Sociologists Of Culture Research Articles

Template matching and moral judgment: A new method and empirical test

The sociology of culture provides tools to weigh in on key interdisciplinary debates that hinge around categorization and its underlying processes. For example, at present, there is widespread debate about how individuals come to perceive events as immoral. In this paper, I use sociological approaches to cultural meaning to test one of the leading theories of moral cognition: the idea that individuals attribute immorality through template matching. I use spatial measures of cultural meaning to define and locate a prototypical moral wrong. I then test the theory of template matching and find evidence that distance from the typical moral transgression -in semantic space - is related to the time it takes to categorize an event as immoral or harmful. I then test these results on a corpus of naturally occurring text to assess their external validity. These studies provide empirical evidence supporting the notion that the attribution of immorality occurs through template matching. Furthermore, they also serve to illustrate that productive conversations can emerge when we take the insights that sociologists of culture and cognition have reached in the past few decades out of our disciplinary boundaries.

Constructing the Racial Hierarchy of Labor: The Role of Race in Occupational Prestige Judgments*

Sociologists of culture are interested in processes of valuation, such as the way we value the division of labor. Typically measured through occupational prestige, prior research on this topic has largely neglected the potential role of race in the construction of the status hierarchy. This study asks whether and how race shapes judgments of occupational prestige, drawing on key insights from the sociology of race and ethnicity (Whiteness as a credential, strategic assimilation) to test key predictions about racial composition and a person’s own racial identity in this process. Combining data from the 2012 General Social Survey with federal administrative data, I find that Whiter jobs are, in fact, seen as more prestigious, even after taking into account an occupation’s level of required education/training, pay, industry, and gender composition. Further analyses demonstrate that this pattern is primarily driven by White and Asian raters and by raters with a college degree. Overall, then, this study indicates that the racial segregation of occupations impacts not only wages but also the status they confer to their incumbents.

The Nature of the Body in Sport and Physical Culture: From Bodies and Environments to Ecological Embodiment

This article raises the ecological substance and relational co-constitution of bodies as a generative question for sociologists of sport and physical culture. It proceeds from our observation that recent research on the materiality of athletic bodies, and on the environmental issues in which sport is implicated, tends to run on parallel tracks. By exploring how biological, environmental, and social natures cohere in the making and unmaking of healthy bodies, our aim is to connect and extend these vibrant areas of research. We do so by developing the concept of “ecological embodiment,” a descriptor for a fluid state of becoming and a sensibility for thinking about hierarchical socioecological entanglements. To illustrate this concept, we draw on a study of whey protein powder, a key ingredient in contemporary fitness cultures.

Letter from the Editors: Contemporary Popular Culture and Social Criticism

Letter from the Editors: Contemporary Popular Culture and Social Criticism

Film and cinema as a subject of sociological study. Between tradition and the present

Relations between sociology and cinema span over a hundred years. The author’s task is to reflect on this fact and, as a result, to present her own theoretical and methodological concept. Constructive framing is done in a historical perspective supplemented with methodological reflections using a variety of existing materials, scientific publications (library query) and the author’s own analyses. The basic research question concerns the state of the subdiscipline: what methodological, empirical and theoretical proposals have been developed; to what extent are they currently up to date or cultivated by scholars? A look at the broad heritage of the sociology of film and cinema allows us to see the gaps to be filled in in the area of empiricism and theory. This article does not address the reasons for this state of affairs in great detail, but merely indicates that an in-depth study of relationships and embedding data in the light of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory or Pierre Bourdieu’s field concept could shed light on the issue from a different angle, in this case – the scope of the sociology of knowledge. One of the conclusions is that the sociology of film has a faint presence in the field of the sociology of art. The author tries to revive the old postulates of the Polish sociologists of culture and film (including A. Kłoskowska, C. Prasek, K. Żygulski), drawing theoretical inspiration from the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer and also using experience from her own research. What emerges as a result is a research model proposal (along with a research tool) in the field of the sociology of film/cinema, aimed at the cognition and comparison of images of reality.

What we talk about when we talk about culture: a multi-facet approach

Though the cultural turn is well behind us, sociologists of culture have yet to agree upon a clear definition of their subject. Recent efforts in this direction have characterized culture as a meta-concept, identifying and disentangling its constituent parts. Building on the two- and three-dimensional models that have emerged of late, while also taking stock of the longer history of sociology’s struggle to reconceptualize culture after Parsons, we argue that culture is best understood via a four-facet model. Culture, we argue, consists of discourse, which is oriented toward meaning, and practice, which is oriented toward action. But both discourse and practice have implicit and explicit dimensions: they consist of underlying generative structures and concrete manifestations. To demonstrate the four-facet model’s value for empirical analysis, we use it to address the high-profile methodological debates that have recently roiled the field, pitting ethnography, interviewing, and survey research against one another as the ideal mode of accessing culture writ large. Rather than arbitrating among methods, we show, the four-facet model specifies how each approach contributes to cultural analysis, facilitating conversation in places where disagreements currently appear intractable and underwriting methodological pluralism.

Lowbrows as Rebels: Under What Circumstances a “Low” Musical Genre Can Change its Cultural Value? The Case of Disco Polo and Populism in Poland

Abstract The sociology of culture and the sociology of valuation and evaluation are closely related (Lamont 2012). In both cases, social hierarchies are the primary, fundamental focal point. Usually, sociologists of culture show what the necessary conditions for building social boundaries in a given historical context are (see e.g. Bourdieu, 1984; Ang, 1985; Ikegami, 2005). The main aim of this paper, however, is to present how lowbrow aesthetics can resist fierce social critique and how social stigma related to “low” tastes can be reversed. I focus on “disco polo” – a genre of simple dance music that became popular in the early 1990s, almost disappeared in 2010s, and recently came back all of the sudden. Disco polo (henceforth: DP) formed an entire aesthetics style, comprising not only music and a kitschy (thus stigmatized and ridiculed) style of videos, but also androcentric values behind the lyrics, a specific way of dressing – with prominent status signifiers such as golden chains or sport cars. Although the empirical material comes from Poland, the core issue is far more generally applicable: the rehabilitation of the lowermost (from the point of view of Bourdieusian dominant classes) kitschy tastes (Kulka 1996; Ward 1996), which is very different from camp sensibility (Sontag 2018). How can lowbrow consumers resist symbolic oppression and derive pleasure from culturally sanctioned “shameful” objects? Focusing on the historical example of this typically Polish music genre, I will show under what circumstances the open rejection of legitimate tastes and admiration of low tastes is possible.

Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis synthesis vs. cognitive-based models of culture

Cultural sociology must catch up in taking seriously recent initiatives in the sociology of culture and cognition, represented by the works of Omar Lizardo, John Levi Martin, Stephen Vaisey, and others. However, aiming at progress in cultural analysis, these theories are partly driven by an epistemic logic alien to cultural theorizing, making the very concept of culture redundant. To identify this anti-cultural strain within the ongoing cognitive turn in sociology, I propose an ideal-typical model—‘the informational theory of communication,’ which reduces culture to information. Although many cognitive scientists and sociologists of culture and cognition are aware of the limitations and counter-productivity of this model, and it might not exist in a pure form, I argue that, first, it is still clearly traceable in many of their arguments, and, second, that it can be seen as a cultural logic underlying a substantial part of their arguments. I posit that replacing this logic of explanation with the Durkheimian model of sui generis synthesis, the concept of emergence, and the idea of ‘boundary conditions’ not only allows us to integrate the insights of cognitive science into sociology, but also opens a way for sociology to contribute to the cognitive sciences.

Style partycypacji kulturalnej człowieka dorosłego. Walidacja narzędzia pomiarowego

The article presents a measurement tool validation process diagnosing an adult person’s cultural participation styles. Its objective is to describe the obtained results at individual stages of the validation and determine the connection between cultural participation styles and cultural systems presented by sociologists of culture. Consequently, cultural participation style of an adult person is the subject of the research. The pilot studies as well as the actual research have been conducted in Opolskie province. The research sample amounted to 100 respondents, then 400 respondents, respectively. The theoretical construct of Kazimierz Obuchowski describing the objective and subjective standard of functioning of an individual and a cultural system according to Antonina Kloskowska served as the theoretical and methodological basis for the research. An analysis of the research results has been conducted as part of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences program (SPSS). It included a factor analysis and determined the reliability as well as external and internal accuracy of the cultural participation styles scale. The reliability coefiicient – the Cronbach’s Alpha – approached high values. It came out at 0,95 for the subjective style of participation, and at 0,88 for the objective style. The internal validity of the scale has been confirmed by the Pearson correlation coefficient. It came out at r= - 0,79. The values reflecting the correlation between the analyzed styles and the subjective dimension of the quality of live, have proved satisfactory as well, and confirmed the internal validity of the instrument. They came out at r= 0,45 for the subjective style of participation, and at r= -0,38 for the objective style. The scale suggestion includes 54 statements grouped in two main dimensions: the subjective and objective cultural participation styles.

Sociologists in Themselves, Sociologists for Themselves

This paper investigates whether there is such a thing as a subfield of the sociology of art and culture. This requires proving that a population of sociologists of art and culture exists both in itself and for itself, meaning that it is both objectively and subjectively distinct from the population of sociologists taken as a whole. Informed by network analysis, our study of the space of the congresses held by the Association française de sociologie (AFS) reveals that neither the speakers in the thematic network of the sociology of art and culture (RT14) nor the sociologists who present papers on art and culture form a distinct group with a strong investment in the same sociological speciality: specialities do not necessarily make specialists. Lastly, the paper shows that while some sociologists of art and culture are objectively and subjectively specialized to a high degree, this is not enough to constitute a genuine subfield.

Something besides monotheism: Sociotheological boundary work among the spiritual, but not religious

The expression “spiritual, but not religious” (SBNR) has gained considerable traction among sociologists of religion and culture, media outlets, and the broader public in recent years. Though the expression itself has achieved wide appeal, few studies have explored what SBNRs believe about God, religion, or spirituality. This paper uses survey data from Wave IV of the Baylor Religion Survey (2014) and draws from the theory of “cultural omnivorousness” to show that SBNRs have significant sociotheological differences when compared to those who are both religious and spiritual (RAS). The expression “spiritual, but not religious” is more than a manifestation of religious deinstitutionalization or “believing without belonging.” Rather, being “spiritual, but not religious” involves sociotheological boundary work that distinguishes SBNRs from traditional monotheists. When compared to RAS respondents, SBNRs are more likely to view God as a higher power or cosmic force instead of a personal being and are more likely to adopt an individualistic ethic as opposed to finding moral authority in God or Scripture. By examining the historical context and sociotheological characteristics of SBNRs, this paper locates a boundary between SBNRs and RAS monotheists and offers theoretical reasons why SBNRs engage in sociotheological boundary work.

Sounds of disadvantage: Musical taste and the origins of ethnic difference

According to Weber, shared cultural differences are fundamental to the formation and identification of ethnic groups. Yet, the origins and trajectory of these differences are rarely interrogated by sociologists of culture. Where do ethnic differences in culture come from and why do some persist while others fade? To address these questions, I bring into focus an ethnic group whose cultural distinctiveness is hotly debated in the U.S. but rarely examined by sociologists of culture: Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants. Using data from the 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and the Mexican American Study Project II, I measure differences in musical preference between Mexican-origin and non-Hispanic black and white Americans, and I test four key mechanisms to account for the ethnic differences I observe: nativity, socioeconomic status, ethnic concentration, and ethnic discrimination. I find that Mexican Americans exhibit a wide array of differences in taste that diminish but still persist after the first generation. While some of these differences are tied to experiences of ethnic isolation and discrimination, the majority are attributable to differences in socioeconomic status. This distinguishes the case of Mexican Americans from that of U.S. blacks, for whom racial disadvantage far outweighs socioeconomic difference in accounting for differences in taste. Genre status also plays a key role in determining where ethnic differences in taste persist and where they fade.

Consensus on Culture in American Sociology: Reply to Smith

In his contribution to this issue, Smith argues that sociology’s house of culture is built on a foundation of sand. In my brief response to Smith, I dispute the claim that culture is in trouble and question the methods and motives behind Smith’s critique. I then indicate the common ground characterizing the work of contemporary culture scholars. Drawing upon my fieldnotes and observations of culture in action, I define culture as a suprasubjective system of signification creating intersubjective senses or ideas that are distinct from the materiality, function, immediacy, or face value of any particular people, objects, words, thoughts, and actions. I argue that this culture concept, which I see as theoretically consistent with the work of most cultural sociologists and sociologists of culture, satisfies many of Smith’s requirement that an acceptable culture concept specify culture’s location, powers, limits, and relationship to subjectivity, and clearly theorize meaning and its relationship to culture.

ЗМІНА СТИЛІВ ЖИТТЯ У ПОСТРАДЯНСЬКІЙ РОСІЇ: ФЕНОМЕН «КУЛЬТУРНОГО ПРОМІЖКУ»

ЗМІНА СТИЛІВ ЖИТТЯ У ПОСТРАДЯНСЬКІЙ РОСІЇ: ФЕНОМЕН «КУЛЬТУРНОГО ПРОМІЖКУ»

Material Evidence and Evidentiary Reasoning

Sociologists of material culture place the materiality of objects at the center of their analyses (see Alexander, Bartmanski and Giesen 2012; McDonnell 2010; Mukerji 1994; Zubrzycki 2013). Bartmanski and Woodward’s Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age and Lopez’s The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA are recent testaments to this trend. Bartmanski andWoodward and Lopez offer an investigation into the importance of material objects in their research on the resurgence of vinyl and building projects funded by remittance dollars, respectively. Both books provide meticulous detail as to how materiality matters, from the mediation of cultural meaning in Berlin’s electronic music scene, to the reproduction of social relations in Mexican villages. In dealing with material culture, the authors, by necessity, make decisions about what objects can (and cannot) tell them. This kind of evidentiary reasoning—how analysts use objects as evidence—receives little attention in sociology. Archaeologists, however, are well disposed to investigate how the construction of knowledge relies on material objects because material evidence is so central within the discipline. In this essay, I discuss archaeological theory alongside Bartmanski and Woodward’s account of the resurgence of vinyl and Lopez’s investigation of remittance building projects. Doing so illuminates the importance of reflexivity and clarity in material evidentiary reasoning. Chapman and Wylie’s Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice brings material evidentiary reasoning to the forefront of archaeological practice, and lays out some Qual Sociol (2015) 38:349–352 DOI 10.1007/s11133-015-9311-6

Culture and Cognition: A Process Account of Culture

Sociologists of culture and cognition are well positioned to take up the rigorous study of culture as a dynamic process by which meanings come to be perceived as shared through social interaction and influence. A wealth of exciting new work in psychology on how cognitive representations and associations are shaped and strengthened by social interaction can be integrated into a more comprehensive account of the dynamic process of culture. Understanding how shared meanings develop and change sheds light onto some of the most important questions in sociology. I provide a brief example of how a process‐based account of culture can help us understand peer conflict in schools.

Continuing the Story: Maximizing the Intersections of Cognitive Science and Sociology

This article is part of a special journal section addressing the sociology of culture and cognition and its future. In this essay, I use the areas of “serial position effects” and “sequencing” to illustrate ways of creating interdisciplinary dialogue between sociologists of culture and cognition and cognitive scientists. I view the body as an integral link in connecting these two fields.

The Terrier [Men

‘Terrier work’ is an historical and deeply significant rural practice in the United Kingdom, in which small or medium size terriers are employed to track, capture and kill foxes in the larger context of an organized foxhunt. Between 2007-2009, I spent time following a small group of ‘terrier men’ and their dogs around the East Midlands countryside as part of an ethnographic project on the use of dogs in rural (mainly fox) hunting cultures. A small faction of these terrier men living in England and Wales participate in a quasi-legal hunting subculture. In this paper, and drawing heavily upon animal standpoint theory (Best, 2013), I shift analytic focus in human-nonhuman animal studies away from human constructions/ uses/ meanings of animals in animal ‘blood sports’ (Gillett & Gilbert, 2013), and consider a fox hunting case study from the positions and subjectivities of the animals involved. This reading calls sociologists of sport and physical culture to reconsider how human-animal sports, analyzed from marginalized or silenced standpoints, direct attention to the interplay between power, instincts, and desires involved when species interactively meet.

Razmerja med občo sociologijo in sociologijo kulture: vsebinske razlike in institucionalni boji

The article develops a two-level analysis of the relation between general sociology and the sociology of culture, as it has been formed at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. One level presents struggles between groups for the seizure of institutional positions and sources, and the other describes formal differences in contents between the two sub-disciplines of sociology. The expected division of their competences is such that general sociology studies and compares general theories, while the sociology of culture studies culture as a particular object. At the Department of Sociology, the structuralist approach gained theoretical hegemony in the 1980s, positioning itself institutionally as the “sociology of culture.” The institutional place of “general sociology” was constituted as a residue of contents and as an institutional asylum. Consequently, structuralist sociologists of culture took the initiative in practising general sociology. Later, the structuralist movement dispersed because none of the theoretical schools achieved hegemony and because the production of theory and theoretical dialogue was not stimulated institutionally. The contemporary polemic against the “studies” approach and for a rebuilding of a theoretical basis of the sociology of culture is a struggle for the renewal of theoretical hegemony, but now as the hegemony of historical materialism.

Razmerja med občo sociologijo in sociologijo kulture: vsebinske razlike in institucionalni boji

The article develops a two-level analysis of the relation between general sociology and the sociology of culture, as it has been formed at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. One level presents struggles between groups for the seizure of institutional positions and sources, and the other describes formal differences in contents between the two sub-disciplines of sociology. The expected division of their competences is such that general sociology studies and compares general theories, while the sociology of culture studies culture as a particular object. At the Department of Sociology, the structuralist approach gained theoretical hegemony in the 1980s, positioning itself institutionally as the “sociology of culture.” The institutional place of “general sociology” was constituted as a residue of contents and as an institutional asylum. Consequently, structuralist sociologists of culture took the initiative in practising general sociology. Later, the structuralist movement dispersed because none of the theoretical schools achieved hegemony and because the production of theory and theoretical dialogue was not stimulated institutionally. The contemporary polemic against the “studies” approach and for a rebuilding of a theoretical basis of the sociology of culture is a struggle for the renewal of theoretical hegemony, but now as the hegemony of historical materialism.