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.     

Going Green: The Process of Lifestyle Change1

This article draws on 40 in‐depth semi‐structured interviews of three groups of people who restrict their consumption in various ways: voluntary simplifiers, religious environmentalists, and green home owners. I identify common patterns in the emergence of green lifestyles across all groups. Green practices are not isolated decisions or actions, but components in an ongoing project. As a result, green lifestyles are often experienced as both a work in progress and a provisionally coherent life narrative. Furthermore, I explore bricolage, the cobbling together of resources at hand by nonexperts, as a mechanism for lifestyle change and expand the concept to include environmental practices and themes. I adopt a pragmatist perspective to understand lifestyle change as a deliberate process undertaken in response to a problem left underaddressed by current policies and practices. This article also weighs in on the debate in the sociology of culture over how culture influences action.     

The problem of order: Understanding how culture predicts social action

How is social order possible? Scholars in a variety of sociological subfields have sought to address this question, known as the problem of order, building theories and evidence that have tended to center either structural forces or human agency. I explain how this dichotomy has shaped the direction and extent of our scholarly progress, focusing on debates and developments in sociological social psychology and cultural sociology, and consider how theoretical and empirical developments in these fields enable us to revisit the problem of order in pursuit of new questions and answers. The great promise of this work is in its ability to identify the micro–macro linkages that enable personal agency and social change, while also explaining why the social order is so durable and how we arrive at and enact a shared definition of the situation as often as we do given individual differences and self‐complexity.     

Igniting Constructionist Imaginations: Social Constructionism’s Absence and Potential Contribution to Public Sociology

Why have social constructionists remained absent from debates over public sociology? I argue that constructionist scholarship would be particularly amenable to Michael Burawoy’s notion of ‘organic’ public sociology, given the ability of constructionist scholars to orient awareness contexts in order to help engender constructionist imaginations. This approach requires that constructionists take on a different view of the role of the analyst. I also discuss some of the problems Canadian academics have had engaging with the media in their efforts to engage in ‘traditional’ public sociology, as well as what a constructionist public sociology may look like practice. I conclude by addressing potential challenges to a constructionist public sociology within Canada, including reference to sociology’s disciplinary coherence and how we can approach—and what we mean by—‘publics’.     

Realms,subfields, and perspectives: On the differentiation and fragmentation of sociology

This article proposes a heuristic classification of intradisciplinary structure and applies that scheme to the current debate over the relationship between the proliferation of subfields and disciplinary fragmentation in sociology. It is argued here that the fragmentation of sociology is caused by the multiplication of competing perspectives rather than by the differentiation of fields of specialization. While competition among perspectives reflects disagreements among sociologists on what their subject matter should be and how to approach it, the proliferation of subfields is generally a result of disciplinary progress.     

Environmental sociology and the environmental movement: Towards a theory of pragmatic relationships of critical inquiry

This article explores the question of: what is the relationship between environmental sociology and the environmental movement? In addition to the historical strong links between the two, both have grown tremendously in the last decade. This poses an interesting challenge/problem of practice for environmental sociology. Drawing on the American Pragmatist Movement, I argue that one possible relationship between the subdiscipline and the movement is that of critical inquirers, who constantly rewrite and revise the dominant signs and symbols of the movement, harnessing the vibrant intellectual community and rich research traditions of environmental sociology to enter into a grounded discourse that prevents the movement from becoming stale and/or oppressive, to pull from inventories of stored tools to construct new social spaces to occupy and ways to get there when the old spaces are no longer recognized as adequate, and to forge ahead of the movement, identifying prejudices, barriers, and unforeseen problems of past, current, or future actions.     

When the University Went 'Pop': Exploring Cultural Studies, Sociology of Culture, and the Rising Interest in the Study of Popular Culture

This article examines why the study of popular culture has taken off as a subject of university course offerings and as a topic of scholarly inquiry since the 1980s. Placing the current explorations of popular culture in historical context, the article argues that popular culture's study and studies in the sociology of culture can illuminate many of the classic concerns that animate sociology and related fields, such as the social organization and power of institutions, debates about public life and the formation of public opinion, concerns about the relationship between consumption, social status, and politics of the privileged elite, and the role of media in the development of social movements and in individual and subcultural understandings. The article considers how popular cultural studies are currently shaping the study of social life, and concludes by considering trends that might be encouraged among students and emergent scholars seeking to study in this area.     

Environmental and Resource Sociology: Theoretical Issues and Opportunities for Synthesis1

Abstract Rural sociologists have been disproportionately represented among the major contributors to environmental sociology. In part, this is because several areas of longstanding rural sociological interest (e.g., sociology of resource management and outdoor recreation, studies of resource-dependent communities) essentially came to be redefined as environmental sociology during the 1970s. The most significant role of rural sociologists in building environmental sociology, however, has perhaps been the fact that the material and biophysical nature of the phenomena they have traditionally studied contributed to a general predisposition to recognize the “materiality” of social structure and social life. I assess the major strategies that have been developed for theorizing this materiality, and then indicate some of the most critical lines of debate and dissension. I argue that if these debates are examined in their specifics—rather than as incompatible perspectives or “paradigms”—some opportunities for synthesis become apparent. Some suggested avenues of synthesis are set forth.     

Outlines of a Critical Sociology of Consumption: Beyond Moralism and Celebration

The 'new' sociology of consumption that emerged in the 1980s acknowledged that consumption is a significant cultural and social practice and not just a mere signifier of the pathological elements of contemporary societies. Arguably, this rehabilitation of consumption has overshot its mark and has led to an overly positive, complacent and celebratory rendering of consumption and to an overriding concern with the symbolic and communicative dimension of goods. Driven by the debates on globalization, political consumerism and the relation between consumption and citizenship, current work shows increased interest in the politics of consumption. The article explores in what directions the classic concern with the symbolic and communicative dimension of goods might be taken if it is more thoroughly grounded in an analysis of the politics of consumption and of the current reconfigurations of consumers and citizens. The overall aim is to outline a basis for a critical sociology of consumption.     

Environmental/Green Cultural Shifts: Dynamics of Social Change

The greening of society is a strong cultural wave as we enter the second decade of the century. This article considers what it means to be ‘green’, core issues that the environmental sustainability wave brings to society and the role of sociology its evolution in public culture. A key argument offered is that sociologists’ historic commitment to critical analysis and to social justice could be important in determining whether the green wave is simply a cultural trend or if it will expand to become a cultural shift. The contributions of environmental sociology, ecofeminism, deep ecology, and green economics are considered significant influences on the relationship between environmentalism and social analysis. Whether scholars and activists can link key concepts such as sustainable development, ecological sensitivity, human dignity, and social justice may prove critical for achieving the goal of societal transformation toward a greener culture.     

Spencer is dead, long live Spencer: individualism, holism, and the problem of norms

The debate between the advocates of sociological individualism and those of holism has been pervasive in the development of social theory. This debate is often situated in the false problems of sociology, since it is seen as a particular form of the perennial and irresolvable dilemma between social nominalism and realism, as well as between freedom and determinism. Nevertheless, the debate is far from over within contemporary sociology and other social science, as indicated by the resurgence of individualism in rational action theory and its repudiation by holistic social theories. The aim of this paper is to identify some modern variations on this theme as well as to discern certain common tendencies of two seemingly opposite theoretical perspectives, viz. the convergence upon a normative solution to the problem of social order. This convergence is therefore denoted normative convergence between sociological individualism and holistic sociology.     

Measuring futures in action: projective grammars in the Rio + 20 debates

While there is an extensive subfield in sociology studying the sources, content, and consequences of collective memory, the study of future projections has been much more fragmentary. In part, this has to do with the challenge of measurement; how do you measure something that has not happened yet? In this article, I argue that future projections can be studied via their externalizations in attitudes, narratives, performance, and material forms. They are particularly evident in what I call “sites of hyperprojectivity,” that is, sites of heightened, future-oriented public debate about possible futures. As a pilot project, I examine contending narratives about possible futures in the online documents of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and the accompanying “People’s Summit,” held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. I propose a framework for studying how public interventions into debates about “sustainable futures” and the “green economy” differ on various dimensions of projectivity, including their temporal reach, attention to contingency and causality, and network mapping of future actors. I present a preliminary analysis at the level of narrative and grammar, by analyzing the use of predictive, imperative, and subjunctive verb forms in both programmatic and oppositional texts. I close with a discussion of how different genres of future projection might be put to analytical use in studying processes of interest to social scientists, such as coalition formation, institution building, political mobilization, and policy change.     

Informal care substitution: what we don't know can hurt us

Empirical studies focusing on the relationship between formal and informal home care do little to quell the fears of policymakers that expanded access to public home care services will result in the withdrawal of informal support. A close examination of the studies designed to measure the withdrawal of informal support justifies this skepticism. Concerns about the withdrawal of informal care may hinder the introduction of more extensive home care benefits. Researchers have come some distance in trying to address this policy question. The conflicting nature of empirical findings, thus far, demonstrates that the answer depends heavily on how the question is framed, how home care is measured and over what time frame, and what sorts of analytic approaches are used to model the relationship between formal and informal community-based care. This article discusses these issues in greater detail and suggests strategies to address these problems in future research.     

Informal Care Substitution:

Empirical studies focusing on the relationships between formal and informal home care do little to quell the fears of policymakers that expanded access to public home care services will result in the withdrawal of informal support. A close examination of the studies designed to measure the withdrawal of informal support justifies this skepticism. Concerns about the withdrawal of informal care may hinder the introduction of more extensive home care benefits. Researchers have come some distance in trying to address this policy question. The conflicting nature of empirical findings, thus far, demonstrates that the answer depends heavily on how the question is framed, how home care is measured and over what time frame, and what sorts of analytic approaches are used to model the relationship between formal and informal community-based care. This article discusses these issues in greater detail and suggests strategies to address these problems in future research.     

Ontology and Method in Cognitive Sociology

The sociology of cognition could serve as a more effective bridge between sociology and other disciplines, and more of a two‐way thoroughfare, if we would consider doing the following two things, which we are already doing here and there. First, we need to take a stand in philosophy of social science debates. Second, we need to show how what we do contributes to sociological methods, and not only say that what we do contributes to sociological theory, however fundamental that contribution may be.     

The Sociology of Traditional,Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and traditional medicine (TM) are important social phenomena. This article reviews the sociological literature on the topic. First, it addresses the question of terminology, arguing that the naming process is a glimpse into the complexities of power and history that characterize the field. Second, focusing on the last 15 years of scholarship, it considers how sociological research on users and practitioners of TM/CAM has developed in that time. Third, it addresses two newer strands of work termed here the ‘big picture’ and the ‘big question’. The big picture includes concepts that offer interpretation of what is happening at a societal level to constrain and enable observed patterns of social practice (pluralism, integration, hybridity and activism). The big question, ‘Does it work?’, is one of epistemology and focuses on two developing fields of critical enquiry – first, social critiques of medical science knowledge production and, second, attempts to explain the nature of interventions, i.e. how they work. Finally, the article examines the role of sociology moving forward.     

Theoretical stances and environmental debates: Reconciling the physical and the symbolic

Several sociologists arc currently debating the relationship of sociology to the physical environment. Their debates beg a question of more general importance to sociology: How do we organize our thinking about phenomena that are at once physical or material and symbolic or ideal? Our intention is not to add another voice in favor of or opposed to theorizing material, physical, or organic characteristics, but to examine the process of thinking about environments and more generally the realist-idealist divide. Environment (like the body) is unlike typical social science concepts in so far as it is both physical and social. If, for example, status and role are purely social concepts, environment is always more than social. I low do sociologists approach what is always more than social in the study of physical environments? Theorizing environments, we propose, is fashioned by the analytic stance of the investigator as legislative, interpretive, or symbolic realist. The strengths and weaknesses of these stances are discussed, and throughout our discussion empirical work representing each ol them is introduced. A final inquiry examines how sociologists can approach these three stances. Two strategies are identified: to assume each stance mirrors the environment as it actually exists or assume the stances are terminologies for exploring various combinations of the physical-symbolic properties ol environments. A brief plea is made for the second strategy.     

A noisy road or noisy resident?: a demonstration of the utility of social constructionism for analysing environmental problems

Within the developing field of environmental sociology the use of social constructionist approaches has often been criticised for detracting attention from the severity of environmental problems and for failing to contribute to attempts to manage them. While there are is a number of published social constructionist analyses of how various environmental problems have come to prominence, few of these address the criticisms which have been levelled at the approach. This paper attempts to contribute to this gap in the literature by providing a reflective case study of the use of social constructionism to analyse a specific environmental problem - the noise generated by a new road. The case study discussed is of the A27 road between Havant and Chichester. The results illustrate that treating environmental problems as socially constructed is often the most valid approach given that the existence and character of these problems, as well as how best to address them, are often contested. In addition it is suggested that the results of social constructionist analyses can make a practical contribution to the management of environmental disputes.     

Public social science in Norway: Migration research in the public debate

How do Norwegian migration and diversity researchers experience and maneuver participation in public debate? And do their experiences and strategies fit with Michael Burawoy's image of Norwegian social science and with his model of public sociology? In this article, the concept of public sociology is expanded to public social science, encompassing communication of research not just from sociology but social science in general. Semi-structured interviews with 31 Norwegian migration and diversity scholars from 10 academic institutions about their experiences of, and views on, public research communication constitute the empirical material. The article concludes that Burawoy is right about the relatively high participation in public debate among social scientists in Norway. And his ideal-typical distinction between four types of sociology is helpful in analyzing how researchers relate differently to the science-public interface. Yet the results indicate that his perspective on public sociology is overly optimistic and not sufficiently attuned to the normativity already attached to highly politicized issues in public debate.     

Moving for a ‘better welfare’? The case of transnational Sudanese families

The burgeoning literature on welfare migration, or on the likelihood of migrants moving to countries with more generous welfare states, yields mixed results. In this article, we aim to disentangle what kinds of considerations underlie the decisions that migrants and their families make to address their social protection needs when they move to certain places. We explain how Sudanese extended families, with members scattered across multiple countries, draw on formal and informal institutions to meet their needs for social protection. Through a transnational approach, we analyse the mechanisms guiding the access, circulation and coordination of resources to cover different but related social protection domains. We contribute to current debates on transnational social protection by drawing on the life stories of members of a Sudanese transnational family and by expanding on the concept of ‘resource environment’. We based this article on 14 months of multi‐sited ethnographic fieldwork with Sudanese migrants and their families in the Netherlands, the UK and Sudan.