying the production and technological mediation of typical modes of communicative sociality in the early twenty‐first century.     

The relationality of law and culture: Dominant approaches and new directions for cultural sociologists

Much of the cultural sociological research in law and culture falls into one of the following approaches: (1) law as a structure that enables and constrains culture; (2) culture as a structure that enables and constrains law; and (3) law as a cultural toolkit or repertoire upon which actors draw to orient strategies for action. This article briefly reviews these approaches, then, drawing from the generative socio‐legal tradition in law as culture, highlights a fourth approach. While law and culture are often analyzed as autonomous forces in ongoing contention, negotiation, and reconciliation, the socio‐legal approach conceptualizes the relationality of law and culture as constituted by ongoing contention. I argue that this relational approach may offer cultural sociologists who do not study law a framework for better analyzing how power undergirds, enables and constrains cultural meaning. I offer examples to illustrate the utility of this research agenda through three areas of interest for cultural sociologists: (1) embodiment; (2) emotions; and (3) political culture. Such an approach encourages a two‐way bridge between cultural sociology and socio‐legal studies conceptualizing culture as a dynamic system of power relations.     

Contemporary NGO–Journalist Relations: Reviewing and Evaluating an Emergent Area of Research

Long recognized as key players in international politics, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) increasingly assume important roles in the provision of news. By hiring photographers, staffing online departments and funding reporting trips, NGOs act in ways that overlap with the actions of professional journalists. This article reviews and evaluates an emerging area of research – the study of NGO–journalist relations – that analyzes these developments. It proceeds in four parts: First, it overviews changes in the NGO and journalism sectors that drive growing scholarly interest in the topic. Second, it summarizes the findings of the available research. Third, it suggests some of the ways in which this research connects with concerns in the sociology of media and communication. Fourth, it evaluates the findings in light of various normative frameworks of public discourse. It concludes by suggesting that NGO–journalism scholarship can benefit from further attention by sociologists working in the areas of media and communication.     

Applied sociology? Even musicians give concerts

Applied sociology is basically what sociologists do for nonsociologists and sometimes for themselves. Applied sociology includes the teaching of sociology as one of the liberating arts and sciences. It also involves the practice of sociology outside academia in the public and private sectors. Either way, applied sociology needs support groups, and state sociological associations need useful things to do beyond their traditional interests in academic teaching and research. Professional sociological associations, and especially those that serve at the local, state level, can become important support groups for applied sociology. This article suggests five types of applied sociology projects appropriate for state associations. These are volunteering applied sociology; doing applied sociology through consulting; making the value of sociological applications more visible; identifying applied sociology jobs for our baccalaureate, master's, and doctoral graduates; and helping to improve the socioeconomic outlook for our academic colleagues and, in turn, ourselves. State associations provide an organizational base, proximate members, and local opportunities for applying sociology. Ron Wimberley, teaches sociological research methods and does research on the southern Black Belt and other topics. He also attempts applied sociology through volunteer work, consulting, and occasional leaves from his university position. Catherine Harris of Wake Forest University is appreciated for suggesting the topic. The author is responsible for the views expressed in the article.