Pub Date : 2024-03-28DOI: 10.1177/00031224241236750
Jun Fang
How does state censorship shape global creative production? To explore the merger of art and the state in a global context, I adopt a micro-sociological approach to examine the culture of censorship and reconceptualize censorship as an ongoing, social process. Based on participant observation within a global film studio and interviews with industry insiders in Beijing and Los Angeles, I investigate how global cultural producers navigate China’s rigid film censorship system. My analysis reveals how China’s state censors use multistage gatekeeping and intermediated censorship to infiltrate the creative process and exert global influence. I then show how informality transforms these organizational procedures into a relational process that is hard to trace. In this, studio executives and filmmakers are induced to engage in complicit creativity, seeking creative negotiations through working with, rather than against, the state; specifically, they practice concession, reconfiguration, and collusion. These processes anchor a culture of censorship characterized by the symbiotic relationship between censors and creators, epitomizing a dynamic dance between everyday state power and everyday resistance. This relational model of censorship provides useful analytic scaffolding, extending our knowledge of the inner workings and consequences of state intervention in the new global cultural economy.
{"title":"The Culture of Censorship: State Intervention and Complicit Creativity in Global Film Production","authors":"Jun Fang","doi":"10.1177/00031224241236750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224241236750","url":null,"abstract":"How does state censorship shape global creative production? To explore the merger of art and the state in a global context, I adopt a micro-sociological approach to examine the culture of censorship and reconceptualize censorship as an ongoing, social process. Based on participant observation within a global film studio and interviews with industry insiders in Beijing and Los Angeles, I investigate how global cultural producers navigate China’s rigid film censorship system. My analysis reveals how China’s state censors use multistage gatekeeping and intermediated censorship to infiltrate the creative process and exert global influence. I then show how informality transforms these organizational procedures into a relational process that is hard to trace. In this, studio executives and filmmakers are induced to engage in complicit creativity, seeking creative negotiations through working with, rather than against, the state; specifically, they practice concession, reconfiguration, and collusion. These processes anchor a culture of censorship characterized by the symbiotic relationship between censors and creators, epitomizing a dynamic dance between everyday state power and everyday resistance. This relational model of censorship provides useful analytic scaffolding, extending our knowledge of the inner workings and consequences of state intervention in the new global cultural economy.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140368751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-04DOI: 10.1177/00031224241231985
Tim Hallett, Matthew Gougherty
In recent years, sociologists have labored to understand how economists have gained influence over policymaking. We extend this research by shifting focus from the matter of influence to the matter of policy training. Granted that economists already have influence, how do future policy professionals learn economic rationales? How is this mindset transmitted to hesitant students? By asking these questions, we bring socialization back into institutional research on “new” professionals. Utilizing data from an ethnography of a Masters of Public Affairs program, we find that students learn economics through a process of “ambivalent reproduction”: they learn to “think like an economist without becoming one.” They remain skeptical and reject the notion that they are economists, and when they use economics in their future policy work they do so in limited ways. Nonetheless, ambivalent reproduction sustains the policy status-quo and allows economics to remain influential without true belief. Ambivalent reproduction provides a new means for understanding the loosely coupled influence of economics on policy, and it contributes to the sociology of economics, inhabited institutionalism, and professional socialization.
{"title":"Learning to Think Like an Economist without Becoming One: Ambivalent Reproduction and Policy Couplings in a Masters of Public Affairs Program","authors":"Tim Hallett, Matthew Gougherty","doi":"10.1177/00031224241231985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224241231985","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, sociologists have labored to understand how economists have gained influence over policymaking. We extend this research by shifting focus from the matter of influence to the matter of policy training. Granted that economists already have influence, how do future policy professionals learn economic rationales? How is this mindset transmitted to hesitant students? By asking these questions, we bring socialization back into institutional research on “new” professionals. Utilizing data from an ethnography of a Masters of Public Affairs program, we find that students learn economics through a process of “ambivalent reproduction”: they learn to “think like an economist without becoming one.” They remain skeptical and reject the notion that they are economists, and when they use economics in their future policy work they do so in limited ways. Nonetheless, ambivalent reproduction sustains the policy status-quo and allows economics to remain influential without true belief. Ambivalent reproduction provides a new means for understanding the loosely coupled influence of economics on policy, and it contributes to the sociology of economics, inhabited institutionalism, and professional socialization.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140080378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1177/00031224241231011
Walker Nelson Kahn
The financialization of the U.S. economy has had important implications for household well-being, but the mechanisms connecting financialization and precarity have not been fully identified. This research identifies mortgage foreclosure as a nexus connecting macro-level financialization to an array of downstream consequences for homeowners and asks (1) how mortgage securitization, a key technology of financialization, enabled new foreclosure practices; and (2) how these practices affect housing precarity among homeowners at risk of foreclosure. To answer these questions, I analyze court records, interviews with key participants, and primary source documents to examine the evolution of mortgage foreclosure in Cook County, Illinois, from 1992 to 2006. I find that as mortgage securitization transformed the social and economic relations between borrowers and lenders, foreclosure became actively managed as both a driver of costs and a source of profits, and loan administrators and their attorneys worked to reduce costly borrower protections. These changes increased housing precarity by making foreclosure more frequent and more rapid.
{"title":"Safe as Houses: Financialization, Foreclosure, and Precarious Homeownership in the United States","authors":"Walker Nelson Kahn","doi":"10.1177/00031224241231011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224241231011","url":null,"abstract":"The financialization of the U.S. economy has had important implications for household well-being, but the mechanisms connecting financialization and precarity have not been fully identified. This research identifies mortgage foreclosure as a nexus connecting macro-level financialization to an array of downstream consequences for homeowners and asks (1) how mortgage securitization, a key technology of financialization, enabled new foreclosure practices; and (2) how these practices affect housing precarity among homeowners at risk of foreclosure. To answer these questions, I analyze court records, interviews with key participants, and primary source documents to examine the evolution of mortgage foreclosure in Cook County, Illinois, from 1992 to 2006. I find that as mortgage securitization transformed the social and economic relations between borrowers and lenders, foreclosure became actively managed as both a driver of costs and a source of profits, and loan administrators and their attorneys worked to reduce costly borrower protections. These changes increased housing precarity by making foreclosure more frequent and more rapid.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140414420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-21DOI: 10.1177/00031224231225665
Abraham Oshotse, Yael Berda, Amir Goldberg
Why are some acts of cultural boundary-crossing considered permissible whereas others are repudiated as cultural appropriation? We argue that perceptions of cultural appropriation formed in response to the emergence of cultural omnivorousness as a dominant form of high-status consumption, making boundary-crossing a source of cultural capital. Consequently, the right to adopt a practice from a culture that is not one’s own is determined on the basis of the costs and benefits one is presumed to accrue. People express disapproval at boundary-crossing if they believe it devalues or extracts value at the expense of the target culture. We call this process cultural tariffing. We test our theory in a between-subject experimental design, demonstrating that individuals who enjoy a privileged social position, as inferred from their social identity or socioeconomic status, have less normative latitude to cross cultural boundaries. This is explained by perceptions that these actors are either devaluing or exploiting the target culture. While symbolic boundaries and cultural distinction theories are inconsistent with our results, we find that Americans who are disenchanted about group-based social mobility are the most likely to be outraged by cultural boundary-crossing. Cultural tariffing, we therefore posit, is a form of symbolic redistribution.
{"title":"Cultural Tariffing: Appropriation and the Right to Cross Cultural Boundaries","authors":"Abraham Oshotse, Yael Berda, Amir Goldberg","doi":"10.1177/00031224231225665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224231225665","url":null,"abstract":"Why are some acts of cultural boundary-crossing considered permissible whereas others are repudiated as cultural appropriation? We argue that perceptions of cultural appropriation formed in response to the emergence of cultural omnivorousness as a dominant form of high-status consumption, making boundary-crossing a source of cultural capital. Consequently, the right to adopt a practice from a culture that is not one’s own is determined on the basis of the costs and benefits one is presumed to accrue. People express disapproval at boundary-crossing if they believe it devalues or extracts value at the expense of the target culture. We call this process cultural tariffing. We test our theory in a between-subject experimental design, demonstrating that individuals who enjoy a privileged social position, as inferred from their social identity or socioeconomic status, have less normative latitude to cross cultural boundaries. This is explained by perceptions that these actors are either devaluing or exploiting the target culture. While symbolic boundaries and cultural distinction theories are inconsistent with our results, we find that Americans who are disenchanted about group-based social mobility are the most likely to be outraged by cultural boundary-crossing. Cultural tariffing, we therefore posit, is a form of symbolic redistribution.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140443616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-01-03DOI: 10.1177/00031224231208723
Linda Zhao, A. Papachristos
Police culture creates an “us versus them” dynamic, which, at its worst, treats threats to the “thin blue line” as worthy of group response. Prior research documents such a group threat process as a possible mechanism for police misconduct, but few studies have analyzed the precise network relationships that serve as the conduit for a misconduct response. Using data on misconduct, officer injuries, and officer networks within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) between 2004 and 2015, this study examines the extent to which injuries officers receive from civilians might elicit a misconduct response from officers’ peers, and especially their direct network associates. Findings demonstrate that network ties to injured officers predict higher levels of subsequent misconduct, especially for officers with stronger ties to the injured officer. Furthermore, the effects of peer injury on subsequent misconduct are contingent on the race of the suspect involved: officers whose peers are injured are linked to more use of excessive force, as well as other types of misconduct, when the suspects involved are Black. These findings support our central hypothesis of a networked group threat response that links peer injuries to police misconduct.
{"title":"Threats to Blue Networks: The Effect of Partner Injuries on Police Misconduct","authors":"Linda Zhao, A. Papachristos","doi":"10.1177/00031224231208723","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224231208723","url":null,"abstract":"Police culture creates an “us versus them” dynamic, which, at its worst, treats threats to the “thin blue line” as worthy of group response. Prior research documents such a group threat process as a possible mechanism for police misconduct, but few studies have analyzed the precise network relationships that serve as the conduit for a misconduct response. Using data on misconduct, officer injuries, and officer networks within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) between 2004 and 2015, this study examines the extent to which injuries officers receive from civilians might elicit a misconduct response from officers’ peers, and especially their direct network associates. Findings demonstrate that network ties to injured officers predict higher levels of subsequent misconduct, especially for officers with stronger ties to the injured officer. Furthermore, the effects of peer injury on subsequent misconduct are contingent on the race of the suspect involved: officers whose peers are injured are linked to more use of excessive force, as well as other types of misconduct, when the suspects involved are Black. These findings support our central hypothesis of a networked group threat response that links peer injuries to police misconduct.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139451047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-30DOI: 10.1177/00031224231214000
Julia C. Lerch, David John Frank, Evan Schofer
This article analyzes academic freedom worldwide with newly available cross-national data. The literature principally addresses impingements on academic freedom arising from religion or repressive states. Academic freedom has broadly increased since 1945, but we see episodic reversals, including in recent years. Conventional work emphasizes the uniformity of international institutional structures and their influence on countries. We attend to the heterogeneity of international structures in world society and theorize how they contribute to ebbs and flows of academic freedom. Post-1945 liberal international institutions enshrined key rights and norms that bolstered academic freedom worldwide. Alongside them, however, illiberal alternatives coexisted. Cold War communism, for instance, anchored cultural frames that justified greater constraints on academia. We evaluate domestic and global arguments using regression models with country fixed effects for 155 countries from 1960 to 2022. Findings support conventional views: academic freedom is associated positively with democracy and negatively with state religiosity and militarism. We also find support for our argument regarding heterogeneous institutional structures in world society. Country linkages to liberal international institutions are positively associated with academic freedom. Illiberal international structures and organizations have the opposite effect. Heterogeneous institutions in world society, we contend, shape large-scale trajectories of academic freedom.
{"title":"The Social Foundations of Academic Freedom: Heterogeneous Institutions in World Society, 1960 to 2022","authors":"Julia C. Lerch, David John Frank, Evan Schofer","doi":"10.1177/00031224231214000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224231214000","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes academic freedom worldwide with newly available cross-national data. The literature principally addresses impingements on academic freedom arising from religion or repressive states. Academic freedom has broadly increased since 1945, but we see episodic reversals, including in recent years. Conventional work emphasizes the uniformity of international institutional structures and their influence on countries. We attend to the heterogeneity of international structures in world society and theorize how they contribute to ebbs and flows of academic freedom. Post-1945 liberal international institutions enshrined key rights and norms that bolstered academic freedom worldwide. Alongside them, however, illiberal alternatives coexisted. Cold War communism, for instance, anchored cultural frames that justified greater constraints on academia. We evaluate domestic and global arguments using regression models with country fixed effects for 155 countries from 1960 to 2022. Findings support conventional views: academic freedom is associated positively with democracy and negatively with state religiosity and militarism. We also find support for our argument regarding heterogeneous institutional structures in world society. Country linkages to liberal international institutions are positively associated with academic freedom. Illiberal international structures and organizations have the opposite effect. Heterogeneous institutions in world society, we contend, shape large-scale trajectories of academic freedom.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139139027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-14DOI: 10.1177/00031224231217711
Prudence L. Carter
In the 2023 ASA presidential address, Prudence Carter delves into the landscape of U.S. society, tracing some of its historical progress and confronting contemporary social, economic, educational, and political challenges. Central to her argument is an exploration of the concept of “unrealized integration” and how it has hindered the nation’s march toward an inclusive, multiracial democracy. Carter describes and characterizes the current state of integration within education and society. Despite the widespread rhetoric of diversity in our organizations and institutions, she critiques its shallow application, exposing diversity’s inability to rectify imbalances of power- and resource-sharing. Incorporating the idea of “tipping points,” she discusses how civil rights movements, despite expanding representation and opportunity, have faced recurrent waves of political backlash and reversals. She contends that an erosion of social progress occurs when there is an imbalance in the pursuit of distributional equality (concerning material resources) and relational equality (involving social and cultural dynamics and processes that shape well-being). Additionally, she identifies three other crucial areas that warrant focus to pave the path toward realized integration within education and society. In a forward-looking call to arms, Carter underscores the imperative for sociologists to transcend epistemological and methodological boundaries; and she advocates for robust collaborations across the social sciences and humanities to harness the collective power of knowledge-generation and solution-building for pressing societal issues.
{"title":"Unrealized Integration in Education, Sociology, and Society","authors":"Prudence L. Carter","doi":"10.1177/00031224231217711","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224231217711","url":null,"abstract":"In the 2023 ASA presidential address, Prudence Carter delves into the landscape of U.S. society, tracing some of its historical progress and confronting contemporary social, economic, educational, and political challenges. Central to her argument is an exploration of the concept of “unrealized integration” and how it has hindered the nation’s march toward an inclusive, multiracial democracy. Carter describes and characterizes the current state of integration within education and society. Despite the widespread rhetoric of diversity in our organizations and institutions, she critiques its shallow application, exposing diversity’s inability to rectify imbalances of power- and resource-sharing. Incorporating the idea of “tipping points,” she discusses how civil rights movements, despite expanding representation and opportunity, have faced recurrent waves of political backlash and reversals. She contends that an erosion of social progress occurs when there is an imbalance in the pursuit of distributional equality (concerning material resources) and relational equality (involving social and cultural dynamics and processes that shape well-being). Additionally, she identifies three other crucial areas that warrant focus to pave the path toward realized integration within education and society. In a forward-looking call to arms, Carter underscores the imperative for sociologists to transcend epistemological and methodological boundaries; and she advocates for robust collaborations across the social sciences and humanities to harness the collective power of knowledge-generation and solution-building for pressing societal issues.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139002094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-14DOI: 10.1177/00031224231214288
Clayton Childress, Jaishree Nayyar, Ikee Gibson
Research on tokenism has mostly focused on negative experiences and career outcomes for individuals who are tokenized. Yet tokenism as a structural system that excludes larger populations, and the meso-level cultural foundations under which tokenism occurs, are comparatively understudied. We focus on these additional dimensions of tokenism using original data on the creation and long-term retention of postcolonial literature. In an institutional environment in which the British publishing industry was consolidating the production of non-U.S. global literatures written in English, and readers were beginning to convey status through openness in cultural tastes, the conditions for tokenism emerged. Using data on the emergence of postcolonial literature as a category organized through the Booker Prize for Fiction, we test and find for non-white authors (1) evidence of tokenism, (2) unequal treatment of those under consideration for tokenization, and (3) long-term retention consequences for those who were not chosen. We close with a call for more holistic work across multiple dimensions of tokenism, analyses that address inequality across and within groups, and a reconsideration of tokenism within a broader suite of practices that have grown ascendent across arenas of social life.
{"title":"Tokenism and Its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field","authors":"Clayton Childress, Jaishree Nayyar, Ikee Gibson","doi":"10.1177/00031224231214288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224231214288","url":null,"abstract":"Research on tokenism has mostly focused on negative experiences and career outcomes for individuals who are tokenized. Yet tokenism as a structural system that excludes larger populations, and the meso-level cultural foundations under which tokenism occurs, are comparatively understudied. We focus on these additional dimensions of tokenism using original data on the creation and long-term retention of postcolonial literature. In an institutional environment in which the British publishing industry was consolidating the production of non-U.S. global literatures written in English, and readers were beginning to convey status through openness in cultural tastes, the conditions for tokenism emerged. Using data on the emergence of postcolonial literature as a category organized through the Booker Prize for Fiction, we test and find for non-white authors (1) evidence of tokenism, (2) unequal treatment of those under consideration for tokenization, and (3) long-term retention consequences for those who were not chosen. We close with a call for more holistic work across multiple dimensions of tokenism, analyses that address inequality across and within groups, and a reconsideration of tokenism within a broader suite of practices that have grown ascendent across arenas of social life.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138972863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：