The American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Volume 7 (2019)

Material culture and the problem of agency

Between legitimization and popularization: the rise and reception of U.S. cultural products in culture sections of quality European newspapers, 1960–2010 Abstract A prominent feature of cultural globalization has been the rising influence of U.S. culture—and American popular culture in particular—worldwide since the mid-20th century. Relatively little is known, however, about the thoroughness, reception, and national variation of this alleged “Americanization” of culture. This study explores the rise of and reactions to U.S. culture in Europe with a longitudinal research design that combines quantitative and qualitative content analysis. Through an analysis of European newspaper culture sections from 1960 to 2010 (the unit of analysis being an article; N = 7322) and a close reading of articles concerning U.S. cultural products (N = 1009), we examine the extent to which the proportion of U.S. cultural products has increased, how characterizations of U.S. culture have changed, and whether the art forms discussed and the newspapers embedded in divergent European national contexts differ in these respects. The results contribute to, and in part problematize, previous knowledge on the role and meanings of the growing influence of U.S. culture in post-1960s Europe. Instead of overestimating its significance, Americanization is best understood as one aspect in the legitimization processes of popular culture and the popularization of (traditional) legitimate culture.

Performing the religious economy in nineteenth-century evangelical missions: a “third-way” approach to studying religious markets Abstract The article aims to theoretically intervene in the debate surrounding the supply-side approach in the sociology of religion. While proponents of this paradigm have used economic laws to explain patterns of religious participation, critics have held that such concepts are an inadequate rendering of the religious realm. This article proposes a third way to studying religious markets, analogous to the performative turn in economic sociology. Instead of rejecting the ontology of (religious) markets from the outset, this line of inquiry asks how actors and socio-technical arrangements projecting such an ontology are inadvertently engaged in constructing a reality in tune with economic notions. To illustrate the utility of this approach, the paper uses the case of nineteenth-century evangelical missions to show how a missionary theology, congruous with the tenets of the supply-side paradigm, effectively spawned a religious economy in foreign fields as envisioned by missionaries (and supply-side theorists).

Achieving more than grades: morality, race, and enrichment education Abstract Affluent parents pursue after-school educational and other extracurricular options for their children in order to instill human capital and cultural capital. Such parents also worry about raising spoiled children with too much entitlement. With this in mind, we would expect parents whose children attend private, after-school learning centers—despite attending well-resourced schools—to appreciate the ability to accrue capital but to regret the moral implications for their children. I have interviewed white professionals who enroll their young children in weekly classes at private learning centers, a site of increasing educational inequality. In contrast to expectations, parents believe it is through such enrollment, not despite it, that they are able to raise children with proper values, separate from instilling cultural or human capital. Parents’ conceptions of moral parenting reveal underlying cultural binaries in regard to raising children, of being hard working versus overindulged and of humanistic versus robotic. Here, we see the reach of culture, for even practices clearly motivated by practical considerations have deeper meanings. We also see the reach of race. They mostly praise rather than criticize Asian Americans, and they reserve their harshest critiques for fellow white professionals, whom they frame in line with anti-black stereotypes.

Conceptions of labor and national cultures: diverging visions of freedom Abstract Studies that relate cultural differences in specific fields of social life to broader cultural differences are wanting in cultural sociology. To show that this type of interlinking can prove fruitful, we focus on cross-country differences in labor relations, starting from the conceptions of wage labor in Britain and Germany that emerged from the late seventeenth century onwards. A first level of culture involves practices specific to a delimited sphere of action. In the British approach, a salaried worker is assimilated to an external supplier who delivers products and remains within a relationship tied to the provision of services without engaging his or her person. By contrast, in the German approach, the salaried worked is viewed as fully engaging his or her person in the company, while also being associated with the company’s overall functioning. Another level of culture involves societal life more broadly. This second level comes to light when exploring the conceptions of freedom inherited from the Enlightenment that are specific to Britain, on the one hand, and Germany, on the other. Moreover, in both countries, these conceptions of freedom were themselves inherited from the medieval conception of the free man.

The political value of cultural capital: nationalism, ethnic exclusion, and elites in 19th-century congress Poland Abstract Why do claims of cultural belonging promote institutional transformation by expanding community boundaries in some instances and constricting them in others? To address this question, I introduce an elite-capital conflict approach, which synthesizes Bourdieu’s concept of capital with elite-conflict theories. I argue that this approach is valuable for understanding key aspects of mass mobilization such as the conditions under which marginalized elites will attempt to mobilize non-elites through appeals of cultural similarity; the factors which shape the cultural boundaries that these appeals propose; and when non-elites are likely to answer an elites’ call to mobilize. Drawing on historical analysis of 19th-century nationalism in Congress Poland, I show that the degree of capital concentration in the hands of Polish elites and conversion rates between different types of capital determined whether, and how, Polish elites utilized appeals to shared beliefs and practices as grounds for mobilization of non-elites. Whether appeals to shared cultural practices became a successful basis of widespread mobilization, however, depended on the benefits for non-elites of the reconceptualization or re-valuation of Polish culture and its boundaries that Polish elites were proposing.

Local meaning structures: mixed-method sociosemantic network analysis Abstract This paper proposes a mixed-method sociosemantic network analysis of meaning structures in practice. While social and institutional fields impose meaning structures, to achieve practical goals, field participants gather in groups and locally produce idiocultures of their own. Such idiocultures are difficult to capture structurally; hence, the impact of practice on meaning structures is underrated. To account for this impact, we automatically map local meaning structures—ensembles of semantic associations embedded in specific social groups—to identify the focal elements of these meaning structures, and qualitatively examine contextual usage of such elements. Employing a combination of ethnographic and social network data on two St. Petersburg art collectives, we find the seemingly field-imposed meaning structures to be instantiated differently, depending on group practice. Moreover, we find meaning structures to emerge from group practice and even change the field-wide meaning structures.

Clifford Geertz, intellectual autonomy, and interpretive social science Abstract Clifford Geertz was a key protagonist in the development of “interpretive social science,” but much of our understanding of his position as an intellectual neglects the crucial years before the publication of The Interpretation of Cultures. In this article, I argue that there is a common thread in Geertz’s early work and that it addressed, quite sophisticatedly, the reworking of the concept of cultural system, which he wrote on from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s. This research program was first developed in the context of the “basic social science” that characterized Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, and it had the support of key figures in that network. Geertz’s position in that intellectual debate was as a contributor to the development of a theory of culture that could address issues left unsolved by structural-functionalism and action theory. In that process, Geertz gradually developed a more interpretivist reading of the cultural system, while maintaining the support of his original network. The article offers some conclusions about the role of support within attention spaces in cases in which emergent intellectual positions can lead to the definition of new research programs.

Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis synthesis vs. cognitive-based models of culture Abstract Cultural sociology must catch up in taking seriously recent initiatives in the sociology of culture and cognition, represented by the works of Omar Lizardo, John Levi Martin, Stephen Vaisey, and others. However, aiming at progress in cultural analysis, these theories are partly driven by an epistemic logic alien to cultural theorizing, making the very concept of culture redundant. To identify this anti-cultural strain within the ongoing cognitive turn in sociology, I propose an ideal-typical model—‘the informational theory of communication,’ which reduces culture to information. Although many cognitive scientists and sociologists of culture and cognition are aware of the limitations and counter-productivity of this model, and it might not exist in a pure form, I argue that, first, it is still clearly traceable in many of their arguments, and, second, that it can be seen as a cultural logic underlying a substantial part of their arguments. I posit that replacing this logic of explanation with the Durkheimian model of sui generis synthesis, the concept of emergence, and the idea of ‘boundary conditions’ not only allows us to integrate the insights of cognitive science into sociology, but also opens a way for sociology to contribute to the cognitive sciences.