Poetics最新文献

In each stage of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have witnessed initiatives that, through digital technologies, have attempted to ensure the presence of theatre and to nurture the relationship with audiences. Our research asks which entry barriers to the artistic field have been strengthened or weakened by implementing theatre initiatives for online audiences and how these initiatives have affected the regional performing arts scene. The study consists of three parts. In the first part, analysis of Italian calls for digital performance projects was carried out to investigate the institutional construction of beneficiaries and imagined audiences. In the second part, we analysed the case of the digital-theatre season MPA - Marche Palcoscenico Aperto. The MPA project provided funding for artists from the Marche region in Italy to realize online performances between February and May 2021. Eleven focus groups were conducted with 41 of the 60 participating companies. In the third phase, four in-depth interviews were conducted with the project's organisers. Findings show how the increased dependence of theatre artists on the artistic system imposed by Covid has simultaneously produced an increase in the collective awareness of the artistic class, but also a stronger distinction between professionalism and amateurism.

This paper analyses the film industry as a social phenomenon through the lens of revised modernisation theory. Revised modernisation theory implies that economic development leads to value shift which eventually results in the spread of more liberal social attitudes, including the greater acceptance of sexual freedoms, gender equality, and overall tolerance. These changes penetrate all spheres of social life, including the field of cultural production. Here, one can expect that topics and visual tools employed by filmmakers reflect the ongoing changes. This research focuses particularly on the presence of female and male nudity in films. We use the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) as a dataset that reflects changes in modern societies, as we believe that IMDB represents a vast area underexplored by social scientists. Using IMDb and European Value Study data, we juxtapose the presence of general, female, and male nudity in films and the prevalence of choice values in the given year and country. The sample consists of films produced in 40 European countries between 1960 and 2013. Relying on the IMDb data we identify 34 291 films, with approximately a quarter of them depicting nudity. Using multilevel regression analysis, we find that the probability of female nudity is associated with the prevalence of choice values, whereas male nudity is more likely to appear in films related to the topic of homosexuality. Overall, the paper shows that value changes are reflected through the depiction of female bodies, however, the spread of choice values do not lift the restrictions on the presentation of men.

The popularity of cultural objects is often distributed as many unpopular “flops” alongside a few “hits.” Hits can be several orders of magnitude more popular than typical objects but are difficult to predict ex-ante. Most explanations focus on cumulative advantage (CA): rich-get-richer processes wherein the success of cultural objects breeds future success, creating high inequality in popularity and decoupling popularity from the properties of objects. I present an additional formal model, multiplicative returns (MR), which assumes that cultural objects are judged as interdependent ensembles of their properties. Like CA, the MR model produces “hit” objects whose popularity is difficult to predict before the fact. I show that the MR model generates popularity distributions consistent with that of US baby girls’ names. I conclude that highly unequal popularity distributions of cultural objects are over-determined: they can arise from MR, CA, or both.

Many scholars who examine systems of status in art worlds such as film, fashion, and cuisine, have drawn on the analytical and folk categories of art and craft to explain hierarchy in these sites. As Becker argues, art is used to describe “higher status” products made for creative purposes, while craft is defined first by its function, and creative concerns are secondary. However, as art worlds continue to be defined by innovation, and, in pursuit of that innovation, expanded variety, perhaps these polarized categories of art and craft are not entirely distinct, nor do they represent the same institutionalized hierarchical meanings in all sites of creative work. In this article, I draw on analysis of 1380 restaurant reviews and 120 in-depth interviews with critically celebrated chefs to understand how creative workers use categories of art and craft (and the distinctions between the two categories) to define creative work that exists between the worlds of art and craft. I find that producers differentially interpret the meaning of art and therefore differentially conceptualize their work as art, craft, both, or neither of the categories. I detail the variations in these conceptual interpretations to illuminate the ways in which creative producers define both the categories and the dimensions of belonging by which they determine their work's inclusion in (or exclusion from) a particular category. I find that, contrary to the dominant theories of art and craft, chefs embrace association with both art and craft, often together, suggesting that the traditional status hierarchies that these concepts have symbolized may be shifting and that the concepts themselves may not be mutually exclusive in all creative work.

This article builds on the emerging literature on relation between music genre and social inequalities in the cultural industries. It specifically highlights the role of two localised, genre-specific value systems (the niche-edm genre and the eclectic genre) to understand how and why the gendered outcomes of genres vary across space. Based on qualitative interviews with 36 (mostly white, male) promoters for nightclubs in Amsterdam, it finds that in one genre of nightclubs (niche-orientated electronic dance music) an informal political culture around gender inequalities has emerged. While this does not change the gendered hierarchies of labour participation, it does alter cultural production practices. To understand the workings of genre further, the article compares niche-orientated electronic dance music clubs with eclectic clubs (pop, r&b, dancehall), where an informal political culture is largely absent. While both genres are characterised by similar gender inequalities in cultures of production, there are differences in the gendered meanings of the club nights the two genres produce. In the eclectic genre, gender is made sense of through regulation, where ‘women-friendly’ functions as a label that essentialises the connection between gender and genre in an attempt to create trouble-free dancefloors. In the niche-edm genre, gender is made sense of through representation on line-ups, which mirrors debates in other artistic disciplines. By deconstructing the ideal of the ‘autonomous artist’ as masculine, critical promoters (and consumers) question cultural classification systems.

In this state-of-the-art article, we review studies of the highly controversial, global rise of private art museums as a new organizational form within art fields. Given that current studies are scattered across different disciplines like sociology, museum studies, economics and anthropology, a systematic engagement with theoretical and methodological issues is difficult. This paper compiles and discusses these studies, identifying key themes, controversies as well as areas of consensus. We organize our review according to eight key themes: 1. (non)-existent definitions of private museums; 2. their historical roots; 3. geographical dimensions; 4. the life course of private museums; 5. their relation to public museums; 6. the involvement of the government; 7. private museums as actors in the art field, and 8. the implications for the (re)production of social inequalities. We conclude by reflecting on the most significant gaps in the literature and formulate a research agenda that can guide us to a more systematic inquiry of the private museum phenomenon.

I develop a theoretical model of the relationship between the macro-structure of political communications and the micro-structure of individuals’ political attitudes. This model conceives of public opinion as a field of competition, where positions correspond to stances on issues, and are occupied both by individuals and by major political actors who compete over their support via political communications. Individuals attend to these communications to better develop their political attitudes. Since a large volume of interdisciplinary work suggests that reliably answering survey questions is an acquired cultural competency that requires substantial training to achieve, I use survey response reliability as a key measure of this enculturation. This points me to a concrete question: do patterns of survey response reliability suggest that competing ideological camps focus on the same issues? To answer this, I develop a formal latent class model of position reliability and estimate it with the 2008-2010-2012 General Social Survey panel. I find that more popular positions are generally reported more reliably than less popular ones, as would be expected if ideological camps predominantly focused on issues where they had an advantage.

Looking at museums as informal learning environments, it is clear that detailed information on visitors and especially on nonvisitors is key to preparing adequate offers. However, representative or population-based audience studies are scarce, and even less information is available on nonvisitors. Based on a representatively drawn German adult cohort (analytic sample: n = 6,837), we look at characteristics of museum audiences and use partial proportional odds models to describe factors that characterize both visitors and nonvisitors. Results show strong evidence for relevant factors outside the realm of demographic and socioeconomic variables, and that it is especially cultural capital and cultural participation that explain museum visits. We conclude by arguing in favor of developing broader models to conceptualize museum attendance and especially nonattendance.

Much of the current research on digital and social media practices uses a Bourdieusian framework to explain stratification processes in the digital realm. This approach typically focusses on social media platform users, neglecting the adequate study of non-users. In this paper, we analyse how cultural, economic and cultural capital are related to reasons non-users in Flanders give for not using social media. We find that access remains a significant obstacle for those with low levels of cultural, economic or social capital, while those with more capital tend to avoid social media over concerns about self-presentation. Education level (as a specific indicator of cultural capital) is also related to both technological skills and technophobia (fear of making mistakes), which are more important barriers for the lower educated. The higher educated also list privacy issues and a lack of time as impediments to social media participation. Implications for research on digital inequalities are discussed in the conclusion section.

We propose the development of 'digital reflexive sociology', understood as the use of digital methods and Big Data to reflect on the social and historical circumstances of sociologists and sociological thinking. To show this approach's potential, we employ Wikipedia as a ‘reflexive tool’, i.e., an external artefact of self-observation that can help sociologists to notice conventions, biases, and blind spots within their discipline. We analyse the collective patterns of the 500 most notable sociologists on Wikipedia, performing structural, network, and text analyses of their biographies. Our exploration reveals patterns in their historical frequency, gender composition, geographical concentration, birth-death mobility, centrality degree, biographical clustering, and proximity between countries, also stressing institutions, events, places, and relevant dates from a biographical point of view. Linking these patterns in a diachronic way, we distinguish five generations of sociologists recorded on Wikipedia and emphasise the high historical concentration of the discipline in geographical areas, gender, and schools of thought. Drawing on these results, we discuss the potential of using digital repositories and methods to enhance reflexivity within sociology.