Poetics最新文献

The rooted dichotomy between art and economy tends to simplify our understanding of the conditions under which makers of cultural products operate. The contingencies of the last decades, leading to a greater plurality of artists’ practices, urge us to create new conceptual tools to seize the effective cultural production structures. This paper aims to open this dichotomy - anchored in institutional sociology, creative economy, arts management and cultural entrepreneurship - and to reveal the relational complexity of cultural production. Building on a meta-study of a body of qualitative research published between 2012 and 2022 based on semi-directed interviews, focus groups and case studies about artists’ effective practices in music, performing arts, visual and mediatic arts from underground scenes or marginal communities, we identify 20 postures adopted by artists. We place these postures on two axes reflecting the intensity of economic and artistic logics. This taxonomy explains more accurately today's conditions of cultural production. It allows us to better understand: the multiplicity of artists’ and works’ trajectories, as well as creation networks; the coexistence and co-dependency of postures within the same practice; and the diversity of artists’ practices beyond a disciplinary logic and a linear conception of artistic career.

In the last decades a new organizational population of private museums has seen substantial proliferation. While multiple hypotheses for the spread of this new form have been raised, systematic analyses of these have been lacking. In particular, the rise of private museums has been hypothesized to stem from tax incentives, reductions in government spending, increasing inequality and increasing elite wealth. Combining various socio-economic and art field data sources, I conduct quantitative tests of these hypotheses with datasets of 1241, 2474 and 3148 country-years using multilevel negative binomial regression models. While I find support for a positive effect of tax incentives, government spending is associated non-monotonically (inverse U-shaped) with private museum founding (not, as hypothesized, negatively). Furthermore the effects of inequality are divergent, as a positive association with private museum founding is found for wealth inequality and a negative one for income inequality. Finally, elite wealth effects are too small, statistically insignificant, and conditional on wealth threshold and dataset to conclude a general relation with private museum founding. I conclude with a call for advancing theoretical elaboration and measurement precision to further investigate founding determinants.

Cultural-creative crowdfunding (CCCF) intersects the culture sector production chain and alternative finance technology as a global web-enabled phenomenon for funding cultural-creative activities. Yet, busking or aspects of patronage are not new to artists and cultural-creative agents; the novelty is doing so through a virtual intermediator space, a crowdfunding platform (CFP). CFPs have proliferated worldwide but the literature is embryonic and lacks further elaboration on how platform dynamics can impact the funding/financing patterns of specific sectors. In the case of the culture sector, given its unique attributes, specificities, and relational structuring, the impact of crowdfunding requires even more conceptual development, systematization, and potential policy instrumentalization. Hence, this study explores how CCCF has evolved and what different models (and channels) within multiple platforms were developed under the CCCF umbrella. Based on a combination of methods (tracking and trawling, Delphi, and categoric analysis), the current research maps the CFPs focusing on culture-creative projects throughout Europe and Latin America. The aim is to conceptualize a broader typology of CCCF practices that can better serve the cultural-creative circuit. This work is among the first to pursue such CCCF typology bridging cross-disciplinary understanding and real-world practices. This research, therefore, offers implications for interdisciplinary academics, practitioners, and policymakers by enabling the nuanced comprehension of the relational forms of CCCF as multiple-practices, expanding its boundaries amid a vaster umbrella of possible web-enabled genre (sub-)models to be adopted, legitimized, and systematized in (and by) the culture sector.

When personal meaning and knowing emerge for a space, that space moves beyond a labeled locale to become a place such that one develops an idiosyncratic knowing or Sense of Place (SoP). Decades of scholarship have animated understandings of SoP for locales, however that work is inconsistent in operationalizing the construct and largely limited to positively valenced, physical spaces. To begin addressing those shortcomings, we (a) synthesize extant scholarship to propose a SPIREs framework for SoP (comprising symbolism, purpose, identity, relation, and emotion dimensions) and (b) conduct a descriptive study of SoP dimensions across physical and digital, positively and negatively valenced spaces. Our analysis induced a hierarchy of complex themes and subthemes for each dimension—findings that point to SoP's conceptual independence from valence and materiality and its likely polythetic structure.

In US K-12 education, the Spanish language is subject to practices and policies that limit its expression, especially among racialized Latinx students. However, higher education claims to view Spanish as a positive form of diversity. We therefore examine college admissions essays to analyze how students strategically deploy Spanish in light of these contradictions. We use two years of undergraduate application essays (n = 276,768) and metadata submitted to the University of California by every self-identified Latinx applicant and a racially representative random sample of non-Latinx applicants. To identify Spanish language usage in the text, we develop a computational mixed methods approach by combining machine translation and human reading. Spanish was used by 33% of Latinx and 15% of non-Latinx students with stylistic variation by class and ethnicity. We also find that lower income Mexican and Central American applicants were the most likely to use substantive forms of Spanish in their admissions essays as well as provide translations into English. We posit that this self-translation is an example of students identifying cultural mismatch between themselves and university admissions offices. This linguistic strategy, which we call strategic Spanish, sheds light on how language, culture, and ethnicity intersect in high-stakes evaluation and also helps surface the potential for machine translation as a method for social scientific inquiry.

While autonomy is a crucial concept in the sociology of culture, most scholars treat it as an objective feature of the cultural field or creative work. This article argues that autonomy is a subjective construct with ambiguous meanings that enable creative workers to flexibly justify their career paths. I draw on a case of Chinese visual artists in the postsocialist era (since 1979), where the institutional context of dual career path highlights the ambiguity of autonomy. Using interview data with two groups of Chinese artists in different institutional positions—state-affiliated artists employed by the official system and independent artists without official affiliation—I show that the two groups offer conflicting narratives of autonomy. State-affiliated artists claim freedom from market and art criticism, whereas independent artists assert autonomy from state and organizational duties. Both groups emphasize the kind of autonomy they have and downplay the kind they lack to justify their career over the alternative position. Based on these findings, I suggest a more interpretive analysis of autonomy in cultural fields, one that illuminates how workers use ambiguous meanings to justify career choices.

Hip-Hop as a music genre is a popular music genre both in commercial success and global impact and there is a variety of academic studies on the origins, creation, effects, and uses of hip-hop. What remains understudied, yet fundamentally important, is a perspective that takes hip-hop consumers and the way they give meaning to hip-hop as a musical genre. The current in-depth interview study (N = 20) aimed to understand how hip-hop listeners came to give meaning to hip-hop music in their own words and from the perspective of their everyday lived experiences. Results outlined four themes that are relevant in the meanings constructed around hip-hop music, 1) how listeners define hip-hop, 2) how they experience listening to hip-hop, 3) how hip-hop is used as a source in identity-formational practices, and 4) how listeners employed a societal perspective in evaluating hip-hop as a musical genre. As such, the current study provides a balanced empirical perspective on hip-hop music and sheds light on the meaningful role it has in the lives of its listeners.

This article advances understanding about book reading as a sociocultural phenomenon in the 2020s. We make a contribution to the cultural sociology of reading by investigating Finnish self-identified book readers by analysing the significance of sociodemographic variables (gender, education, age, and place of residence) in terms of reading activity and access to books. Our study is placed in the context of Finnish reading culture that is characterised by a particular appreciation of reading and measures promoting equal access to culture. Based on an online survey of 955 respondents conducted in 2021, our statistical analyses show that the social stratification of book reading activity that is prominent in population level does not recur within the specific group of people who identify themselves as readers. Among Finnish self-identified book readers, education, gender, and place of residence do not induce significant differences in reading activity. Our analysis that foregrounds inclination instead of quantity as a criterion for readers sheds light on reader equality from a different direction than previous research into nationwide reading habits or descriptive studies on avid readers.

Existing research has demonstrated that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to engage with online political disinformation that traffics in partisan conspiracies. However, little is known about why this asymmetry exists. This study proposes that exposure to conflicting accounts from conflicting authorities in a given knowledge domain is an under-appreciated mechanism that increases susceptibility to partisan conspiracies and helps drive such asymmetries. To examine this question, I test two pre-registered hypotheses using two survey experiments on Amazon Cloud Research. In experiment 1, Republicans were more open to conspiracies at baseline but exposure to conflicting accounts made strong Democrats more open, eliminating this gap. In experiment 2, the effect of exposure to conflicting accounts is weaker but still contributed to closing the partisan gap, while Democrats’(but not Republicans’) self-reported media consumption heavily moderated the effect of exposure to conflicting accounts on belief. Implications of these findings are discussed for research on political polarization and disinformation as well as non-political knowledge domains.

Sociologists usually conceptualize events as unexpected occurrences bringing about long-lasting transformations of social structures. Following this definition, most empirical studies of events focus on pre/post-measurement strategies. Yet not all events are unexpected (e.g., Eurovision, Oscar nominations, the Olympics). Moreover, pre/post-measurements cannot capture the temporality in which meaning-making processes unfold nor account for the overlap between various events. We address these shortcomings by introducing the concept of ‘recurrent events,’ defined as events occurring with regular and recurrent cadence, charging collective effervescence and anticipation among audiences. Drawing from resonance theory, we conceptualize constellations of cultural change happening around recurrent events. We provide an empirical proof-of-concept, focusing on the case of the Eurovision Song Contest. To do so, we build a unique dataset of Eurovision lyrics and public attitudes in 18 European countries between 1981 and 2021 to study the relationships between attitudes about sexual and gender identity and national identity and the corresponding narratives presented at Eurovision. Our findings complicate common assumptions about the duality of events, by highlighting six different configurations of cultural change. We demonstrate how the concept of recurrent events contributes to the literature on events, consider the theoretical and methodological implications, and provide recommendations for future research.