The Acting Class and the Myths of Meritocracy

Our feature documentary The Acting Class (2017) is here contextualised in the context of a critique of the cultural industries as part of the ideology of meritocracy and a resurgence of work around class in the sociology of culture. The Acting Class focuses on the question of class stratification in the UK acting industry. We here review our research on this issue and contextualise it within the scholarly literature on diversity and inequality, the creative industries and the broader reconfigurations of the political economy of British capitalism. We also discuss the importance of the interview in creative practice research as a way of democratising knowledge production and socialising experience.

Naturalist Methods in the Sociology of Creation: The Case Against Reductionism

The Sociology of Culture has much to say when it comes to the ever-changing general consensus on what constitutes legitimate culture and definitions of creativity. The naturalistic studieson cognition in social and cognitive sciences show this empirically (Bourdieu, 1979: Becker, 1982, 2002; Sennett, 2012; Author, 2014). Creative cognition is part of an institutional context. However, the influential culturalist branch of cognitive sociology (CCS) reduces creativity toa cognitivist psychological level (Lizardo and Strand, 2010). We start from the conjecture that the Sociology of Culture can draw on the naturalistic paradigm of cognition to explain creativity without falling into reductionist or atomist positions. The authors take the diversityof theoretical-empirical proposals into account in identifying the starting points for focusing the debate at both the macro and micro levels. The body of the article comprises a literature review which, while not exhaustive, offers a full picture of the pragmatic and integrated models of creativity. The studies analysed present inter-subjective processes of creationand the transmission of variable legitimate criteria concerning cultural consumption such as categorisations, evaluations and aesthetic judgments. The sociological perspective offers scope for strengthening critical tools for examining creativity.

Aping Blackness: Reading and Evaluating Racialized Images in Cartagena, Colombia

Why are residents of a city racialized as Black overwhelmingly in favor of representations of Blackness that caricature Afro-descendants as subservient, hypersexual and licentious, jovial, uninhibited and libertine, primitive (folklorized), and violent? This article bridges the literatures on the sociology of culture and cognition, racial signification, and frame theory to explore the various sociomental lenses and schemata that people use to perceive racial symbols and evaluate their legitimacy. It uses semi-structured and open-ended photo-elicitation interviews, primarily with residents of a largely-Afro-descendant community in Cartagena, Colombia, to systematically generate a collection of readings and evaluations of racialized imagery, resulting in an empirical example of the socio-optical construction of race within the Colombian cultural context. These readings and evaluations of external cultural primers such as photographs of racialized performance and ritual reveal (1) how a Colombian Atlantic Coastal “optical community” connects the signifiers and signifieds of Blackness; (2) that racial frames evoke three primary schemas (personal, spatiotemporal, and explicitly ideological), which interpreters use to decode and evaluate images; (3) that interpreters read the racial frames transmitted by cultural producers (e.g., performance artists and festival goers) via the visual language of racialized imagery as collectively credible and/or personally salient, and that this visual resonance is how the racialized imagery gain legitimacy and; (4) that personal experience, cultural knowledge, and social location account for variations in whether people consider racialized imagery credible and salient and, as such, legitimate forms of recognition.

Texas wildfire survivors’ narratives and the meaning of everyday objects

This study suggests the importance of focusing on lost objects after disasters and gauging the emotional registers and impacts of object loss to best understand and assist in wildfire victims' recovery process. Because objects and materiality are a focus of research in the sociology of culture and the sociology of emotions, I assess these sub-field of interest in object and emotion, along with surveying the various fields dealing with disasters and their aftermaths. Participants were from a small, semi-rural community in the central hill country of Texas. A participant-observer design allowed for working alongside fire survivors. Grounded theory and situational analysis frameworks were used to analyze 54 survivors' narratives related to the importance of everyday household objects in their recovery– things resurrected from the wildfire. The findings suggest that it would be wise to ponder material objects in situated context—in a new manner and with new respect.

Recovering the primitive in the modern: The cultural turn and the origins of cultural sociology

This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a primitivism that would be transformed by the rationality and universalism of modernity. While the barbarisms of the 20th century cast doubt on such predictions, only an intellectual revolution could provide the foundations for an alternative social theory. The cultural turn in philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology erased the division between primitive and modern; in sociology, the classical writings of Durkheim were recentered around his later, religious sociology. These intellectual currents fed into a cultural sociology that challenged the sociology of culture, creating radically new research programs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Sociocultural Tradition in Economic Development (communicative aspect)

The article is devoted to the topical problem of interaction between culture and economy. The sociology of culture studies this issue in order to identify the factor role of culture and economy in the mechanisms of sociogenesis in modern conditions. The author examines the role and place of socio-cultural traditions, norms and values in the economic system of society and the economic activity of modern Russian society; within the study the attention is drawn to what determines reality and forms a space for communication of subjects of social relations. In this regard, the work defines the socio-cultural tradition as the basis of communication, interaction between culture and economy. The author analyzes the development of views and ideas on the relationship between culture and economy in the works of foreign and domestic researchers, and also considers tradition as the basis that forms the economic model of human behavior. Based on research the author considers the sociocultural tradition the core that determines, explains and predicts human behavior in economic life.

Welcome to the Real World: Escaping the Sociology of Culture and Cognition

Recent developments in cultural sociology show that our field remains entrenched in a troubling pattern. As Lizardo (2014) demonstrated, sociologists have a pathological relationship to interdisciplinarity. We tend to create internal “avatars” of other disciplines rather than working with them directly. This fools us into thinking that we’re interdisciplinary when, in reality, “[t]hese subdisciplinary avatars have been created by sociologists for sociological consumption” (Lizardo 2014: 985). Little has changed in the past seven years. In this paper, I will briefly examine one recent case - values - where some sociologists are actively resisting interdisciplinary engagement. I argue that most of their objections are unfounded. I then examine other, less obvious, mechanisms that discourage cultural sociologists from interdisciplinary dialogue.

The role of template matching in the attribution of immorality

The sociology of culture provides tools to weigh in on key interdisciplinary debates that hinge around categorization and its underlying processes. For example, at present, there is widespread debate about how individuals come to perceive events as immoral. In this paper, I use sociological approaches to cultural meaning to test one of the leading theories of moral cognition: the idea that individuals attribute immorality through template matching. I use spatial measures of cultural meaning to define and locate a prototypical moral wrong. I then test the theory of template matching, and find evidence that distance from the typical moral transgression - in semantic space - is related to the time it takes to categorize an event as immoral or harmful. I then test these results on a corpus of naturally occurring text to assess their external validity. These studies provide empirical evidence supporting the notion that the attribution of immorality occurs through template matching. Furthermore, they also serve to illustrate that productive conversations can emerge when we take the insights that sociologists of culture and cognition have reached in the past few decades out of our disciplinary boundaries.

The Influence of Simmel on American Sociology Since 1975

Recent decades have seen Georg Simmel's canonical status in American sociology solidify and his impact on research expand. A broad understanding of his influence, however, remains elusive. This review remedies this situation by evaluating Simmel's legacy in American sociology since 1975. We articulate Simmel's sociological orientation by elaborating the concepts of form, interaction, and dualism. Employing a network analysis of references to Simmel since 1975, we examine how Simmelian concepts have been adopted in research. We find Simmel became an anchor for change in urban and conflict studies, where scholars moved from his earlier functionalist reception toward a formalist interpretation. This formalist reception consolidated Simmel's status as a classic in network research and symbolic interactionism during the 1980s. Recent work in economic sociology and the sociology of culture, however, builds on Simmel's growing reception within relational sociology. We conclude with several ways to further articulate Simmel's ideas in the discipline. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.