Cultural Sociology Research Articles

Music studies as cultural capital accumulation and its impact on music genre preferences

Music preferences have been shown to be determined by a diversity of factors such as cognitive, emotional, cultural, or experiential. Having studied music is also a factor that has been considered from a musicology standpoint and is linked to the accumulation of cultural capital, as analyzed in cultural economics, arts management, and the sociology of culture. Research on how music studies influence music genre preferences shed light on the role that music education plays in the stock of cultural capital individuals hold. To do so, an exploratory empirical survey was undertaken using self-administered questionnaires targeted to a sample of 231 students. Findings, after performing multivariate analysis, showed that knowledge or familiarity plays an important role in music genre preferences. Specifically, having studied music affects the choice of music genres. These results contribute to the literature on music preferences, and specifically on their determinants, establishing the connection of music education with the accumulation of cultural capital and its influence on the formation of music genre preferences.

The Consequences of Conflating Trans-ness and Vulnerability

The Consequences of Conflating Trans-ness and Vulnerability

Contributors

Previous article FreeContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIngrid Anzelín ([email protected]) is professor at the Faculty of Education at the Universidad de la Sabana, Colombia. She is interested in the analysis of public policy.Francesca Borgonovi ([email protected]) is British Academy Global Professor at the UCL Social Research Institute and Head of Skills analysis at the OECD’s Centre for Skills. Her research interests include the analysis of gender and socioeconomic differences in academic achievement, attitudes, and self-beliefs using international large-scale assessments.Jorge Celis ([email protected]) is a member of the research group in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), School of Engineering, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota. His research interests include doctoral education, the job market for PhD graduates, and intellectual property management.Samira Chatila ([email protected], [email protected]) is a double doctoral student in comparative and international development education (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) and sociology (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). She is also an interdisciplinary fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, focusing on the global south, and are guided by and committed to promoting social justice.Tao Chen ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate in sociology at Fudan University. His research concerns fertility decline, social gerontology, and causal inference. He has published in journals such as Chinese Sociological Review, Jiangsu Social Science, and Population & Economics.Kathleen Fincham ([email protected]) is director of the Centre for Research into the Education of Marginalised Children and Young Adults at St. Mary’s University (London). Kathleen’s work is situated at the nexus of development and humanitarian scholarship, policy, and practice. Specific areas of research interest include identities, inequalities, social exclusion, social cohesion, social mobility, and citizenship.Brian C. H. Fong ([email protected]) is research associate, SOAS China Institute, SOAS University of London. Specializing in great power politics, democratization, and identity politics, he is also the founding editor of Hong Kong Studies Reader Series, associate editor of Social Transformation in Chinese Societies, and lead editor of several comparative politics books, including China’s Influence and the Centre-Periphery Tug of War in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Indo-Pacific and the Routledge Handbook of Comparative Territorial Autonomies.Jared Furuta ([email protected]) received his PhD in sociology from Stanford University, where he conducted research on global changes in national education systems over the postwar period. He has also studied the rise of test-optional college admissions policies in the United States. His prior research has appeared in Sociology of Education and Social Forces.Meseret F. Hailu ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of higher and postsecondary education at Arizona State University. She studies the retention of minoritized women in STEM higher education. Hailu’s work has been funded by the Fulbright Program, the United States Agency for International Development, and the National Science Foundation.Anning Hu ([email protected]) is professor of sociology at Fudan University. He is interested in culture and religion, social inequality and stratification, and social research methods. His work has appeared in British Journal of Sociology, Sociology, Journal of Marriage and Family, and China Quarterly, to name a few.Jihyun Lee ([email protected]) is a professor of educational assessment at the School of Education, UNSW. She conducts research on the role and processes of psychological, social, and family factors associated with student achievement. Her research is often based on large-scale international data such as PISA and TIMSS.Dongyu Li ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate in sociology at Fudan University. His research interests include the sociology of culture, sociology of education, and computational sociology. His work has appeared in Population Research and Policy Review, Sociological Review of China (in Chinese), and Fudan Education Forum (in Chinese).Pedro Pineda ([email protected]), Dr. Phil., Humboldt University of Berlin, is associate professor (senior lecturer) at the Department of Education, University of Bath. He specializes in the fields of comparative education, higher education, the sociology of education, and organizational studies.Aga Rehamo ([email protected]) is associate professor at Sichuan Normal University. She has published book on the modernization of ethnic minority education. She has for many years conducted research on education quality improvement in rural areas and is currently engaged in research on rural revitalization and rural education revitalization in China.Xiaogang Wu ([email protected]) is Yufeng Global Professor of Social Science and director of the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at NYU Shanghai and professor of sociology at New York University. He is interested in education, inequality and social stratification, political sociology, and urban sociology. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 66, Number 2May 2022 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/719186 Views: 410Total views on this site © 2022 Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Performing Social Distancing: Culture, Scripts, and Meaningful Order in the Italian Lockdown

This article aims to explore the relationship between symbolic action and critical junctures by looking at early responses to the Covid-19 epidemics that broke out in Italy in late February and March 2020. In this regard, Italy's lockdown in the context of the Covid-19’s pandemic that shook the world in Spring 2020 provide material for an analysis of what happens of the relationship between processes of meaning-making and the alignment to an emerging and progressively more generalized disaster culture in an extreme condition in which the room for symbolic action becomes more and more limited. I argue that the new politics of performance that was shaped during the lockdown, with huge limitations both to the spaces of expression and to the morality of performance, can be analyzed effectively in order to to gain insight on the collective dimension of social life in a case in which there is a programmatic, top-down intervention on one of the crucial requisites for the production of symbolic action, namely, the co-presence of participants. Keywords Cultural Sociology; Social Performance; Scripts; Covid-19; Contemporary Italy Funding This article was supported with funds from the “SOCDIST” strategic project of the University of Trento, 2020-2022.

A Chinese tale of three regions: a century of China in thousands of films

Over the past 70 years, because of their different historical and social contexts, the film industries of China’s three regions, namely mainland China, Taiwan, and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), have exhibited distinct characteristics that grow out of a single cultural root. Based on data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), this study investigates how the image of China has spread overseas through cultural products by applying big data analysis and machine learning methods to compare the content, topics, and attitudes toward the image of China disseminated by films originating in these three regions. The results show that the three areas have sought to express their subjectivity during periods of flux and striven to connect with the world in films. The macroscopic analysis of large-scale content allows the exploration of hidden cultural phenomena and compensates for the lack of objectivity of traditional research methods, while understanding embedded historical and cultural contexts of the three regions helps to clarify the regions’ ethnic, cultural, and emotional connections. Therefore, this study has contributed to cultural sociology both in topic and methodology.

Political Socialization in a Changing Society: A Crisis of Value Orientations or Asynchronization of National Memories?

The article examines qualitative changes in the socio-cultural parameters of intergenerational communication that impact social cohesion and civic identification in contemporary society. Diversification of symbol production and an increase in the number of agents of political communications, a greater heterogeneity of political ideologies, and modes of political representation shape political processes. To adequately address these changes, one needs new theoretical models of political socialization. Such models would examine youth political incorporation as a particular form of communication predicated on the spatial and temporal design of political events within national communities. The focus on generational differences in the interpretation of political events helps explain youth positioning vis-à-vis older generations. In this case, political socialization goes beyond the processes of the younger generation’s adaptation to institutions and value-normative regimes of the “adult” society. It is a communicative process of establishing generational political expectations. Analysis of the legitimating profiles of national memory—those that include competing symbolic representations of images of the future and the past, typologies of the heroic, concepts of guilt and responsibility—is crucial to studying the political socialization of the younger generation. The authors emphasize the significance of both a theoretical and applied analysis of symbolic structures of political memory and the role of iconic power in understanding intergenerational continuity and change. Drawing on the methods of cultural sociology, the authors outline novel theoretical approaches to studying youth political socialization in today’s society.

Toward a cultural sociology of disaster: Introduction

• A discussion of how cultural sociology can contribute to disaster research and vice versa. • A review of pioneering studies in the cultural sociology of disaster. • A proposal of future agenda. • A summary of the articles in the special issue.

The Cultural and the Racial: Stitching Together the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and the Sociology of Culture

Sociology subdisciplines are notorious for being siloed in their respective fields of study. This is sometimes more noticeable in those arenas that surprisingly (to some) do not make sense, as there are bound to be greater sociological insights gleamed from an intra‐subdisciplinary approach that allow for better synthesis of theory(ies) or even epistemology(ies). In this piece, we issue a challenge to the need for more sociological engagement that weaves together the cultural, those structured stories that render our lives and the order of those lives meaningful, and the racial, those storied structures of white supremacy that give rise to that order of our lives and undergird our identities and institutions.

Religious Values of Youth within the Framework of the Sociology of Culture

In a situation of paradigm pluralism of modern sociology, the selection of certain provisions for the formation of a theoretical framework always causes certain difficulties and problems. On the one hand, there is a clear division of sociological knowledge along the line of the classical – non-classical, and on the other hand, in the present conditions this division looks somewhat artificial and, according to many analysts, should be replaced by the integration of approaches, theories, and concepts, the creation of an integrative paradigm. Therefore, considering the sociological heritage and new developments, it is necessary to select those groups of theoretical propositions that will help reveal the diversity of values in empirical research. The novelty of the research is determined by the existence of a certain hierarchy in the value system. As part of any value system, one can distinguish, first of all, dominant values. The authors show that the system of values determines the criteria recognised by society, based on which control over the activities of people is carried out and their behaviour is regulated, that is, it is the system of values that ensures civil order. It acts as a theoretical framework for social activity. Authors determine that the value system regulates the behaviour of people in society and directs it in the proper, correct direction. It acts as a guideline when choosing a method of action, forms goals and leads to their achievement. The practical significance of the research is determined by the fact that each culture creates its individual system of value guidelines, which serve as a kind of model, determine the direction of the actions of a person or the entire society, that is, values of a certain kind of motivators of actions.

Religion as a Micro and Macro Property: Investigating the Multilevel Relationship between Religion and Abortion Attitudes across the Globe

AbstractIn many countries, abortion is the most contested issue being publicly discussed, in part, because it has important implications for gender equality, health, family formation, politics, and views about morality. Personal religious beliefs are often seen as having an important role in shaping disapproving attitudes. However, little attention has been given to the country religious context for understanding public opinion about abortion. Drawing on ideas from cultural sociology, the anti-ascetic hypothesis, and the moral communities hypothesis, this study investigates the individual and country religious associations with abortion attitudes. Using hierarchical modelling techniques and survey data from over 70 nations, representing the majority of the world’s population, the multilevel roles of religion are investigated. Both personal and country levels of religious importance are associated with the disapproval of abortion, but there are few differences across religions. Laws allowing for abortion are marginally associated with attitudes and there is no moral communities effect, whereby overall levels of religious importance have a moderating influence on the relationship between personal religiosity and attitudes. However, individual religious importance appears to have a greater association with disapproval in richer, rather than poorer, countries, providing novel insight into why abortion has remained controversial in many countries, especially those with higher levels of economic development.

НОВАЯ КАРТИНА МИРА И КУЛЬТУРА ПОВСЕДНЕВНОСТИ. О ВЗАИМОСВЯЗЯХ РАЗВИТИЯ ТЕХНИКИ, СЕКУЛЯРИЗАЦИИ И СОСТОЯНИЯ ПОСТМОДЕРНА

This article discusses the specifics of the relationship between the development of technology, the processes of secularization, and the principles of the Postmodern Condition. The influence of these relationships on the culture of everyday life is revealed. The study used the concepts of culture-forming ideals according to D.V. Pivovarov and the ideas from the "Research Program"of Lakatos. A historical analysis of the factors that influenced secularization was made. Common points of interaction between Peter Berger and Jean Francois Lyotard are found. The influence of the Protestant movements of the second half of the 20th century on the formation of cultural ideals is considered. The contribution of Dorothea Sölle, almost unknown in Russia, is indicated. Within the framework of the article, the concept of polyvariability of the Hard Core of modern culture is indicated. This article is relevant for people studying cultural studies, theology, psychology, sociology and philosophy.

Cultural Continuities and Skateboarding in Transition: In the Case of China’s Skateboarding Culture and Industry

Previous research on skateboarding has been conducted largely under the lens of cultural studies. Recently, there has been growing recognition of skateboarding as an industry under capitalist structures. Nonetheless, the transition of skateboarding from a subculture to a global multi-billion dollar industry is still left untheorized. There are two primary aims of this study. First is to evaluate the implication of the theoretical transition in existing literature from the subcultural theories and the critical political economy approach in examining subcultures and cultural industries. The second is to contextualize key concepts such as authenticity and cultural intermediaries in the empirical understanding of the dynamics of distinction in the Chinese skateboarding community and industry. The evidence presented in the qualitative investigation of key members of the Chinese skateboarding community suggests that an ambivalent sociality has been neglected in previous discussions on authenticity and the precariousness of skateboarding careers. Borrowing perspectives from cultural sociology and organizational sociology, the finding on the prevalence of the Chinese concept guanxi suggests relevant implications for future research.

“Terrorism”, “democracy” and the Spanish 1978 “constitution”: transitional concepts, post-transitional metaphors

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that during the Spanish Transition (1975–1982) there was a gradual semantic displacement that would strongly condition subsequent usages of the terms “terrorism”, “democracy” and “Constitution” in mass public discourse as supposedly designating self-evident realities, rather than ontologically unstable and socially constructed entities. While the meaning of these three signifiers had been hotly debated as part of the transitional process, by 1982 “democracy” had been reduced to its understanding as a reform of (rather than a break with) the Franco regime; “terrorism” was consistently used in public discourse as synonymous with sub-State political violence (as opposed to State political violence); and the so-called “Constitution” had assumed the mantle of sacrosanct foundation of the current “democratic” order. Accordingly, since the Spanish Transition, real and fabricated “terrorist” attacks have been constantly instrumentalised to reinforce (the perceived need of protecting) “democracy” by opposition, particularly as enshrined in the 1978 “Constitution”. From the perspectives of cultural sociology and critical discourse analysis, I carry out a critical revisionist account of the classical state-centric views on the transitional period to show how the Spanish post-transitional regime has been built not only despite terrorism, but also through it.

Cultural Discourse in the Formation of Spiritual and Aesthetic Culture

The author considers the problem of complex research of culturological discourse, which influences the formation of spiritual and aesthetic culture as a holistic phenomenon. Synergetic approaches to culturological systems were analyzed in order to identify their importance in the spiritual and aesthetic education of youth. Two areas of cultural study (optimistic and pessimistic) are described in the article, they are generated by its crisis. Isolationist and integrative views on the place of culturology in the system of scientific knowledge are considered from the point of view that according to the first optimistic consideration it is a separate science with its own special approach, which does not replace culturology with other sciences (philosophy of culture, art history, sociology of culture, etc.) thus according to the second pessimistic consideration the culturology is a synthesis of social and humanitarian knowledges not about individual cultural systems, but about the universal properties inherent in all cultures. It is noted that new culturological models of researchers have appeared in modern Ukraine, which directly or indirectly affect the problems of spiritual and aesthetic culture. The concept of the synergetic paradigm of building the cultural continuum of Ukraine is covered in order to reveal the specifics of the history and ethnography of its main cultural regions. The author emphasizes that they have a common cultural basis. The concept of methodological foundations of the study of spiritual and aesthetic culture is substantiated from the standpoint of philosophy, aesthetics and culturology. It is proved that the structural elements of culture, their dynamics and new formations depend on changes in the nature of society, globalization and alterglobalization processes, social commitment of culture and art, reducing cultural and aesthetic needs of consumers of artistic, aesthetic and spiritual values. The culturological model of the sociocultural system is proposed by the author. This model is actively used in the study of the origins of national history and culture, as well as in the return of its basic institutions taking into account the real economic transformations. It was found that the leading role in the preservation of highly spiritual values belongs to the representatives of creative professions as highly intelligent bearers of perfect "craft" and impeccable aesthetic and artistic taste.

How Intersectional Threat Shapes Views of Gun Policy: The John Wayne Solution

Abstract Guns are highly visible in the news, in politics, and in American culture more broadly. While most Americans support some gun control, a significant and vocal minority of Americans are firmly opposed. Drawing on work from the recently developing sociology of modern gun culture, we propose an intersectional threat model—wherein perceived threats to multiple privileged identities provoke a distinct response—for understanding the positions Americans take on gun policies. Using data from a 2018 national survey conducted by the American National Election Survey, we find a robust role for perceived threats along gender, race, and citizenship lines in opposition to background checks for private sales and an assault weapons ban as well as support for arming teachers. Interactions reveal multiplicative effects: that gender threats matter more when racial and immigrant threats are also felt. We discuss implications for the prospect of policy and for understanding the pro-gun alt-right movement and other potential applications of intersectional threat.

Zygmunt Bauman, Culture and Art: Selected Writings

Zygmunt Bauman, <i>Culture and Art: Selected Writings</i>

Reductionism: Friend or Foe of an Integrative Social Psychology?

I begin my address by identifying three vertical directions of reductionism (upward, horizontal, and downward) with ontological (descriptive) and epistemological (explanatory) forms. Following a brief discussion of horizontal reductionism, I deal with upward reductionism in terms of postmodernist thought and its influence on social scientists. In my discussion of downward reductionism, I reject ontological (descriptive) reductionism while embracing a qualified version of epistemological (explanatory) reductionism. While admitting psychological and biological variables to explanation of social phenomena, this qualified version of explanatory reductionism maintains that individual-level variables cannot explain social phenomena without residue because such phenomena have emergent properties. I support my argument by discussing the perceived threat of neuroscience by psychologists and the lesson it holds for sociology and social psychology with respect to employing individual-level explanatory variables. Following a discussion of affect control theory and cultural sociology as examples of the qualified version of explanatory reductionism advanced in this address, I present a model of an integrative social psychology, locating different kinds of reductionism and social psychological theories in this model.

The Place of Greening: Comparing Civic Engagement Scenes of Urban Natures across Danish Cities

As elsewhere in Europe, cities in Denmark have witnessed a surge in civic urban nature engagement, such as place- and practice-based initiatives (e.g., public-access community gardens, organic food collectives, and grazing associations that enhance biodiversity). While this expansion of urban green communities, as we call them, is widely noted in the literature, less attention has been paid to the comparative variability of their local civic expression. In this article, we use digital methods to map out the group styles, the spatial intergroup networks, and the cultural-political value landscapes of 130 urban green communities across the four largest cities in Denmark. To compare results, we develop the concept of “civic engagement scenes” as a way of responding to recent developments in cultural and political sociology. Overall, we show how this notion allows for interpreting civic greening groups: they are neither neighborhood-based endeavors nor hubs of social movement mobilization, but rather geographies of co-engagement that span cities while also forge new senses and practices of place.

Two traditions of cognitive sociology: An analysis and assessment of their cognitive and methodological assumptions

AbstractCognitive sociology has been split into cultural and interdisciplinary traditions that position themselves differently in relation to the cognitive sciences and make incompatible assumptions about cognition. This article provides an analysis and assessment of the cognitive and methodological assumptions of these two traditions from the perspective of the mechanistic theory of explanation. We argue that while the cultural tradition of cognitive sociology has provided important descriptions about how human cognition varies across cultural groups and historical periods, it has not opened up the black box of cognitive mechanisms that produce and sustain this variation. This means that its explanations for the described phenomena have remained weak. By contrast, the interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive sociology has sought to integrate cognitive scientific concepts and methods into explanatory research on how culture influences action and how culture is stored in memory. Although we grant that interdisciplinary cognitive sociologists have brought many fresh ideas, concepts and methods to cultural sociology from the cognitive sciences, they have not always clarified their assumptions about cognition and their models have sketched only a few specific cognitive mechanisms through which culture influences action, meaning that they have not yet provided a comprehensive explanatory understanding of the interactions between culture, cognition and action.

How journalists internalize news practices and why it matters

Practice scholars of news production generally imagine news practices as symbolic resources that exist external to reporters and prior to reporters’ actions. This understanding has been incredibly productive for scholars, but it elides an important question. How do news practices actually get into reporters’ heads? The lack of answers to this question has created a persistent gap between the study of news practices and examination of reporters’ actions. In this essay, I build on recent advances in cognitive cultural sociology, especially the dual-process theory of social cognition, to offer an account of how reporters internalize culture. I argue that this account is especially helpful for analysis of situations in which what journalists can say about what they do is only loosely associated with what they do, or know how to do. In my estimation, such situations are increasingly common in journalism. A clearer understanding of processes of internalization will lead to more accurate assessments of reporters’ actions, especially in situations in which their words and their deeds are not aligned.