Cultural Sociology Research Articles

Use of Performance Information and External Accountability: The Role of Citizen Oversight in Mitigating the Motivated Evaluation of Body-Worn Camera Evidence

Despite being touted as a game-changing technology, studies on the influence of body-worn cameras (BWCs) on policing outcomes have produced mixed results, with the underlying reasons for such findings unclear. Drawing on the sociology of culture and organizational theory, we argue that BWCs often have mixed impacts due to deeply ingrained, valued occupational assumptions and practices shaped by the structural and organizational context. These assumptions and practices, collectively known as the police métier, are not politically neutral and can lead to motivated decisions rather than accurate ones. We suggest that such motivated reasoning can be mitigated by changing the structural or organizational context, such as establishing a citizen oversight agency (COA), which could decrease racial disparities in policing outcomes. To test these arguments, we examined the impact of BWCs on racial disparities in two types of policing outcomes: police homicides of citizens and disorderly conduct arrests (DCAs). Our findings indicate that while the adoption of BWCs does not impact racial disparities in DCAs or police homicides of citizens, there is a significant decrease in racial disparity in DCAs when BWCs and COAs are used in conjunction. Additionally, while the racial disparity in police homicides of Blacks and Whites does not decrease when BWCs and COAs are used together, there is an overall decrease in police homicides across both racial groups. Overall, our study demonstrates that technology's impact on bureaucratic performance is influenced by occupational assumptions and practices, which can be altered by external accountability mechanisms such as COAs.

‘If It’s All an Act, Then What’s the Point?’: Men’s and Women’s Views on Authenticity in Pornographic Videos

Sociological research has demonstrated a keen interest in authenticity by different audiences in a wide variety of social domains. The current study joins recent efforts by both sociologists and pornography scholars to empirically investigate the meaning and importance of authenticity for pornography viewers. It relies on in-depth interviews with 302 regular pornography viewers from a wide range of countries, cultural backgrounds, ethnicities and sexual identities. Findings show that most viewers ascribe significant importance to watching sexual acts that they perceive as authentic, although a significant minority does not find authenticity to be very important. I discuss the implications of these findings to sociological theory and research in fields such as the sociology of culture, the sociology of emotions and the sociology of consumption, reflecting on the challenges that demands for authenticity in pornography pose to feminist ethics.

Meaning Change in U.S. Occupational Identities during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Was It Temporary or Durable?

The COVID-19 pandemic altered social and economic life in the United States, displacing many people from their typical relationship to the institution of work. Our research uses affect control theory’s measurement structure to examine how cultural meanings for occupational identities shifted during the pandemic on the dimensions of evaluation (good-bad), potency (powerful-powerless), and activity (lively-inactive). Quinn et al. found that most occupations were seen as less good and powerful in the early stages of the pandemic than they were shortly before it began, with greater evaluation loss for nonessential occupations and greater potency loss for occupations classified as essential by state executive orders. We add a third wave to these data to reassess meanings after the pandemic eased and vaccines were developed. We use linear mixed modeling to estimate meaning changes across all three waves and to explore whether these changes differed for essential versus nonessential occupations. We find that evaluation and potency ratings of occupations rebounded over the longer term—a pattern that fits a control model of stable cultural meaning. Our results contribute to discussions in cultural sociology about beliefs and their stability.

Youth Heavy Metal Bands in Morocco: Resistance and the Struggle for Change

In Morocco, Metal is a controversial genre of youth music that has usually been misinterpreted, marginalized and stigmatized by many individuals due to its transgressive sound, lyrical contents and visual codes. In this regard, the purpose of this paper is to explore the specific lyrical themes of Moroccan Metal bands concerning elements of symbolic transgression and musical activism. It also aims to the main motivations that push these bands to produce and sustain their musical discourse taking into account the conservative nature of the Moroccan context. Using both content analysis and semi-structured interviews, the paper concluded that despite the severe cultural challenges that surround their socio-cultural condition, the artistic participation of Moroccan Metal bands has not just allowed them to gain support from their subculture but also made them impose themselves as leaders of culture of courage. By tracing the Moroccan Metal bands’ artistic engagement and commitments, this paper will bring to light the cultural sociology and multi-dimensional nature of Metal narratives in Morocco and the challenges that shape its existence. It also provides an interesting account for students and academics concerned with cultural minorities, literature and arts-related topics about the nature of content produced by this minority as a reference.

The House I'd Like to Have: Women's Spatial Cultures, Design, and Aesthetic in 20th Century Italy

"Has any woman ever designed architectures in the past centuries? You may ask her to design a hut, not even a temple! She can't. She is foreign to architecture." These infamous words of Benito Mussolini (1927) reflected the widespread sexism of the Fascist regime and prompted a silent wave of dissent pioneered by women intellectuals, architects, writers, and journalists in the early 20th century. They advocated for a valuable feminine contribution to Italian architecture and their story is still partially unknown by architectural historians today. This essay tackles Italian women's spatial design and aesthetics during the regime, a period in which they kept silently operating within the built environment as professional architects with unbuilt projects and as amateur designers inside their homes. These circumstances, as argued here, determined the emergence of a feminine and feminist approach to architectural design and criticism that transcended the male boundaries of high culture, reinforced by the Fascist regime and in line with the modernist binary understanding of taste and cultural architectural production. The latter is studied through the lens of cultural domesticity, a theoretical framework that merges cultural sociology, feminism, and architecture. By focusing on Italian women's lived experiences and unconventional design approaches, this study ultimately looks at the consolidation of feminine aesthetics and how it informed women's spatial design as it keeps challenging the boundaries of architectural history.

Geneviève Zubrzycki. Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022

Geneviève Zubrzycki, a distinguished comparative-historical and cultural sociologist who studies national identity, religion, and collective memory, has written a fascinating and insightful book, based on a decade of participant observation and interviews in multiple Polish cities and towns, about an astonishing Jewish revival in Poland since the early 2000s. This revival takes various forms: the organizing of Jewish festivals in cities and towns throughout Poland since the mid-2000s, the “popularity of klezmer music,” the “proliferation of Judaica bookstores and Jewish-style restaurants,” the creation of “new museums, memorials, and memory spaces,” the development of “Jewish and Holocaust studies programs in universities,” the publication of books and articles on Jewish topics, and even a “modest but steady number of conversions to Judaism” (p. 8). Text in English

Revisiting social responsibility as a characteristic feature of social interactions in various fields

The relevance of the research topic is determined by the fact that social responsibility seems to be an important condition for the stability of social order and development. During the periods of crisis, the problem of leveling social responsibility among individuals and communities arises. The purpose of the research is to identify the most significant areas of social life of a modern man in the 21st century, where social responsibility is considered as a significant category that requires particularly close scientific analysis. When working with empirical material, methods applied in Sociology of culture and Sociology of management have been used - axiological, typological, structural-functional ones. Based on the results of the research, it has been revealed that research into the implementation of social responsibility in the sphere of economic relations - business and corporate interactions - is most in demand. Scientists are also interested in the need to demonstrate social responsibility in the field of Biotechnology and activities of engineers, who should focus not only on the scientific and technical, but also on the humanitarian component of production. In the current information society, the social responsibility of the media is of particular importance. The key conclusions include theses that social responsibility as a way of positively responding to the requests of those in need (individuals, groups, society) is being formed very slowly due to various historical, socio-economic, general cultural and psychological reasons; social responsibility is difficult to manage, it cannot be formed under compulsion; it is necessary to find a balance of economic benefits and ethical altruistic values that are embedded in the religious and traditional systems of ethnic cultures.

Where do opportunity beliefs come from? Implications of intergenerational social mobility for beliefs about the distribution system in China

People’s understanding of the drivers of inequality is a function of their position in the social structure. Nevertheless, the ways in which intergenerational social mobility is associated with opportunity beliefs remain under researched. Recent findings in cultural sociology suggest that individuals seldom update their beliefs, and that settled dispositions lead people to reproduce their beliefs in their adulthood. This study used a probabilistic and representative survey of Chinese citizens to explore how intergenerational social mobility relates to opportunity beliefs. China presents an interesting context to explore this question, since Chinese society is considered to be highly unequal yet highly tolerant of social inequalities. Our results indicate a U-shaped relationship between social class and opportunity beliefs. The upper class and farmers exhibit stronger meritocratic beliefs than middle-classes. Moreover, upwardly and downwardly mobile individuals show greater weights for origin and destination, respectively. Thus, opportunity beliefs are explained by the social class where they rank lower. These findings suggest that when beliefs are updated through social mobility, they interact with the mobility trajectory. In addition, the stronger meritocratic beliefs of the farmers’ class and the greater weight of social origin for upwardly mobile individuals could help explain the dormant social volcano in China.

Madrid's Arco de la Victoria: Cultural Symbols and Social Negotiations in Contemporary Spain

This paper examines Madrid's Arco de la Victoria as a cultural symbol and its role in the social negotiations of contemporary Spain. Anchored in the framework of cultural sociology, the study traces the monument's origins to Franco's regime, where it was intended as a symbol of authoritarian triumph. As Spain transitioned to democracy, the Arco's significance shifted, reflecting the changing narratives and collective memory of Spanish society. Through analysis of academic literature and historical records, the study explores the monument's contested semantics over time and public discourses that surround it. The findings reveal that the Arco de la Victoria, much like other Francoist monuments, has evolved from a representation of unified national identity to a site of contestation and re-negotiation in democratic Spain. The paper contributes to the understanding of how historical symbols are re-evaluated as societies progress and how they continue to shape and reflect collective identities and memories.

РАЗВИТИЕ РОССИЙСКОЙ СОЦИОЛОГИИ ФИЗИЧЕСКОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ И СПОРТА КАК НАУЧНОГО НАПРАВЛЕНИЯ И УЧЕБНОЙ ДИСЦИПЛИНЫ

For over a century, Russian sociologists have been engaged in the study of physical culture and sport, with a particular focus on the mass and professional spheres. Physical education and sport are integral parts of social, cultural as well as socio-political life. Motivation, socialization through sport, education and health improvement, attitudes to physical education, the problems of Olympic and mass sports movement, etc., have come to the fore in different historical periods. All this can be found in the scientific publications of Russian sociologists and other social and humanitarian scientists. In the meantime, the analysis of sociological publications on this topic and their systematization, with the exception of the work of Russian sociologist O. A. Milstein, have not been carried out in a practical manner. In this paper, a scientific analysis of a variety of sources was carried out using two distinct approaches: comparative-historical and problem-chronological. The sources included brochures, articles and monographs, dissertations, and periodicals. Consequently, the principal thematic orientations of sociological inquiry into physical culture and sport in Russia, as well as the distinctive characteristics of sociological research across different historical eras, are elucidated. The institutionalization of the sociology of sport is considered in close connection with the institutionalization of Russian sociology. Moreover, experts examine the teaching of courses on the sociology of physical culture and sport in Russian universities. The process began in the 1920s and was subsequently interrupted. It can be stated that there has been an increase in the number of scientific publications on the sociology of physical culture and sport during the 2000-2020s. Furthermore, a number of textbooks on this subject have emerged during the same period.

Exploring the Population Exodus of Northeast China from the Perspective of Cultural Sociology——Cultural Blockage and the Outflow of College Students

The spatial migration of the population is a social phenomenon since ancient times. With the relatively stable natural growth rate, migration and flow have become significant factors affecting the size and structure of the regional population. According to the seventh national census in 2021, more serious population loss can be seen in Northeast China, where the outflow of a large number of high-quality population will lead to insufficient driving force for regional economic development. It has also become one of the vital reasons for the economic plight in Northeast China. Based on the employment emigration rate of college graduates in Shenyang, this paper explores the root of population outflow in Northeast China from the perspective of cultural sociology and puts forward relevant countermeasures and suggestions.

Paved with Good Intentions: Moral Evaluation of Volunteer Tourism as Social Action

Abstract This article explores how social actors account for their participation in a socially contested and criticized activity, while maintaining their moral self-worth. As a case study, the article focuses on volunteer tourism—a practice positioned at the intersection of economic inequality and global historical power relations, in which tourists combine volunteering in the Global South with vacationing. Despite public criticism, the practice is growing in popularity. Analyzing 48 in-depth interviews using theoretical ideas from the new cultural sociology of morality, I identify three predominant justifications invoked by volunteers to explain their actions. With each of these, interviewees assert the righteousness of their intentions, distancing themselves from the potentially negative outcomes of their actions—thus maintaining their moral self-worth, criticism of their actions notwithstanding. In articulating these claims, social actors express a distinct logic through which the moral evaluation of a social action is undertaken, emphasizing fundamental components of the action, referred to here as the intention and outcome propositions. The article highlights the importance of these interrelated propositions in understanding moral evaluations of an action, particularly in cases of possible moral devaluation.

Virtualizacija performativne umjetnosti u doba socijalnog distanciranja / Virtualisation of Performative Arts During the Times of Social Distancing

The times of social distancing and movement restrictions caused by Covid-19 have been marked by significant changes in all aspects of life. Due to preventive pandemic measures direct access of audiences to cultural institutions was unabled and performative arts moved to an online, virtual environment physicaly distancing performers from the audience. In this paper, we discuss adaptations that took place in the domain of culture and arts offering a virtual, technologically mediated experience, deprived from some dimensions of senses, emotional engagement, interaction and communication in vivo. Our research, therefore aims to inform on audiances’ aesthetic experience which was on the one hand devoided of bodily, situated performances, or on the other hand taking place with reduced number of spectators in an open space sites during the social distancing times. Key issues we focus on are transformations of performing arts in terms of audience participation and similar kinds of modifications that were not merely an answer to a current crisis, but a shift towards the new hybrid models of digital culture overcoming classic conceptual oppositions such as real-virtual, individual-collective and mass-elite. Our insights on performative arts and new media spheres hybridisation process as well as audiences’ altered position during social distancing times are based on literature in the field of sociology of culture and arts, esthetics and mediology.

The Leningrad Rock Club in St Petersburg: From Memory to Cultural Heritage

Over the last 30 years, the popular musical past has become a subject of interest for researchers in many social sciences and the humanities, from cultural geography and cultural sociology to urban studies and public history. Popular music is regarded not only as a significant part of national and regional cultural history, but also as an important element of the urban cultural heritage. The revision of both the content and the very concept of cultural heritage is associated with large-scale changes in the humanities and social sciences that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century and influenced the transformation of historical politics in many cities, regions, and countries. In Russia, a diverse and rich musical past, related to the history of late Soviet popular and rock music, has only recently begun to be studied and represented in the urban space. The article discusses the ways of authorising the musical heritage associated with the history of the Leningrad Rock Club in contemporary St Petersburg. The research is based on field data collected in 2020–2021: in-depth and spontaneous interviews with musicians participating in the Leningrad Rock Club, rock journalists, employees of the Pushkinskaya, 10 Art Centre and the Kamchatka Rock Club-Museum, and field observations during guided tours of rock-related places in St Petersburg and exhibitions dedicated to the history of Leningrad rock. The author proposes to consider the urban musical heritage in St Petersburg self-authorised. The examples studied in the article are initiatives of the predominantly St Petersburg rock community of musicians, journalists, and city activists. Its key forms are excursions, installation of memorial plaques and signs, temporary exhibitions, and opening of a museum dedicated to the history of Leningrad rock music based on the Pushkinskaya, 10 Art Centre. Despite the traditional format of representing the memory of the musical past, the organisers do not seek to designate the musical places of modern St Petersburg in terms of “authorised heritage discourse” but gravitate toward a less formal conversation and representation of this past.

Il/legitimate? Annie Ernaux’s contentious path to the Nobel Prize

ABSTRACT This article analyses the mass media reception of Annie Ernaux’s 2022 Nobel Prize, particularly the criticisms in the French press. After the award announcement, Ernaux was at once celebrated for her feminist writing and vilified for her socio-ethnographic approach and political engagements. French journalists and critics have deemed her Nobel illegitimate, calling into question the Swedish Academy’s choice. The article probes the concept of ‘il/legitimacy’ by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture and by reading Ernaux’s award within three contexts: the history of the Nobel Prize in Literature; mass media evaluations of her works’ aesthetic value; and literary debates about the impact of authors’ politics on their candidacy to the Nobel. I argue that the legitimacy of Ernaux’s Nobel Prize is the result of a process of cultural negotiation involving authors, texts, and individual as well as institutional agents. Becoming a Nobel laureate is a lengthy process that needs to be examined in the light of all these factors.

Critical Friends, Dialogues of Discomfort, and Researcher Reflexivity in the Sociology of Sport

In this special issue, which calls for a “more radical sociology of sport and physical culture,” the purpose of this paper is to address how practices of reflexivity might be mobilized among critical sport scholars toward changing the intersectional, fragmented, and complex communities we inhabit inside and outside the academy. We begin by conducting a literature review of researcher reflexivity and positionality in Sociology of Sport Journal from 2000 to 2022. Utilizing Wanda Pillow’s “reflexivities of discomfort,” we interrogate our own research by engaging in a reflexive dialogue as “critical friends.” Through this work, we try to make sense of the potential of these dialogues for shaping our ethical, political, and personal approaches to research, writing, methodology, and knowledge production.

Future-cultures: How future imaginations disseminate throughout the social

The futures of humanity and planet Earth are at stake. This is reflected not only in the increasingly dire future imaginations of billions of people around the world but also in an ever-increasing body of future-related literature in the social sciences and humanities. However, despite growing sociological engagement with the future, an astonishing desideratum remains: the dissemination of future imaginations. Although many works imply that future imaginations disseminate, they rarely spell out how the cultural mechanisms of dissemination work. Therefore, in this article, I develop the notion of future-cultures to conceptualize how future imaginations disseminate throughout the social, drawing from cultural sociology and theories of social practices. I conceptualize the future-cultures framework in three steps: (1) how future-cultures generate future-cultural codes, which select and classify (il-)legitimate future imaginations, sites of futuring and futuring practices; (2) how future-cultural codes relate different (futuring) practices and discourses into broader practice-/discourse-complexes, which (3) organize transversally in fields of futuring and modes of futuring, thereby disseminating distinct future imaginations over space and time.

Book Review: Cultural Sociology of Cultural Representations: Visions of Italy and the Italians in England and Britain from the Renaissance to the Present Day

Book Review: Cultural Sociology of Cultural Representations: Visions of Italy and the Italians in England and Britain from the Renaissance to the Present Day

Towards a Cultural Sociology of the Uses of Classical Literature: Deploying Literary Representations of Rome and the Romans in England between the 15th and 18th Centuries

Studies of receptions of ancient Greek and Roman literature analyze how so-called ‘classical’ texts are variously taken up and deployed by persons existing at later points in history. So far, the nature of such reception has not been conceptualized in an explicitly sociological manner. This paper proposes one way to do that, drawing upon key ideas developed by the Yale School of Cultural Sociology. This is done in order to re-narrate the ways in which ancient Roman texts were used by various interested parties in England, and later the United Kingdom, between the 15th and 18th centuries. The paper shows how Italian humanist understandings of the classicality of ancient Roman texts were taken up by English humanists, thereby purifying the overall set of such texts, rendering them seemingly context-free and adaptable to changing social circumstances. The relatively autonomous and free-floating nature of Roman literary texts defined as ‘classical’ allowed them to be taken up in different ways at different times for different purposes by different sorts of actors, especially aristocratic ones or those closely associated with aristocratic viewpoints. Texts describing republican Rome, and those depicting the transition from that political condition to the emergence of the Roman empire, were particularly appealing to English exegetes in the 17th and 18th centuries. They were deployed to make sense of the English Civil War and its aftermath, to carve out variant political identities, and to reflect upon the rise of the British Empire, which was understood to have surpassed its Roman counterpart, at the same time as it was feared that it might succumb eventually to a similar demise. The hopes and fears of English elites, as these were woven into the creation of political identities, were worked out through reflection upon and deployment of Roman texts taken to be timeless, processes that the paper models in a distinctive cultural sociological fashion.

“Fractional” Vocational Working and Learning in Project Teams: “Project Assemblage” as a Unit of Analysis?

Situated and Activity theories have exercised a significant influence in the field of vocational learning for some considerable time, both sharing a focus on bounded forms of work and forms of learning that facilitate learning in, or to changes to, bounded forms of work. Yet much learning occurs in unbounded contexts often referred to as projectification, where collaborations occur only for the life of a project thereby creating new contingent contexts for learning . Given the existence of this form of working and learning, what type of unit of analysis (UoA) is required to analyse that vocational working and learning in the context of projectification? To address this question, the paper advances the following inter-theoretical argument. Firstly, it is timely to develop a new unit of analysis (UoA) to capture the fractional (intermittent, discontinuous and concurrent) working and learning dynamics associated with the forms of projectification, where funding has to be procured in order to commence. Secondly, that unit of analysis is constituted by the concept of project assemblage, which is based on ideas from Actor Network Theory, Cultural-historical Activity Theory and Cultural Sociology. Thirdly, this new UoA enables researchers to identify the way in which project teams, where members are coming in-and-out, learn to use their different forms of specialist activity to enact objects, why team members will have different backgrounds and understandings of their work, why objects may not cohere, even though team members may treat them as unified and coherent, and how team members learn to incorporate one another’s insights and suggestions, and establish a finalized object.