Poetics最新文献

This paper examines audience engagement at livestreamed concerts, a form of mediatised cultural consumption that saw an immense growth in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerts, as events that draw large groups of people with similar intentions, are the perfect location for the establishment of large-scale interaction rituals – moments of group behaviour characterised by a highly intense collective emotion. Furthermore, as social occasions, concerts are organised around a set of routine interactions that construct and define the collective experience. We argue that in moving online, the definition of the (concert) situation is highly impaired due to a context collapse. In comparing two distinct audiences (classical and Dutch popular music), the first aim of this research is to explore how these differing audiences adapt their cultural behaviour to the virtual sphere. Secondly, by adopting a microsociological perspective, we aim to broaden the theoretical understanding of virtual large-scale interaction rituals, an area becoming increasingly important due to the growth in online communication. This paper uses discourse analysis of the synchronised comments, left on livestreamed concerts on Facebook Live (n = 2,075), to examine the interaction between audience members. We find that both classical and Dutch popular music audiences use a form of hyper-ritualised interaction. In an attempt to combat the plurality of meanings online, they explicitly refer back to the central conventions of the face-to-face concert. This emphasises not only the significance of genre conventions, but also presents a form of virtual interaction distinct form interpersonal interaction.

The impact of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic on the arts sector resulted in acute, drastic drops in employment, revenue, and events. Career maintenance and persistence in the arts during this period involved substantially altered practices, particularly in terms of professional social interactions, which are known to be essential in artistic occupations. This research uses interview data from 66 U.S.-based arts graduates during the first year of the pandemic to establish how those in early, established, and late career stages experienced their professional social interactions. The findings show that the massive shift from in-person to almost solely online work and connectivity led to a drastic decrease in professional social interactions. Findings show that early career artists have the least social capital, established artists have the most, and late career artists begin to lose social capital unless they actively maintain it. Additionally, the “event-ized” nature of scheduling and attending work interactions digitally reduced feelings of community and collegiality.

This article analyses classificatory encounters in a unique library with integrated academic and public book collections. Employing Walter Benjamin's image of the organised bookshelf as a ‘magic circle’ of independently relating items, I follow the choreography of classification in library spaces: from the formality of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) through which books are organised, to their resulting social life on the shelves, to the way they are subsequently engaged with by users. Through ethnographic analysis of interactions with the surprising juxtapositions found on the library's bookshelves, I provide insights into the power of classification, both for socially organising knowledge and for inviting intellectually and emotionally significant encounters of subtle reclassification. I argue that while formal classification schemes may seem to fix knowledge categories, the ‘magic circles’ created through such schemes on the shelves suggest a more vital, vibrant and invitational dynamic. Further, I highlight the centrality of library books as material cultural objects to the potency of these classificatory encounters for those involved in them. Combining insights from prominent lines of research in cultural sociology – regarding classification and materiality – the article shows how classification matters.

How does an artwork's referencing of creative content affect its peer recognition? Artists constantly seek to balance the tension between originality and conformity. Previous research argues that peers tend to reward socially well-embedded artists that signal community involvement and literacy of established conventions. Another stream of sociological research argues that the criteria for peer recognition are not fixed but depend on a cultural field's legitimacy. This paper examines the emerging and shifting standards of peer recognition throughout 70 years in U.S. American filmmaking. I ask whether and to what extent a film's referencing of artistic content from earlier films, such as snippets of dialog or camera shots, conditions its chances of being referenced. I analyze reference styles of 5,555 U.S. American movies released between 1930 and 1995 and show how artistic standards emerged during the New Hollywood movement in the 1960s. While films of the New Hollywood (1960–1979) and Blockbuster Era (1980–1995) were rewarded for signaling cultural literacy and openness in their reference styles, these standards did not apply yet to Golden Age filmmakers (1930–1959). These findings offer new insights for sociologists of culture and organizations who ask how an artwork's embeddedness into the cultural space affects its recognition by contemporary peer audiences.

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.