Symbolic Distinctions Research Articles

“Who Should Care for Our Parents?” How the Perceived Achievement Hierarchy Complicates Transnational Family Relations in China?

This article offers the concept of an “achievement hierarchy”—the symbolic meanings that families attach to siblings’ ability to convert education into professional accomplishments across borders—to examine how adult children caring for left-behind parents position themselves vis-à-vis their emigrant brothers and sisters. We argue that respondents’ characterization of siblings’ migration trajectories significantly shapes the dynamics within global care chains. Based on 95 qualitative interviews with family caregivers, our analysis delineates three scenarios where respondents manage a perceived achievement hierarchy in the context of long-distance eldercare: (1) hierarchical transfer, (2) contested sibling hierarchy, and (3) hierarchical collaboration. Many respondents believe that an achievement hierarchy among siblings paves the way for slotting them into a less desirable node in the global care chain. By contrast, some emphasize their status as the moral head of their family or China's global rise to challenge the family's symbolic distinctions. Others develop a collaborative relationship with emigrant siblings to care for parents at home, but this collaboration can either strengthen or soften the perceived achievement hierarchy between siblings. Our analysis shows that the pathways of emigration—as student, labor, and marriage migrants—mediate at-home caregivers’ feelings, emotions, and identities during family life transitions.

Playing God: Symbolic Arguments Against Technology

In ethical reflections on new technologies, a specific type of argument often pops up, which criticizes scientists for “playing God” with these new technological possibilities. The first part of this article is an examination of how these arguments have been interpreted in the literature. Subsequently, this article aims to reinterpret these arguments as symbolic arguments: they are grounded not so much in a set of ontological or empirical claims, but concern symbolic classificatory schemes that ground our value judgments in the first place. Invoking symbolic arguments thus refers to how certain new technologies risk undermining our fundamental symbolic distinctions by which we organize and evaluate our interactions with the world and in society. Such symbolic distinctions, moreover, tend to be resilient against logical argumentation, mainly because they themselves form the basis on which we argue in the cultural and ethical sphere in the first place. Therefore, effective strategies to evaluate and counter these arguments require another approach, showing that these technologies either do not challenge these classifications or, if they do, how they can be accompanied by the proper actions to integrate these technologies into our society.

A Language-Based Method for Assessing Symbolic Boundary Maintenance between Social Groups

When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people pursue in maintaining symbolic boundaries: boundary retention—entrenching themselves in pre-existing symbolic distinctions—and boundary reformation—innovating new forms of symbolic distinction. Traditional approaches to measuring symbolic boundaries—interviews, participant-observation, and self-reports are ill-suited to detecting fine-grained variation in boundary maintenance. To overcome this limitation, we use the tools of computational linguistics and machine learning to develop a novel approach to measuring symbolic boundaries based on interactional language use between group members before and after they encounter one another. We construct measures of boundary retention and reformation using random forest classifiers that quantify group differences based on pre- and post-contact linguistic styles. We demonstrate this method's utility by applying it to a corpus of email communications from a mid-sized financial services firm that acquired and integrated two smaller firms. We find that: (a) the persistence of symbolic boundaries can be detected for up to 18 months after a merger; (b) acquired employees exhibit more boundary reformation and less boundary retention than their counterparts from the acquiring firm; and (c) individuals engage in more boundary retention, but not reformation, when their local work environment is more densely populated by ingroup members. We discuss implications of these findings for the study of culture in a wide range of intergroup contexts and for computational approaches to measuring culture.

Academic Reform in Fractured Disciplines \u2013 On the Interaction of Bologna, New-Public-Management and the Dynamics of Disciplinary Development

At the intersection of science studies and higher education research, this contribution looks at the way in which the requirements of universities as organizations release development dynamics in academic disciplines and it analyses the interaction between discipline and organization. We will analyse German educational science, bearing in mind it is an example of disciplines that are fractured and consequently have little consensus in terms of fundamental theories and basic concepts. Firstly, we take on a quantitative approach and analyse the changes in degree courses at the structural level and the symbolic boundaries or conceptual distinctions following the transition to the Bachelor and Master system. Secondly, we take a close look at the negotiating processes and practices, as well as at the disciplinary orientations that determine these boundary shifts, using a qualitative approach that focuses on the actors. In group discussions with representatives of the German educational science at different universities it stood out that actors involved in course design are compelled to find an equilibrium between the demands of the discipline and those of the organization, and do so in very different ways. Finally, we discuss the extent to which close interaction between higher education reforms and academic disciplines can be figured out, particularly for disciplines seen as fractured and which do not have consensual common disciplinary standards.

The Prize of Governance. How the European Union Uses Symbolic Distinctions to Mobilize Society and Foster Competitiveness

AbstractSince its origins, the European Union (EU) has increasingly relied on prizes to highlight the values and principles channelling European integration. In the last two decades, such symbolic tools of governance have shifted away from the kind of distinctions granted by elites to elites and aiming to honour prominent figures offered as role models mainly in the field of identity, memory and cultural policies. In an increasingly market‐oriented Europe, prizes are used as incentives and disciplining instruments to enhance self‐compliance of economic and social actors with an ethos of competitiveness and innovation. They work as a magnifying glass of the evolution of the EU towards a government at distance through policy instruments. The focus is on four areas where prizes have multiplied since the 2000s: research and innovation, economic governance, territorial and environmental policies, and communication policies. The article draws on a qualitative analysis of a corpus of ninety‐one prizes, institutional documentation, parliamentary debates and media controversies related to prizes.

The logic of distinctions in the Hungarian jazz field: a case study

AbstractThis study aims to make the contemporary Hungarian jazz field the focus of a sociological investigation, based on a critical reinterpretation of Bourdieu's relational theory of artistic fields. It aims to grasp the logic of symbolic distinctions by analysing the free/mainstream dichotomy. This dichotomy of historically constituted poles is understood as a system of structuring oppositions that play a decisive role in the position-takings and prestige-construction of jazz musicians. The analysis of qualitative data shows how different evaluations and interpretations of shared musical references are instrumentalised in order to occupy positions in the field. Further, this article argues that such a qualitative analysis of local jazz fields transcends the national context, since culturally hybrid jazz diasporas offer an excellent terrain for analysing how the circulation of transnational artistic references influences the cultural dynamism of local fields that are embedded within global networks of cultural production.

Cultural logics and modes of consumption: Unraveling the multiplicity of symbolic distinctions among concert audiences

In this study, we examined how audiences for different types of concerts structure their musical preferences according to specific cultural logics and how this relates to the motives for going to the concert. We used large-scale audience data collected at 73 concerts in Belgium ( n = 1594). Using Correlational Class Analysis, we inductively uncovered four different cultural logics: omnivore vs. disinterested; highbrow vs. lowbrow; acoustic vs. electric; and anything but/with distortion. Accordingly, besides the well-documented oppositions between highbrow and lowbrow, and between omnivorousness and univorousness, we found two other cultural logics among concert audiences. In subsequent analyses, we related these cultural logics to concert genre (e.g., classical and electronic) and mode of consuming concerts (e.g., music-centered and entertainment-centered). We demonstrate that mode of consumption is associated with both concert genre and the cultural logic to which one adheres.

‘I don't think there are great sex differences there’: Processes of discursive bridging and othering in a discussion of gendered norms related to alcohol, sexual behaviour, and aggression

BackgroundExisting research indicates that sexual behaviour and aggression are particularly important to the reproduction of gendered drinking norms, both in the media and in face-to-face interaction. However, research has yet to understand in more detail the discursive processes whereby actors negotiate gendered norms related to alcohol, sexual behaviour, and aggression. This article examines how actors make symbolic distinctions between themselves and others in discussing alcohol, aggression, and sexual desire, and analyses the similarities and differences within and across gender that they identify in this process. MethodsThe study relies on individual qualitative interviews with 25 Swedish women and men. To elicit participants’ normative positions, we used a newspaper article as a probe during the interviews. ResultsFindings show that participants highlight similarities between women and men, and variation and individual differences among men and among women in discussing alcohol's effects on sexual desire and ‘sexually active behaviour’. Differences, by contrast, are most salient when they discuss alcohol and aggression and seek to distance themselves from ‘shabby bar men’, rural men, and male football hooligans who drink and fight, outgroups that are marked as working-class in the participants’ narratives. ConclusionTwo general discursive patterns were identified: discursive bridging across gender and discursive othering across class. For the participants, drinking norms are not as much about general gender differences as they are about the ‘dysfunctional’ drinking of certain groups of working-class men. These findings contribute to a more specific understanding of the reconstitution of gender boundaries in relation to drinking norms.

Governing by prizes: how the European Union uses symbolic distinctions in its search for legitimacy

ABSTRACT Since their creation and with an increasing intensity since the 1980s, European institutions have used prizes, labels and other distinctions as political resources to perform and legitimize their action. The purpose of this article is to make sense of this governance by prizes. It documents the occurrences, uses and meanings of European prizes and what it reveals of EU politics and policies. It shows how the EU mobilizes and updates the three usual functions of prizes as claim of centrality and authority by the prize-giver, creation of incentives and compliance for recipients and construction/solutions of/to social problems. The conclusion is that the European governance by prizes mirrors what happens at other levels of governance while adapting it to its politico-institutional singularity. The EU operates with its own logic of symbolic production but remains secondary to member states in the definition of hierarchies of honours and values.

‘So under “cause for concern”, I’ll write that…’ class, parenting and risk prevention in public health practices in schools: a question of moral value?

This article explores how risk, moralisation and class intertwine in prevention work targeting parents. The analysis is based on an ethnographic study at three Danish schools, from which two exemplary cases have been selected, consisting of observations of two introductory consultations between families and school health nurses. We focus on how the professional assesses whether a family is at risk. The outcome of the consultations is distinctly different. The privileged family is able to display the legitimate risk practices. In contrast, the disadvantaged family is regarded as irresponsible and at risk. This is not so much due to the complexity of their social situation, but because of what the professional identifies as a major risk: the child’s overweight. Our methodological approach is to explore how the consultations are framed. Our analysis reveals how a focus on ‘lifestyle choices’ results in dismissing the structural conditions that shape not only the hazards facing families, but also their risk practices. Consequently, the privileged parents are celebrated as morally worthwhile, while the disadvantaged parents are judged to be of less moral value. This, we argue, is grounded in symbolic class distinctions, revitalising ‘respectability’ as a central aspect of the discretionary assessment.

Symbolic Distinctions in Traditional Palestinian Toponymy: Class, Gender, and Village Prestige in Palestinian Space in Israel

This article analyzes the Arabic toponymy of Palestine, based on folk tales and memories of Palestinians living in Israel. The discussion is interpretative and has a dual purpose. First, it aims to shed light on class and gender power relations and the issue of the village's image. Second, it examines the differential relation of Palestinian society to the landscape, as reflected in names of places versus natural features. The starting point is the assumption that toponymy is the result of two parallel processes: names articulate reality and identity, but at the same time, they are also profoundly influenced by the approach of the naming culture to its space. The reading of Palestinian names is a tactic that gives space to popular and peripheral knowledge categories, exposing the limitations of toponymical research in Israel that has tended to focus on the names recently imposed top-down by Zionism, to the neglect of Palestinian spatial constructions. Finally, it empowers the indigenous population by giving voice to their perception of space. The names evoking this perception testify to the ideological and cultural uses of place names, as opposed to the names of natural features used by Palestinian society. The system for naming was a complex system of spatial distinctions and classifications that privileged hegemonic class and gender values by marginalizing feminine or lower-class images.

Youthfulness and immaterial labour in the new economy

The focus of this article is youth and youthfulness in the contemporary economy. Drawing on theories of immaterial labour, the article moves beyond an existing focus on ‘young people’ as capital accumulating subjects to theorize the production of youthfulness as a quality that circulates through immaterial economies and that is mobilized to confer a particular form of value on consumer goods, service interactions and labouring subjectivities. The production of youthfulness is made possible through relations between the micro-level production and consumption that take place within youth cultures and modes of sociality, the production practices and marketing activities of firms, and young people whose capacities for embodiment, sociability and youthful consumption cultivated both within and outside of paid employment contribute to their constitution as labouring subjects. Within this network of relations, youthfulness is mobilized to distribute playful affects, offer the possibility of hedonistic leisure/pleasure and confer symbolic distinctions of cutting edge style. These economies of youthfulness constitute a specific means by which production, consumption, labour and leisure intersect in the labouring subjectivities and immaterial products of the contemporary service economy, and contribute to the formation of valorized and devalorized youth subjectivities in relation to the new economy.

“You can’t eat love”: “Getting by” in South Africa’s informal sexual economy

Transactional sex and sex work are defined as mutually exclusive in both popular parlance and scholarly debates in South Africa, and yet this qualitative study based in Johannesburg suggests that the lines between these practices are blurring under neoliberalism, as poor women are forced to rely extensively (and sometimes exclusively) on sexual exchange to support themselves and their families. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of gift exchange, the paper argues that the historic institutions of trust and reciprocity upon which transactional sex relies are threatened by the precarity instigated by neoliberalism. As a result, poor women’s habituses have been destabilized. They respond by buttressing symbolic distinctions that are no longer supported by structural scaffolding and incorporate imaginary identifications of an idealized time when South Africa had full employment and stable gender customs, as melancholic loss. The faltering of the symbolic economy of gift exchange affords women both increasing freedom and precarity. Overall, the project contributes to our understanding of how relations between intimacy and the economy are reconfigured in the face of structural crisis and how this shapes peoples’ subjectivities.

Biomedicine and ‘Risky’ Retirement Destinations: Older Western Residents in Ubud, Bali

ABSTRACTInternational retirement migration is often conflated with the generic emergence of a new stage in the life course, the third age. I describe how well-travelled, globally orientated retirees are drawn to and experience biomedical provision in ‘risky’ retirement destinations. Drawing on ethnographic research in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia, I consider how older Western residents shape, share, and manage their health concerns in light of an Indonesian biomedical system that is transforming in the context of modern medical provision and an emerging retirement industry. Building on Rose and Novas’s notion of biological citizenship, I illustrate the ways in which Western retirees engage with multiple biomedical realities built around localized, symbolic distinctions between ‘hospital’ and ‘doctor,’ immigration frameworks, the transregional context of medical tourism, and broader concerns relating to change and overdevelopment in Ubud and Bali.

Musical preferences and technologies: Contemporary material and symbolic distinctions criticized

Music as a mechanism for social distinction is well established. Yet, perhaps more than any other form of cultural expression, it is music which has been systematically transformed by emerging technologies. From the gramophone, radio, cassette and CD, through to portable devices and shared through social media, music is in constant flux. To separate taste for music from its various acquisitional forms is to undermine its role in society. In this article, our aim is to integrate within taste and cultural consumption analysis a salient dimension, such as technologies to acquire music, conceptualized as modes of musical exchange and formats used to listen to music. We argue that these are components of musical consumption practices which enhance our understanding on how symbolic boundaries are shaped today. Using multiple factor analysis, this study provides a simultaneous analysis of musical tastes and technological engagement in Chile. We find that uses of technologies share a unique relationship to musical taste. Musical taste remains a relevant process of distinction, but modes of exchange prove to be an emerging property. They, however, do not create new symbolic boundaries; rather, they are important in reinforcing those that exist.

Esses roquero não curte: performance de gosto e fãs de música no Unidos Contra o Rock do Facebook

O presente artigo trata do debate sobre o gosto e suas manifestações nos sites de redes sociais. Discutimos a noção de performance de gosto (Hennion, 2007, 2010) como uma relação experiencial entre sujeitos, música e as materialidades da tecnologias. A partir da contextualiza-ção das discussões sobre o gosto e os fãs de musica, descrevemos e caracterizamos de forma exploratória algumas formas empíricas dessas manifestações, tomando como exemplo a fanpage Unidos Contra o Rock do Facebook. Dentre as observações iniciais destacamos o amálgama entre as disputas simbólicas e distinções sociais (Bourdieu, 2008) no embate entre os gêneros rock e funk carioca; os elementos de capital subcultural (Thornton, 1996) e a sociabilidade ora lúdica ora combativa de fãs, antifãs, haters e trolls. Tais aspectos constituem modos de performatização do gosto musical atuando nas mediações entre a escuta e os gêneros musicais no contexto da cultura contem-porânea.

Discursivity, difference, and disruption

We offer a genealogical perspective on the reflexive critique that consumer culture theory (CCT) has institutionalized a hyperindividualizing, overly agentic, and sociologically impoverished mode of analysis that impedes systematic investigations into the historical, ideological, and sociological shaping of marketing, markets, and consumption systems. Our analysis shows that the CCT pioneers embraced the humanistic/experientialist discourse to carve out a disciplinary niche in a largely antagonistic marketing field. However, this original epistemological orientation has long given way to a multilayered CCT heteroglossia that features a broad range of theorizations integrating structural and agentic levels of analysis. We close with a discussion of how reflexive debates over CCT's supposed biases toward the agentic reproduce symbolic distinctions between North American and European scholarship styles and thus primarily reflect the institutional interests of those positioned in the Northern hemisphere. By destabilizing the north–south and center–periphery relations of power that have long-framed metropole social science constructions of the marginalized cultural “other” as an object of study—rather than as a producer of legitimate knowledge and theory—the CCT heteroglossia can be further diversified and enriched through a blending of historical, material, critical, and experiential perspectives.

Notes on a cultural sociology of immigrant incorporation

I lay out a scheme for understanding immigrant incorporation as social solidarity achieved through the application of widely shared meanings, categories of perception, moral distinctions and manners of speech pertaining to social membership. The inclusion of immigrants is accomplished through the symbolic construction of community boundaries that include newcomers, the reification of symbolic distinctions in identifiable practices, and the censure and exclusion of problematic elements of diversity. This cultural sociology of immigrant incorporation draws upon Alexander's work on the multicultural mode of incorporation in the civil sphere, Bakhtin's thinking regarding centripetal and centrifugal forces in language, and Foucault's conception of discipline. Empirical material from Sweden and the United States supports the theory.

Classifying quality: Cognition, interaction, and status appraisal of art museums

How do experts assess the quality of fine art museums? While there is a well-developed body of sociological knowledge on evaluation and classification processes, there has been little work to treat museums as an object of inquiry. Yet guidance from the multidisciplinary museum literature only offers an undersocialized view of these organizations. I argue that museums offer a rich opportunity to study how classification, cognition, and interaction unfold in a developed field, because valuation processes are related to aesthetics in a particularly rich way. A diverse group of museum professionals offer their perspectives on organizational quality. The study finds that art professionals make an extensive range of symbolic distinctions in their understanding of quality, some of which are shared. How individuals compare museums to one another illuminates implicit status hierarchies and classification biases in cognition. A unique contribution of this study lies in the explication of different kinds of interactions between museums. In doing so, this study adds depth to prior work on evaluation, and breadth to research on inter-organization relationships.

Zones of indistinction: family life in Danish asylum centres

In Western societies, asylum politics is a highly debated issue, as modern nation states come under increasing pressure from globalization and find it more difficult to remain homogeneous institutions for ruling. In the context of these pressures, asylum-seekers constitute political and constitutional dilemmas deeply embedded in the issue of bordering, securing and sustaining nation state sovereignty. According to Giorgio Agamben, one solution to this dilemma is the creation of ‘camps’ as institutionalized ‘states of exception’, i.e. asylum centres, where asylum-seekers are deprived of not only some of the legal rights accorded citizens but also human rights. In Denmark, while the political focus is on increasingly restrictive asylum policies, studies show that asylum-seeking families suffer from deteriorating psychological and physical health and social life. Drawing on Agamben, this article examines the underlying reasons for and the dynamics of illness and family breakdown in Danish asylum centres, particularly given the claims by some that these problems are self-inflicted. The article analyses illness and family breakdown as individualized manifestations of both the camp's dissolution of normal social and symbolic distinctions, and of the (bio-) politicization of the private lives and bodies of asylum-seekers. Understanding asylum centre life through these concepts clarifies the ambivalent and paradoxical nature of illness and family breakdown in asylum centres, and leads to the article reframing the epistemological question of how one can determine asylum-seekers' social and mental health condition to the ontological question of what kind of existence is possible for people living in asylum centres.