Pub Date : 2023-03-02DOI: 10.1177/17499755221147653
P. Levitt, Andreja Siliunas
While prior research foregrounds the economic and political conditions that shape cultural globalization, we focus on the effects of culture. We argue that diffusion itself is a cultural practice, and that two types of cultural schemas – ways of conceptualizing national belonging, on the one hand, and geopolitical ideologies, on the other – shape the people, policies, and infrastructures actors deploy to insert their cultural products into the global art and literary worlds. Based on fieldwork in Argentina, South Korea, and Lebanon, we show how two forms of trans-border nationalism – those that incorporate the diaspora based on ethnic or ancestral similarity, and those that incorporate regional neighbors based on common civic norms – are mobilized to circulate art and literature internationally. Who participates in these diasporic and regional networks, however, depends on diffusers’ ideological commitments. We identify two types of aspirational visions for a global (art) world order, which influence which people and institutions cultural makers and managers draw on to diffuse art and literature: a reformative vision, in which the core institutions in traditional centers of power maintain their centrality but become more inclusive of creators from historically underrepresented countries, and a transformative vision, in which the global art and literary world are restructured and power redistributed via new nodes and circuits that circumvent these traditional centers.
{"title":"Cultures of Cultural Globalization: How National Repertoires and Political Ideologies Affect Literary and Artistic Circulation","authors":"P. Levitt, Andreja Siliunas","doi":"10.1177/17499755221147653","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221147653","url":null,"abstract":"While prior research foregrounds the economic and political conditions that shape cultural globalization, we focus on the effects of culture. We argue that diffusion itself is a cultural practice, and that two types of cultural schemas – ways of conceptualizing national belonging, on the one hand, and geopolitical ideologies, on the other – shape the people, policies, and infrastructures actors deploy to insert their cultural products into the global art and literary worlds. Based on fieldwork in Argentina, South Korea, and Lebanon, we show how two forms of trans-border nationalism – those that incorporate the diaspora based on ethnic or ancestral similarity, and those that incorporate regional neighbors based on common civic norms – are mobilized to circulate art and literature internationally. Who participates in these diasporic and regional networks, however, depends on diffusers’ ideological commitments. We identify two types of aspirational visions for a global (art) world order, which influence which people and institutions cultural makers and managers draw on to diffuse art and literature: a reformative vision, in which the core institutions in traditional centers of power maintain their centrality but become more inclusive of creators from historically underrepresented countries, and a transformative vision, in which the global art and literary world are restructured and power redistributed via new nodes and circuits that circumvent these traditional centers.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41435951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-24DOI: 10.1177/17499755231153766
O. Koskinen
The affective turn has highlighted the need to study emotions, visceral reactions and embodied experiences within social sciences, and its importance has also been recognized within theories of practice. However, practice theoretical discussions of affects, especially empirically grounded ones, are still sparse and fragmented. This article seeks to further these nascent discussions by arguing that affective practices present one fruitful avenue forward. Originally introduced by Margaret Wetherell within social psychology, affective practices are theoretically developed further in this article within sociological research on consumption practices. This is done by suggesting that affective practices can be operationalized as meanings, materials and competences, following Shove, Pantzar and Watson’s work. To explore how these three interdependent elements fit within affective practices, the article utilizes examples of disgust as an affective practice from a research project on everyday meat consumption practices among Finnish consumers. This provides a rich area of enquiry, since meat consumption mobilizes many affects in these times of mounting sustainability, health and animal rights concerns, and disgust within it entangles with visceral reactions as well as moral aversion. Altogether, the article provides a conceptualization for studying how affects themselves are constituted practically (affects as practices), to compliment previous research that has considered affects or emotions as parts of certain practices (affects within practices). Approaching affects as practices makes it possible to see affects’ ontological variability and trajectories over time, as well as their relations to cultural and social values and feeling rules.
{"title":"Introducing Affective Practices: Disgust in Finnish Consumers’ Everyday Meat Consumption","authors":"O. Koskinen","doi":"10.1177/17499755231153766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755231153766","url":null,"abstract":"The affective turn has highlighted the need to study emotions, visceral reactions and embodied experiences within social sciences, and its importance has also been recognized within theories of practice. However, practice theoretical discussions of affects, especially empirically grounded ones, are still sparse and fragmented. This article seeks to further these nascent discussions by arguing that affective practices present one fruitful avenue forward. Originally introduced by Margaret Wetherell within social psychology, affective practices are theoretically developed further in this article within sociological research on consumption practices. This is done by suggesting that affective practices can be operationalized as meanings, materials and competences, following Shove, Pantzar and Watson’s work. To explore how these three interdependent elements fit within affective practices, the article utilizes examples of disgust as an affective practice from a research project on everyday meat consumption practices among Finnish consumers. This provides a rich area of enquiry, since meat consumption mobilizes many affects in these times of mounting sustainability, health and animal rights concerns, and disgust within it entangles with visceral reactions as well as moral aversion. Altogether, the article provides a conceptualization for studying how affects themselves are constituted practically (affects as practices), to compliment previous research that has considered affects or emotions as parts of certain practices (affects within practices). Approaching affects as practices makes it possible to see affects’ ontological variability and trajectories over time, as well as their relations to cultural and social values and feeling rules.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44559359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-22DOI: 10.1177/17499755231151216
J. Clark
There exists a rich corpus of literature exploring some of the diverse roles – positive and negative – that music can play in war. This interdisciplinary article makes a novel contribution to this literature, and to research on the sociology of music more broadly, through its particular emphasis on resilience. Scholarship on resilience has increasingly moved beyond person-centred, psychology-based approaches towards more complex relational and multi-systemic framings that situate the concept in the interactions between individuals and their social ecologies (environments). However, it has given little attention to the sensory dimensions of these ecologies, including their acoustic dimensions. Focusing on the war in Ukraine and drawing primarily on media sources (including several online videos) to develop its analysis, the article argues that music can be a form and expression of resilience (and resistance) in war situations that directly acts on the acoustic ecology – a concept that to date has mainly been discussed within ecology and conservation research. Specifically, the article frames music as a form of ‘soundscaping’, in the sense of an active aligning of sound and wellbeing.
{"title":"Music, Resilience and ‘Soundscaping’: Some Reflections on the War in Ukraine","authors":"J. Clark","doi":"10.1177/17499755231151216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755231151216","url":null,"abstract":"There exists a rich corpus of literature exploring some of the diverse roles – positive and negative – that music can play in war. This interdisciplinary article makes a novel contribution to this literature, and to research on the sociology of music more broadly, through its particular emphasis on resilience. Scholarship on resilience has increasingly moved beyond person-centred, psychology-based approaches towards more complex relational and multi-systemic framings that situate the concept in the interactions between individuals and their social ecologies (environments). However, it has given little attention to the sensory dimensions of these ecologies, including their acoustic dimensions. Focusing on the war in Ukraine and drawing primarily on media sources (including several online videos) to develop its analysis, the article argues that music can be a form and expression of resilience (and resistance) in war situations that directly acts on the acoustic ecology – a concept that to date has mainly been discussed within ecology and conservation research. Specifically, the article frames music as a form of ‘soundscaping’, in the sense of an active aligning of sound and wellbeing.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44283428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-16DOI: 10.1177/17499755221147073
Anson Au
Conflicts are everyday sources of professional disagreement in the workplace. This article advances the study of professional conflicts by examining the symbolic interactionist processes through which professionals in South Korea cooperatively work through conflicts. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a large hospital in Seoul in 2018, it is demonstrated that clinical professionals retain their poise and cooperate their way through conflicts by adhering to predetermined script-like ‘lines’ of action that mandate the protection of a triadic conception of social face: their own social face, that of their colleagues, and that of their hospital. Locked in disagreement over the risk profile of procedures for clients, embattled clinicians and nurses reroute conversations about conflicts to stress a shared identity in a bid to prevent humiliation, maintain network reciprocity, and preserve social face – of their dissenting counterparts, themselves, and their hospital. Professionals exercise a discerning level of heterogeneity in their conflict avoidance to maintain harmonious relationships, foster a personal brand of trust with clientele, and ultimately safeguard professional unity in the hospital.
{"title":"How Professionals Cooperate through Conflicts: Networks and Social Face in the Workplace","authors":"Anson Au","doi":"10.1177/17499755221147073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221147073","url":null,"abstract":"Conflicts are everyday sources of professional disagreement in the workplace. This article advances the study of professional conflicts by examining the symbolic interactionist processes through which professionals in South Korea cooperatively work through conflicts. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a large hospital in Seoul in 2018, it is demonstrated that clinical professionals retain their poise and cooperate their way through conflicts by adhering to predetermined script-like ‘lines’ of action that mandate the protection of a triadic conception of social face: their own social face, that of their colleagues, and that of their hospital. Locked in disagreement over the risk profile of procedures for clients, embattled clinicians and nurses reroute conversations about conflicts to stress a shared identity in a bid to prevent humiliation, maintain network reciprocity, and preserve social face – of their dissenting counterparts, themselves, and their hospital. Professionals exercise a discerning level of heterogeneity in their conflict avoidance to maintain harmonious relationships, foster a personal brand of trust with clientele, and ultimately safeguard professional unity in the hospital.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49335732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1177/17499755221129764
S. Chambers
Theorisations of cultural preferences frequently posit a nexus between familiarity and pleasure. The pursuit and enjoyment of our tastes has been linked to the socialised acquisition of embodied cultural competencies and to psychological mechanisms of expectation. A genre such as contemporary art music disrupts this link to familiarity due to its emphasis on the explicitly unfamiliar. Drawing on interviews with concert attendees, this article examines how taste is put into practice and performed in a context marked by ambiguity. The data are significant for the disruption they represent to any idealised notion of how audiences engage with legitimate culture. Not only is the anticipation of pleasure largely absent, but the expression of taste is also far removed from an austere mode of contemplation and appreciation. Affective modes of appreciation are frequently employed, while audiences also often show a reluctance to engage in processes of evaluation. The article argues for the importance of understanding taste as comprising fluid, emergent and contingent strategies for forming an attachment to cultural objects in a field marked by ambiguity.
{"title":"‘You Don’t go to These Kinds of Concerts for Fun’: The Fluid and Emergent Performance of Taste in Contemporary Art Music","authors":"S. Chambers","doi":"10.1177/17499755221129764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221129764","url":null,"abstract":"Theorisations of cultural preferences frequently posit a nexus between familiarity and pleasure. The pursuit and enjoyment of our tastes has been linked to the socialised acquisition of embodied cultural competencies and to psychological mechanisms of expectation. A genre such as contemporary art music disrupts this link to familiarity due to its emphasis on the explicitly unfamiliar. Drawing on interviews with concert attendees, this article examines how taste is put into practice and performed in a context marked by ambiguity. The data are significant for the disruption they represent to any idealised notion of how audiences engage with legitimate culture. Not only is the anticipation of pleasure largely absent, but the expression of taste is also far removed from an austere mode of contemplation and appreciation. Affective modes of appreciation are frequently employed, while audiences also often show a reluctance to engage in processes of evaluation. The article argues for the importance of understanding taste as comprising fluid, emergent and contingent strategies for forming an attachment to cultural objects in a field marked by ambiguity.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44305979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-31DOI: 10.1177/17499755221134940
H. Holmes, N. Crossley, Graeme Park
In this article we explore the revival of rave music in the UK, reporting original research findings and focusing, in particular, upon two emergent themes: (1) the lived experience of the ageing raver, and its embodied and collective nature; and (2) the changing role of the DJ. The article draws upon 15 in-depth interviews with both music professionals and ordinary participants who were part of the rave scene in the 1990s and who are now either returning to rave, after a period away from it, or who, having decreased their involvement, are now stepping it up again in the context of the revival. We explore how rave’s revival constitutes a form of heritage which is crucial to the UK’s creative economy and we illustrate how heritage rave events provide a collective space for ageing ravers to relive times, music and dances of old. However, we find that heritage rave is also a space of contention between advocates of ‘authentic’ and ‘commercialised’ forms of rave respectively. A further finding centres upon the ways in which reviving rave and reframing it in terms of heritage has transformed the position and role of the DJ. Having been a background figure in rave’s first wave, the DJ has become a centralised and revered figure within the heritage rave sector. There is a greater demand for professionalism and therefore sobriety, a demand which often agrees with those of their ageing body, but there are also performance demands which must be reconciled with the limitations of the latter. All DJ’ing involves non-contact bodywork – using music and mixing as a means of eliciting a specific and importantly, collective, bodily response – we argue, but this is heightened in the heritage rave scene.
{"title":"‘If God is a DJ’: Heritage Rave, the Ageing Raver and the Bodywork of the DJ","authors":"H. Holmes, N. Crossley, Graeme Park","doi":"10.1177/17499755221134940","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221134940","url":null,"abstract":"In this article we explore the revival of rave music in the UK, reporting original research findings and focusing, in particular, upon two emergent themes: (1) the lived experience of the ageing raver, and its embodied and collective nature; and (2) the changing role of the DJ. The article draws upon 15 in-depth interviews with both music professionals and ordinary participants who were part of the rave scene in the 1990s and who are now either returning to rave, after a period away from it, or who, having decreased their involvement, are now stepping it up again in the context of the revival. We explore how rave’s revival constitutes a form of heritage which is crucial to the UK’s creative economy and we illustrate how heritage rave events provide a collective space for ageing ravers to relive times, music and dances of old. However, we find that heritage rave is also a space of contention between advocates of ‘authentic’ and ‘commercialised’ forms of rave respectively. A further finding centres upon the ways in which reviving rave and reframing it in terms of heritage has transformed the position and role of the DJ. Having been a background figure in rave’s first wave, the DJ has become a centralised and revered figure within the heritage rave sector. There is a greater demand for professionalism and therefore sobriety, a demand which often agrees with those of their ageing body, but there are also performance demands which must be reconciled with the limitations of the latter. All DJ’ing involves non-contact bodywork – using music and mixing as a means of eliciting a specific and importantly, collective, bodily response – we argue, but this is heightened in the heritage rave scene.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45365278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-25DOI: 10.1177/17499755221143835
T. Boland
Emergent genres can serve as diagnoses of society, particularly dystopias which exaggerate yet articulate problematic elements within modernity. Herein the focus is on ‘dystopian games’, particularly The Hunger Games and Squid Game, part of a wider genre emerging in contemporary culture wherein dystopia is not just totalitarian, oppressive or ideological, but also requires its protagonists to participate in contests and trials which transform them. Arguably, the global success of these texts reflects the cultural resonance of their diagnosis of the contemporary world as itself the ‘scene of a trial’ in Boltanski’s phrase. Following Stark on the sociology of tests, dystopian games can be related to the proliferation of intense competition in education and the labour market, relentless trials and evaluations at work and the contests for attention and popularity on social media. Building a dialogue between social theory and dystopian literature inspired by Foucault’s work on ‘truth-telling’ and ‘transformations’, what emerges is a vision of ubiquitous transformations created by compulsory participation in trials and tests, less emancipatory or self-actualizing than a nightmare.
{"title":"Dystopian Games: Diagnosing Modernity as the Scene of Tests, Trials and Transformations","authors":"T. Boland","doi":"10.1177/17499755221143835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221143835","url":null,"abstract":"Emergent genres can serve as diagnoses of society, particularly dystopias which exaggerate yet articulate problematic elements within modernity. Herein the focus is on ‘dystopian games’, particularly The Hunger Games and Squid Game, part of a wider genre emerging in contemporary culture wherein dystopia is not just totalitarian, oppressive or ideological, but also requires its protagonists to participate in contests and trials which transform them. Arguably, the global success of these texts reflects the cultural resonance of their diagnosis of the contemporary world as itself the ‘scene of a trial’ in Boltanski’s phrase. Following Stark on the sociology of tests, dystopian games can be related to the proliferation of intense competition in education and the labour market, relentless trials and evaluations at work and the contests for attention and popularity on social media. Building a dialogue between social theory and dystopian literature inspired by Foucault’s work on ‘truth-telling’ and ‘transformations’, what emerges is a vision of ubiquitous transformations created by compulsory participation in trials and tests, less emancipatory or self-actualizing than a nightmare.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47949773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-23DOI: 10.1177/17499755221130187
Willa Sachs, J. Alexander
This article theorizes the relationship between social movements, public opinion, and presidential power. While sociologists and social movement scholars have long neglected these interconnections, we argue that they form a key foundation of American political life. Drawing on civil sphere theory, we show that, at least in formally democratic regimes, the exercise of state power is continuously subject to public opinion, via social movements that pressure states in the public’s name. We demonstrate how social movements compete with one another to speak on behalf of ‘public opinion.’ In giving expression to the desires of ‘the public’, imagined as a putative whole, movements exercise what we call ‘civil power.’ Taking the second-wave feminist movement and the countermovements that arose against it as our empirical case study, we examine their interaction with three particularly illustrative presidential administrations: that of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. While presidents organize state power, we argue, the effective functioning of this formal power is enabled by the civil power of social movements, whose roots are located in collective meanings and whose generation occurs outside the state.
{"title":"Presidential versus Civil Power: Public Opinion, Second-Wave Feminism, and Party Politics in the USA","authors":"Willa Sachs, J. Alexander","doi":"10.1177/17499755221130187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221130187","url":null,"abstract":"This article theorizes the relationship between social movements, public opinion, and presidential power. While sociologists and social movement scholars have long neglected these interconnections, we argue that they form a key foundation of American political life. Drawing on civil sphere theory, we show that, at least in formally democratic regimes, the exercise of state power is continuously subject to public opinion, via social movements that pressure states in the public’s name. We demonstrate how social movements compete with one another to speak on behalf of ‘public opinion.’ In giving expression to the desires of ‘the public’, imagined as a putative whole, movements exercise what we call ‘civil power.’ Taking the second-wave feminist movement and the countermovements that arose against it as our empirical case study, we examine their interaction with three particularly illustrative presidential administrations: that of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. While presidents organize state power, we argue, the effective functioning of this formal power is enabled by the civil power of social movements, whose roots are located in collective meanings and whose generation occurs outside the state.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":"17 1","pages":"21 - 43"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46543839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-09DOI: 10.1177/17499755221114667
C. Villegas
How can civil sphere theory contribute to class analysis? In contrast to critics who suggest Jeffrey Alexander’s The Civil Sphere does not take class seriously, this paper argues that class is a central component to both the rhetorical argument and empirical justification of the text. Through a new reading of the book’s discussions and references to class, this paper provides the rudiments for a new civil sphere theory of social class. The paper first demonstrates how Alexander uses social class as a rhetorical foil against instrumentalist, class-centric models of civil society. Second, the paper elaborates on the obscured but rich set of references to historical cases of class formation to push civil sphere theory towards attending to the creative discursive and institutional action of class movements in the civil sphere. Third, the paper develops Alexander’s concept of ‘refraction’ and argues that the ways in which class communities create new cultures better explains the relationship between classes and the civil sphere. In the conclusion, the paper offers two directions for a civil sphere theory of class – a realist one which posits social classes are products of the economy and then become meaningfully civil as they approach the civil sphere; and an interpretivist one which posits that classes are already-meaningful structures in both the economy and the civil sphere, leading to an open-ended transformation of both.
{"title":"The Civil Sphere and Social Class","authors":"C. Villegas","doi":"10.1177/17499755221114667","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221114667","url":null,"abstract":"How can civil sphere theory contribute to class analysis? In contrast to critics who suggest Jeffrey Alexander’s The Civil Sphere does not take class seriously, this paper argues that class is a central component to both the rhetorical argument and empirical justification of the text. Through a new reading of the book’s discussions and references to class, this paper provides the rudiments for a new civil sphere theory of social class. The paper first demonstrates how Alexander uses social class as a rhetorical foil against instrumentalist, class-centric models of civil society. Second, the paper elaborates on the obscured but rich set of references to historical cases of class formation to push civil sphere theory towards attending to the creative discursive and institutional action of class movements in the civil sphere. Third, the paper develops Alexander’s concept of ‘refraction’ and argues that the ways in which class communities create new cultures better explains the relationship between classes and the civil sphere. In the conclusion, the paper offers two directions for a civil sphere theory of class – a realist one which posits social classes are products of the economy and then become meaningfully civil as they approach the civil sphere; and an interpretivist one which posits that classes are already-meaningful structures in both the economy and the civil sphere, leading to an open-ended transformation of both.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":"17 1","pages":"62 - 78"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49508167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-06DOI: 10.1177/17499755221127877
O. Boichak, Brian McKernan
Ukraine’s efforts to resist the Russian invasion have sparked unprecedented levels of civic engagement. While the more tangible efforts to alleviate immediate needs have been prominently featured in mass media and elsewhere, the norms and values that shaped this large-scale collective effort often remain behind the scenes. Approaching narratives of volunteering through a critical cultural sociology lens, we find that wartime involvement constitutes a shift from duty-based norms in which citizens are required or expected to engage in civic activities, to forms of engaged citizenship which contribute not just to the state, but also to the wellbeing of those in need. In this context, volunteering facilitates the emergence of civil society that often occupies the space outside of the currently defined institutional contexts and works through the collective shaping and contestation of social norms and values. Documenting these dynamics provides valuable new insights into the important role volunteerism plays in broader sociopolitical transformations, especially in non-Western and postcolonial contexts where the processes of civil society development take many forms and may be easily overlooked.
{"title":"Narratives of Volunteering and Social Change in Wartime Ukraine","authors":"O. Boichak, Brian McKernan","doi":"10.1177/17499755221127877","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221127877","url":null,"abstract":"Ukraine’s efforts to resist the Russian invasion have sparked unprecedented levels of civic engagement. While the more tangible efforts to alleviate immediate needs have been prominently featured in mass media and elsewhere, the norms and values that shaped this large-scale collective effort often remain behind the scenes. Approaching narratives of volunteering through a critical cultural sociology lens, we find that wartime involvement constitutes a shift from duty-based norms in which citizens are required or expected to engage in civic activities, to forms of engaged citizenship which contribute not just to the state, but also to the wellbeing of those in need. In this context, volunteering facilitates the emergence of civil society that often occupies the space outside of the currently defined institutional contexts and works through the collective shaping and contestation of social norms and values. Documenting these dynamics provides valuable new insights into the important role volunteerism plays in broader sociopolitical transformations, especially in non-Western and postcolonial contexts where the processes of civil society development take many forms and may be easily overlooked.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42172414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：