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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Pub Date : 2022-12-06DOI: 10.1177/17499755221140236
P. Kivisto, G. Sciortino
This article argues that Jeffrey Alexander’s The Civil Sphere constitutes the first sociological theory of civil society, a theory with its own developmental history. That history includes the trajectory of Alexander’s career prior to his simultaneous turn to cultural sociology and civil society. The former led him to develop what he calls a ‘strong program,’ while the use of the term ‘civil sphere’ serves to distinguish his approach to civil society from other articulations, past and present. This includes viewing the theory as offering a more realistic understanding of the prospects for and impediments to liberal democracy. Conceived at the outset as an ongoing project, rather than the last word on the topic, we review how that project has shifted from the work of one prominent theorist to a global network of scholars.
{"title":"From Author to Network: The Coming of Age of Civil Sphere Theory","authors":"P. Kivisto, G. Sciortino","doi":"10.1177/17499755221140236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221140236","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Jeffrey Alexander’s The Civil Sphere constitutes the first sociological theory of civil society, a theory with its own developmental history. That history includes the trajectory of Alexander’s career prior to his simultaneous turn to cultural sociology and civil society. The former led him to develop what he calls a ‘strong program,’ while the use of the term ‘civil sphere’ serves to distinguish his approach to civil society from other articulations, past and present. This includes viewing the theory as offering a more realistic understanding of the prospects for and impediments to liberal democracy. Conceived at the outset as an ongoing project, rather than the last word on the topic, we review how that project has shifted from the work of one prominent theorist to a global network of scholars.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46829404","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 : 2022-12-05DOI: 10.1177/17499755221138720
Werner Binder
As a social phenomenon, artificial intelligence (AI) is not just technically but also culturally constructed. This article investigates the meaning-making of AI in the case of AlphaGo by employing and refining cultural sociological narrative analysis. Building on Smith’s structural model of genre, whose horizontal axis reflects varying degrees of (dis-)enchantment, I propose an extended model of narrative genre, adding a vertical axis on the theoretical basis of Durkheim’s distinction between pure and impure sacred, to account for the empirical bifurcation between utopian and dystopian AI narratives. While critical approaches to AI, prevalent in sociology, tend to offer disenchanted narratives, my cultural sociological approach allows for the construction of a meta-narrative, which is able to capture not only enchantment as well as disenchantment but also purification and impurification as empirical processes that accompany the emergence and consolidation of new technologies. This approach is exemplified by a case study of AlphaGo, a Go-playing program utilizing machine learning and neural networks, which gained global prominence and cultural significance after beating a human grandmaster in 2016. Drawing on publicly available online data, this article investigates the discourses surrounding AlphaGo, focusing on its cultural construction through storytelling and genre. I not only show how characters and events were emplotted in different stories, which were in turn embedded in broader narratives about technological progress and AI, but also explain how the development of the main storyline was driven by in-game performances, audience expectations and collective representations. The article demonstrates the feasibility of a cultural sociology of AI and the usefulness of my extended model of narrative genre, which is not only applicable to AI discourses but other domains as well.
{"title":"Technology as (Dis-)Enchantment. AlphaGo and the Meaning-Making of Artificial Intelligence","authors":"Werner Binder","doi":"10.1177/17499755221138720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221138720","url":null,"abstract":"As a social phenomenon, artificial intelligence (AI) is not just technically but also culturally constructed. This article investigates the meaning-making of AI in the case of AlphaGo by employing and refining cultural sociological narrative analysis. Building on Smith’s structural model of genre, whose horizontal axis reflects varying degrees of (dis-)enchantment, I propose an extended model of narrative genre, adding a vertical axis on the theoretical basis of Durkheim’s distinction between pure and impure sacred, to account for the empirical bifurcation between utopian and dystopian AI narratives. While critical approaches to AI, prevalent in sociology, tend to offer disenchanted narratives, my cultural sociological approach allows for the construction of a meta-narrative, which is able to capture not only enchantment as well as disenchantment but also purification and impurification as empirical processes that accompany the emergence and consolidation of new technologies. This approach is exemplified by a case study of AlphaGo, a Go-playing program utilizing machine learning and neural networks, which gained global prominence and cultural significance after beating a human grandmaster in 2016. Drawing on publicly available online data, this article investigates the discourses surrounding AlphaGo, focusing on its cultural construction through storytelling and genre. I not only show how characters and events were emplotted in different stories, which were in turn embedded in broader narratives about technological progress and AI, but also explain how the development of the main storyline was driven by in-game performances, audience expectations and collective representations. The article demonstrates the feasibility of a cultural sociology of AI and the usefulness of my extended model of narrative genre, which is not only applicable to AI discourses but other domains as well.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45398055","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 : 2022-12-02DOI: 10.1177/17499755221137507
M. Rimmer
Music sociology has proven a fertile arena for the study and theorization of object–subject interaction, with the work of scholars such as Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion marking its key contribution to the ‘new sociology of art’. Recent years have, however, witnessed no little debate amongst music sociologists about the broader purchase and value of such scholarship, especially considering its apparent challenge to Bourdieu’s critical cultural sociology. This article seeks to contribute to debates in this area by advocating a novel approach to questions about music’s relation to the social, one that seeks less to map the social distribution of taste profiles or explore how listeners make use of music’s affordances than understand the variable ways in which music emerges as something to be attended to (or not) in the first place. Drawing on recent work in relational sociology, the mature philosophy of pragmatist John Dewey as well as new materialist thought, this article explores the potential of a trans-actional prospectus for music sociology. This is an approach that advocates a ‘flat’ social ontology in order to focus on questions about the constitution and configuration of musical events. In so doing, the article argues that if we are to gain a better understanding of music’s varied relation to the social, it is necessary to transcend the residual substantialism implicit in ‘new sociology’ and mediation-focused accounts and adopt an approach capable of integrating concerns of object-ness, emergence and attention with questions of power and inequality.
{"title":"Beginning at the Beginning: Towards a Trans-actional Music Sociology","authors":"M. Rimmer","doi":"10.1177/17499755221137507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221137507","url":null,"abstract":"Music sociology has proven a fertile arena for the study and theorization of object–subject interaction, with the work of scholars such as Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion marking its key contribution to the ‘new sociology of art’. Recent years have, however, witnessed no little debate amongst music sociologists about the broader purchase and value of such scholarship, especially considering its apparent challenge to Bourdieu’s critical cultural sociology. This article seeks to contribute to debates in this area by advocating a novel approach to questions about music’s relation to the social, one that seeks less to map the social distribution of taste profiles or explore how listeners make use of music’s affordances than understand the variable ways in which music emerges as something to be attended to (or not) in the first place. Drawing on recent work in relational sociology, the mature philosophy of pragmatist John Dewey as well as new materialist thought, this article explores the potential of a trans-actional prospectus for music sociology. This is an approach that advocates a ‘flat’ social ontology in order to focus on questions about the constitution and configuration of musical events. In so doing, the article argues that if we are to gain a better understanding of music’s varied relation to the social, it is necessary to transcend the residual substantialism implicit in ‘new sociology’ and mediation-focused accounts and adopt an approach capable of integrating concerns of object-ness, emergence and attention with questions of power and inequality.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45261487","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：