Poetics最新文献

The emergence of individualization in contemporary Chinese society has transformed parent–child dynamics. This article examines one frequently acknowledged, but rarely scrutinized, individualizing force in this process: the consumption of Western popular media. Based on 29 in-depth interviews with college students in Beijing in 2009–2010, I investigate how members of China's first only-child generation reflexively engaged American television shows to assess their own parent–child relationships during a pivotal time of social change in China. While watching US TV inspired a desire among respondents for the individualistic and democratic family dynamics featured on screen, many were critical of what they saw and came to appreciate Chinese family practices more. Beyond comparing their lived realities with specific narratives on US TV, respondents often extrapolated individual circumstances to broader social issues and cultural traditions. Thus, US TV presented new alternatives for family life that fostered a reflexive “social imagination” among young Chinese, allowing them a deeper understanding of personal experiences by situating them within a constellation of social institutions, economic systems, and cultural values. By analyzing viewers’ meaning-making of American television shows within a Chinese context, this article illuminates how parent–child relationships have been shaped by an interplay between local norms and global possibilities.

This article examines how intermediary organizations use both organizational and interpersonal scripts to perform face-to-face transparency in the informal organic market in China. These performances constitute a form of organizational relational work that has the following consequences: (1) framing the relationships between intermediary organizations and consumers as trustworthy by demonstrating the former's competence and honesty; (2) making consumers prioritize long-term trustworthy partnerships over the quality of a single product. The organizational relational work sustains transactions despite quality uncertainty. However, when this performative transparency is found by consumers not reflecting the actual production process, it spoils established trust. This case illustrates how organizational relational work stabilizes transactions amidst market uncertainty by building consumers’ trust in organizational-level institutions. It also highlights the role of dramaturgy in enabling organizational relational work.

Cultural production is to an increasing degree characterized by digitalization, mediatization, platformization and the use of social media. In this article, we investigate how digital cultural labour is experienced by platform-dependent cultural producers. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews with more than twenty Norwegian content creators, we more specifically analyse how they describe and valuate their products and production, the online communication of their labour, and the careers and strategies of digital cultural labour. The production of content is experienced as a demanding and continuous endeavour, being relentlessly quantified through clicks and metrics. Furthermore, the content creators show the psychological toll of being the product or a more or less integrated part of the product. Partly because of the challenges of continuous content production and communication with a community, as well as because of the unpredictable power of algorithms, we see creators branching out, spreading risk, or combining platform-dependency with -independency. This tendency only partly explains why digital cultural labour in the Norwegian context does not tend to represent a career end in itself, but a means to reach other and/or more long-term career goals. In the Norwegian context, this tendency is also explained by other factors: the welfare-oriented and inclusive Nordic model of cultural policy, which includes a public broadcaster integrating social media actively in its portfolio, as well as a general risk- and precarity-reducing welfare society.

Viewers form enduring bonds, or parasocial relationships (PSRs), with media characters. They suffer breakup distress when such relationships are dissolved and show emotional reactions similar to those from the dissolution of social relationships. Alongside definite and temporary breakups, this paper introduces the term uncertain breakup, and the three breakup types are analyzed and compared. In a two-survey study with viewers of five shows (Emily in Paris, Bridgerton, Peaky Blinders, Shadow and Bone, Never Have I Ever), the three parasocial breakup types were analyzed in Study I with independent samples and with dependent samples in Study II, which also considered the behavioral effects of parasocial breakups. The results show that PSRs positively predict viewers’ temporary, uncertain, and definite breakup distress and subsequent PSRs after a breakup. The three types of breakup distress differ regarding, for example, their moderation of viewers’ level of loneliness or their behavioral effects. The results’ implications are discussed for future research on PSRs and their dissolution.

Recent work in the sociology of taste has begun to grapple with the relational properties of traditional survey-based data using techniques inspired by network analysis. Despite productive results from this endeavor, critics rightly question the face and ecological validity of the vague macrogenre labels included in standard arts participation surveys (e.g., Classical, Rock, Rap) which feed into these novel methods. In this paper, I propose a link-clustering approach for discovering focused microgenres from standard survey-based information on cultural tastes, exploiting the underlying relational patterns realized by the indirect connectivity structure of genres (via people) in a two-mode network. The link-clustering approach partially answers two of the challenges of macrogenre critics: The fact that actual genres are overlapping and not crisply bounded and that there is hidden heterogeneity within the broad labels we usually focus on. To showcase the fruitfulness of the proposed approach, I engage in two “case studies” featuring the vague macro genres of “Heavy Metal” and “Latin/Salsa” music and show the focused microgenres produced by the link clustering procedure are segmented in ways that help resolve puzzles that have emerged in previous work.

This study investigates the use of coagents in the book industry. To reach international markets, domestic publishers typically license a title’s rights to third-party international publishers, a practice known as 'selling rights’. Rights sellers can either choose to work directly in a local market or with intermediaries known as coagents. Using a data set of over 2000 international rights sales for Australian-authored titles of a major publisher, we examine whether employing the services of a coagent leads to superior outcomes as measured by the size of the advance. We find a positive relationship between the use of coagents and the size of the advance. This result is robust to a variety of contract lengths and international market conventions. The evidence suggests that, on average, coagents help secure better outcomes for authors and domestic publishers. More broadly, our study suggests that international intermediaries may play an important role in the export of cultural goods.

This paper explores the collaborative networks of Yacht Rock, a genre of music that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and is currently experiencing a resurgence of popularity in the United States and beyond. In addition to using formal social network analysis to explore the development and transformation of Yacht Rock's collaborative musical network through time, we identify its most influential artists and musicians and highlight the most pivotal songs of the era – adding context with historical and archival approaches. The results indicate that a core group of studio musicians based in Los Angeles played an essential role in helping develop Yacht Rock. This reservoir of musical talent and the supporting "hard" infrastructure (e.g., recording studios, music labels) in Los Angeles helped bring Yacht Rock to the masses. However, much of this movement's success has roots in the "soft" infrastructure of the region (e.g., management, industry connections) and the network effects of bands like Toto and Steely Dan.

How does families’ social networks influence the transmission of cultural capital to their children? Earlier research on this process has mainly focused on within-family mechanisms, and the role of social capital as conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu has here received little attention. This article explores this question through a study of parents’ social ties and parents’ and children's cultural, leisurely, and athletic practices, using Geometric Data Analysis and regression analysis of data on children (N = 4754) and their parents in the city of Bergen, Norway. The analysis finds that parents with social ties to higher status occupations have children that are more often exposed to traditional legitimate forms of culture, also when other familial resources are controlled for. When ties composition is heterogeneous, composed of both working class and elite ties, elite ties shape cultural consumption. The study finds evidence of Bourdieu's multiplier hypothesis, that returns from other capitals is multiplied by social capital, also that high volumes of social capital can compensate somewhat for having no cultural capital. Within-family characteristics are key to understanding the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital, but significant support for this process may be found in parents’ social networks.

How are racial representations created? I compare two kinds of jazz album cover from the 1950s and 60s to show that the production of culture approach has untapped potential for answering that question. After demonstrating that photographic and modern art-based work constructed Blackness in different ways, I account for photography's domination of the sleeve by focusing on the structure and history of occupational careers. Compared to painters, I show, photographers had (a) easier entry into and harder exit out of cover design, and (b) earlier and more regular access to jazz musicians. Based on these findings, I call for a rethinking of the role of racial projects in racial formation; an elaboration of the production of culture approach; and the expansion of the scope of the interracial coalition concept.

To foster creativity through sociality, residences put artists together. At the same time, in their quest for originality, artists often opt for individualism. Little is known on how physical collocation in residences affects artistic sociality. Addressing this gap, we draw on a combination of interviews, observations, and surveys, analysed with an innovative mixture of abductive coding, computational space analysis, and statistical network modeling. This allows us to unveil how room sharing and object usage relate to friendships and collaborations between residents. Along with explicit individualism of artists, we spot plenty of social ties between them. And these ties are positively related to joint material embeddedness. Simultaneously, the two main types of residential zones – working studios and leisure areas – appear to encourage the types of social ties inverse to our expectations. Our findings inform the practice of artistic residence organising and the proposed approach enables explanatory analysis of the relation between material space and sociality in various settings.