Poetics最新文献

This article investigates the contemporary meaning and value of traditional highbrow taste in the United States. Hypotheses rooted in cultural capital theory and social psychology are tested in a nationally representative survey experiment. The results of the experiment are threefold. First, signals of traditional highbrow taste have a positive, cumulative effect on perceptions of social class and competence, while signals of traditional lowbrow taste have a negative, cumulative effect on perceptions of class but not competence. Second, the effect of signals of taste on perceptions of social class is the primary pathway through which signals of traditional highbrow taste shape perceptions of competence. Third, the effect of signals of taste on social perceptions varies across cultural domains and according to respondent gender and social class. Results suggest that traditional hierarchies of taste can persist even as elite patterns of taste change.

How does a community with a history punctuated by responding to disasters understand the slow risk posed by industrial toxic exposure? Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a contaminated informal settlement in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, I explore the neighbors’ understanding of toxicity as mediated by previous experience with disaster and displacement. Esmeraldas is home to the largest refinery in Ecuador. Located only meters away from smoke stacks and other industrial structures, 50 Casas is one of the neighborhoods in closest proximity to the petrochemical complex. Since their arrival in the area, residents of the neighborhood have faced a variety of disasters ranging from earthquakes and intermittent floods to industrial accidents. I present a case in which the conjunction of temporally distinct risks has shaped the community's protective strategies to focus on the urgency of impending disasters, while deprioritizing the mitigation of slower contaminants. Drawing on the concept of slow violence, I show, first, that a conjunction of threats with varying temporalities may have the unintended consequence of minimizing the danger of slower threats, second, that risk perceptions are intimately tied to personal experience and history, and third, that residents mobilize their identity as “contaminated citizens” to demand infrastructural works aimed at minimizing the danger of sudden disasters.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster was profoundly a man-made one, resulting from the organizational failure of nuclear emergency preparedness. To fully understand the cause of this disaster, I propose to extend an organizational perspective on disasters into a macro-institutional perspective on disaster preparedness. To this end, I borrow from science and technology studies the concepts of "sociotechnical imaginary" and "civic epistemology" to probe the deepest layers of meaning-making constitutive of disaster preparedness. I then apply these concepts to the history of nuclear energy in postwar Japan that was centered on the developmental state pursuing industrial transformation. Specifically, I illustrate how the "pacifist imaginary" emphasized positive contributions of "the peaceful use of nuclear energy," legitimating a priori the promotion of nuclear power as a means of economic development; and how the "technocratic epistemology" invoked the superior competencies of state bureaucrats and expert advisers, legitimating post hoc their disregard for the possibility of a severe accident. The imaginary and epistemology thus enabled the developmental state to pursue pro-nuclear policy by securing acquiescence from the majority of citizens and discrediting the minority of antinuclear activists – until the earthquake and tsunami exposed the preparedness failure in March 2011.

This study focuses on digital divide in the context of access, use, and perceptual understanding of digital assistants. We pay particular attention to inequalities of perceptual outcomes that may be triggered by the first-(access) and second-level (use) divides. We extend this insight to the level of perceptual understanding and investigate how the understanding of various personalized AI-related applications—as manifested via the consumption of functional and informational features of digital assistants—vary depending on access and use. Our analyses of two U.S. national surveys reveal the first and second divides, such that those in higher status (higher income) enjoy higher access and use. Then, we also find related perceptual gaps along the line of socio-demographics, as the pattern was evident for education in interaction with other demographic backgrounds. That is, there were varying degrees of the understanding of algorithmic misjudgment, bias in recommended content, or data surveillance, while users with lower social status tended to easily overlook those risks for their excitement and convenience of AI-enabled devices. We argue that inequalities operate in terms of material (access/use) as well as socio-cultural (perceptual understanding) bases, suggesting how digital opportunities instigated by digital assistants may not be built on levelled grounds and continue to consolidate and reproduce existing inequalities in recursive ways.

This mixed-methods study examines how political leaders mobilize collective intentionality during the COVID-19 pandemic in nine US States, and how collective intentionality differs across republican and democratic administrations. The results of our computational and qualitative analyses show that i) political leaders establish collective intentionality by emphasizing unity, vulnerability, action, and community boundaries; ii) political leaders’ call to collective action clashes with the inaction required by health guidelines; iii) social inequalities received little attention across all states compared to other themes; and iv) collective intentionality in democratic administrations is linked to individuals’ agency and actions, suggesting a bottom-up approach. Conversely, in republican administrations individuals’ contributions are downplayed compared to work and state-level action, indicating a top-down approach. This study demonstrates the theoretical and empirical value of collective intentionality in sociological research, and contributes to a better understanding of leadership and prosociality in times of crisis.

Research into narrative tension is of interest in terms of the progress of knowledge of the processes and mechanisms by which stories are received and enjoyed. We have created four versions of an audiovisual story with three different structures of fiction (suspense, surprise, curiosity) and one of non-fiction. We have investigated the effects of the narrative tension of these stories with four groups of subjects (N=94). The results show that the organization of the stories, depending on their structures of suspense, surprise, or curiosity, induces narrative tension, while the non-fictional story, induces cognitive and affective effects of another kind. Narrative tension appears during narrative progression. It is manifested by cognitive-affective responses that include anticipations, diagnoses, retrospections, and emotions. In narrative tension, curiosity plays a triggering and organizing role in suspense and surprise. The emotions and cognitions that result from narrative tension during plot construction underpin the experience of enjoyment. The Multidimensional Narrative Tension Theory of Enjoyment that emerges from this research allows establishing connections between narrative theory concerned with narrative progression and plot, the psychology of interest, and the psychology of media enjoyment.

From business events such as content trade fairs, we can learn about the institutional logics of contemporary cultural industries. In our ethnographic fieldwork at six different trade fairs in three industries (book, music and TV), we identified five ways of legitimating the commercial production and distribution of cultural goods: cultural industries are represented as an idealized form of business, as art for art's sake, as innovation and technology, as entertainment and as a public sphere. Our findings both confirm and contradict Bourdieu's theory of cultural production fields. In accordance with Bourdieu's description of the field as a reversed economic world, we observed an industry which struggles to disguise ordinary economic transactions, such as negotiating deals, ordering services or making contracts. In contrast to Bourdieu, we do not find a strong homology between a position in the field and its symbolic representation. Rather, we observed that small enterprises from the restricted field of cultural production as well as large-scale producers and distributors of cultural goods use the same narratives to legitimate their practices. Borrowing from recent advancements in organizational institutionalism, we interpret the symbolic representations at trade fairs as a cultural toolkit from which people in the industry strategically choose in order to pursue their interests.

Research on the tastes of higher status groups has long prioritized analysis of aesthetic preferences. However, recent work has brought more attention to the moral dimensions of tastes. In this paper, we investigate the intersection of morality and aesthetics in tastes. Drawing on survey data and focus groups, we investigate how aesthetic and moral concerns operate in the domain of food, and meat specifically. A latent class analysis identifies four orientations to food that differ in their emphasis on aesthetic versus moral concerns. We identify classes that we label pragmatism, aestheticism, moralism, and moral aestheticism . These orientations toward moral and aesthetic concerns in food are associated with economic capital, cultural capital, age, political ideology, race, and gender. Respondents with higher social status are most likely to hold the moral aestheticism orientation, which simultaneously upholds moral and aesthetic concerns. Analysis of focus group data brings the nature of each of these four orientations into sharper focus. Further survey analyses show these four orientations predict high status aesthetic preferences and moral orientations beyond food, and they also predict the holding of symbolic and social boundaries related to moral judgments in food. We argue that research on high status cultural consumption must conceptualize and measure moral consecration alongside aesthetic consecration in order to better understand the social stratification of tastes.

Individuals adjust their behavior on social media to varying extent, and commonly in their idealized way. Most studies have focused on the problems associated with materialism and social media use, yet their potential positive contributions remain less clear. In fact, impression management holds potential for both negative and positive: it has been linked with materialistic attitudes, but also increased amounts of self-reported social capital. This study examines how young people's materialistic values connect with status-seeking impression management on social media, and subsequently to social capital, within the same model. Eight hundred Finnish participants aged 15–19 participated in our structured phone survey. We applied structural equation modeling to examine the connections between materialism, impression management, and online social capital. Our findings show that materialism is positively related to impression management, while impression management is positively associated with online social capital. Additionally, we found positive indirect effects between materialism and both bridging and bonding social capital through impression management. In sum, more materialistic young people who engaged in higher impression management had higher amounts of social capital.