The middle class as a culture structure: rethinking middle-class formation and democracy through the civil sphere Abstract This paper proposes a new cultural link between the middle class and democracy. In comparative democratization, scholars remain strongly wedded to economic-materialist understandings of the middle class. They define the middle class by income or occupation, but disagree on its role in democratization and weakly explain middle-class formation. In contrast, this paper reconstructs the cultural structures that intertextually link the language of class to the language of democracy. Middle-class discourse is undergirded by a stable set of binary codes through which social actors establish creative links to the discourses of the civil sphere. Embedded in the civil sphere, middle-class discourse takes on three institutional functions—specifying the terms of solidarity and exclusion, intersphere translation, and civil-regulatory power relatively independent of the civil sphere’s own institutions.

Moving beyond production: Ron Eyerman and the cultural sociology of the arts Abstract This paper celebrates Ron Eyerman’s contribution to the sociology of the arts. Through a discussion of selected publications, I highlight the key arguments and the themes running through this strand of his work to show how he both pointed beyond production perspectives and secured a central place for art and music in the strong program of cultural sociology. I also revisit his call for a meaningful sociology of the arts, not only to reflect on how this has influenced my own research agenda, but also to take stock of the current state of the field and gauge how much progress has been made in responding to his challenge to take meaning seriously.

The myth of the business friendly economy: making neoliberal reforms in the worst state for business Abstract From 2010 to 2013, legislators in Rhode Island enacted a series of neoliberal reforms to increase “business friendliness” in the state. Where economistic, electoral, organizational, and diffusion accounts fail to explain the timing and content of these reforms, I synthesize the work of Georges Sorel and Jeffrey C. Alexander to argue they were motivated by the myth of the business friendly economy. More than mere narration, this myth set before lawmakers the vision and the promise that a business friendly economy would return prosperity to the state. It prompted neoliberal legislation by integrating “business unfriendliness” into collective understandings of Rhode Island’s economic failure, defining policy reform as a moral imperative, and projecting a vision of the ends towards which reform should be oriented. This analysis contributes to cultural, economic, and political sociology by reclaiming myth as an alternative framework to assess the symbolic dimensions of political transitions, providing explanation for an otherwise puzzling case of neoliberalization, and suggesting opportunities for future research to problematize political actors’ deployment of economics in their attempts to project possible futures and shape action in the present.

Video games, contestation, and meaning: a strong program approach to studying artistic legitimation Abstract For a creative expression to be widely recognized as art, sociology of art scholars argue that proponents must apply a legitimizing discourse that supporters of past art forms have successfully used. Unfortunately, sociology of art scholars have ignored the affective connections people have with these art forms and how proponents draw upon these meanings in their push for legitimation. To be sensitive to this dimension, scholars must adopt principles from the Strong Program (SP) of cultural sociology. To demonstrate the insights we gain from a SP approach, I examine how video game fans responded to disparaging comments made by the prominent film critic Roger Ebert. My findings indicate that certain aspects of fans’ push for artistic recognition are consistent with previous research. However, fans also express meaningful attachments to video games, and this affective dimension influences the narratives they construct in their pushes for legitimation. Moreover, the narratives fans construct disagree on whether video games are or can become art. Despite these disagreements, all the narratives emerge from the same affective foundation. These findings demonstrate the need for sociologists to examine how pushes for artistic legitimation build upon a deeply felt foundation.

Cultural trauma: Ron Eyerman and the founding of a new research paradigm Abstract The field of cultural trauma has reached the status of a research paradigm. Ron Eyerman has played a central role in this development. Since he first embarked on research into cultural trauma with several colleagues in 1999, Eyerman has maintained an intensive preoccupation with the topic, resulting in the publication of numerous books and essays. In this article, I review the development of Eyerman’s approach to cultural trauma, with the broader aim of shedding light on this new research paradigm. I focus on several key themes in Eyerman’s work, including the relationship between event and representation; the significance of affect and emotion; the role of collective memory; the adoption of a dramaturgical perspective; and a multidimensional research methodology. To conclude, I discuss potential new directions in the study of cultural trauma.

Career gatekeeping in cultural fields Abstract This paper presents a comparative analysis of career gatekeeping processes in two cultural fields. Drawing on data on appointment procedures in German academia and booking processes in North American stand-up comedy, we compare how gatekeepers in two widely different contexts evaluate and select candidates for established positions in their respective field and validate their decisions. Focusing on three types of gatekeeping practices that have been documented in prior research—typecasting, comparison, and legitimization—our analysis reveals major differences in how gatekeepers perform these practices across our two cases: (1) typecasting based on ascriptive categories versus professional criteria, (2) comparisons that are ad-hoc and holistic versus systematic and guided by performance criteria, and (3) legitimation by means of ritualization versus transparency. We argue that these differences are related to the social and organizational context in which gatekeepers make selection decisions, including differences in the structure of academic and creative careers and the organization of the respective labor markets in which these careers unfold. These findings contribute to scholarship on gatekeeping in cultural fields by providing comparative insights into the work of career gatekeepers and the social organization of career gatekeeping processes.

What can cognitive neuroscience do for cultural sociology? Abstract Can cognitive neuroscience contribute to cultural sociology? We argue that it can, but to profit from such contributions requires developing coherent positions at the level of ontology and coherent epistemological views concerning interfield relations in science. In this paper, we carve out a coherent position that makes sense for cultural sociology based on Sperber’s “infra-individualist” and Clark’s “extended cognition” arguments. More substantively, we take on three canonical topics in cultural sociology: language, intersubjectivity, and associational links between elements, showing that the cognitive neurosciences can make conceptual and empirical contributions to the thinking of cultural sociologists in these areas. We conclude by outlining the opportunities for further development of work at the intersection of cultural sociology and the cognitive neurosciences.

How do performances fuse societies? Abstract This article discusses Jeffrey Alexander’s work on social performances. All societies, says Alexander, need a measure of integration—they need to be “fused”—for a common, properly social, life to be possible. In simple societies, this is achieved by means of rituals; in complex societies, it is achieved by means of the theater. In both cases, performances are understood in analogy with “texts” which are “read.” Although explicit interpretations indeed are crucial for our understanding of a performance, audience members make sense of what they see in more direct, more embodied, ways as well. Cognitive neuroscience can help us understand how performances affect us and thereby how societies are fused.

Cultural sociology meets the cognitive wild: advantages of the distributed cognition framework for analyzing the intersection of culture and cognition Abstract Cognitive cultural sociology has exhibited a preference for the neuro-scientific wing of cognitive science that generally sees cognition as a process occurring in individual minds. This preference has contributed to the individualistic cast of cognitive cultural sociology. Other theoretical frameworks can help cognitive cultural sociology out of this pickle. The paper identifies the distributed cognition approach as a valuable theoretical framework capable of integrating many of the individual/neurological insights of cognitive cultural sociology with the more macro perspectives adopted by most cultural sociologists. The article describes the distributed cognition approach, emphasizing its affinity for some of the theoretical and analytical models already in use by a wide range of cultural sociologists. Features that it offers include a de-emphasis on the inside/outside boundary of the individual person as marking the limit of cognition, attention to heterogeneous networks of information and meaning propagation, and a strong role for culture not just in providing content for cognition but in actually shaping the distributed cognition process. The concept of distributed cognition has the potential to enhance, but not replace, the concept of culture by suggesting fruitful new avenues for exploring the pathways of information and meaning propagation that constitute cognition in its distributed form.