Poetics最新文献

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.

Studies in the social cognition literature indicate that several strategies play a role in how observers understand an observed actor, including by simulating the actor's perspective (identification), and/or an audience member projecting their own perspective onto the actor's mind (egocentric projection). In processing story characters, there is evidence that taking a character's perspective and projecting one's own perspective are distinct psychological mechanisms used to understand a character. Manipulating a common and much studied narrative feature—character morality—we examined how morality influences the way audience members process story characters. Three experiments consistently found that audience members tend to have higher levels of both egocentric projection and identification with the character when interpreting moral characters, compared to immoral characters. Confirmatory factor analysis shows that egocentric projection and identification are two distinct constructs.

How do contested emerging subgenres become legitimated and institutionalized? This case illustrates the meso-level negotiation of community sense (Wohl, 2015) as stakeholders of a genre (romance fiction) debate whether genre boundaries include a new subgenre (erotic romance). Erotic romance upended conventions by introducing explicit and sometimes unconventional sex into the traditionally heteronormative romance genre. However, opposition to subgenre inclusion involved more than sexual content. Drawing on interviews (n = 40) and text data from Romantic Times (n = 360) and Romance Writers Report (n = 180), I find that mainstream incorporation of erotic romance involved community negotiation of multiple symbolic boundary debates: (1) What is acceptable sexuality? (2) What is a real book? (3) Who is a professional author? Erotic romance was fully institutionalized after best-selling Fifty Shades of Grey forced the community to confront all three boundary debates at once. Each debate represents a different symbolic boundary around the mainstream romance genre, but the case can only be fully understood by examining how they intersect. I conceptualize that intersection as the symbolic boundary nexus and argue that analyzing genre classifications as a set of intersecting boundaries is a productive approach for understanding how cultural communities negotiate contested classification processes.

When conventions change, how do cultural producers respond to new trends in heteronomous fields? Established artists in heteronomous fields will be supplanted by newer styles created by new entrants to the field. Market-oriented artists must bend to changing conventions rather than keep to the kinds of cohesive trajectories that shape restricted field careers. Regardless of whether established cultural producers like or appreciate changing conventions in their field, they must respond to emergent movements, norms, ideas, and styles in their own work. Using interviews with 40 commercially successful songwriters, I find that when faced with a new trend, songwriters who stay in the field accommodate new trends through strategic, habitual practices. By adapting to new aesthetic features of trends through “research” or mimicry and by adopting new, trendy artists into collaborative creative groups, established artists can successfully incorporate new trends into their creative labor. These practices allow artists to continue producing relevant creative work despite misalignment between new conventions and their own preferences. Attending to the ways that artists incorporate new aesthetic features and new collaborators into their work contributes an understanding of the everyday practices that lead to trend accommodation.

Organizations benefit when they are perceived as authentic. Yet, explanations for this effect typically rely on context-specific attributions that can carry different meanings for different people. Here we develop some elements of a broader theory of authenticity. In sketching our theory, we draw from ideas about signaling and transparency in organization theory, and essentialism in psychology. Using signaling and transparency, we derive arguments implying that observable organizational features representing obviously costly investments convey a sense of authenticity. Using essentialism, we derive alternative counter-arguments that posit unobservable features associated with the intangible essence of a firm will generate perceptions of authenticity. We study distilled spirits producers across a multi-method program of empirical studies including wiki surveys, archival analyses, surveys and online experiments. In the empirical work, we find that producers who present profiles with clusters of observable backward vertical integration activities (including internal production systems) are more likely to be described as authentic by potential consumers. But we also find that individual observable features (e.g., internalized stills, farms) presented in isolation from other features do not consistently appear more salient to consumers than unobservable features (e.g., tradition and terroir). Because they carry multiple messages in varying modalities, profiles of clustered features may be more widely recognized and impactful in projecting authenticity.

US colleges and universities are defined by their exclusivity, and the most prestigious schools reject most of those who apply. Yet these same schools also widely advertise their inclusiveness, encouraging students from all backgrounds to submit applications and highlighting evaluation protocols that identify many characteristics worthy of consideration for admission. We surface this paradox and use it as motivation to theorize a little studied component of college applications: personal essays. Drawing from cultural sociology, we posit that the commission and production of essays extolling applicant worth and worthiness is a ritual practice that instantiates an idea of merit that is broadly shared among those who submit applications to admissions-selective schools. We pursue this work empirically by observing essay prompt selections of 55,016 applicants to the University of California in 2016 and conducting human readings and statistical analyses of 3,519 unique essays. Results indicate that prompts and essays encompass a broad but bounded range of life challenges that selective schools and applicants consider meritorious. The entire process of application to selective US schools helps to reify a national faith in a broad and inclusive conception of merit.