Gothic cathedrals like Chartres were built in a discontinuous process by groups of masons using their own local knowledge, measures, and techniques. They had neither plans nor knowledge of structural mechanics. The success of the masons in building such large complex innovative structures lies in the use of templates, string, constructive geometry, and social organization to assemble a coherent whole from the messy heterogeneous practices of diverse groups of workers. Chartres resulted from the ad hoc accumulation of the work of (...) many men. (shrink)

Fashion design is a feminized occupation, but there is a widespread perception that gay male designers are advantaged in receiving awards, publicity, and praise. This article develops the notion of a “glass runway” to explain this inequality. First, using design canons and lists of award recipients, I show that men, especially gay men, receive more consecration than women. Second, I show how men and women are consecrated differently by analyzing the content of 157 entries in Voguepedia’s design canon and 96 (...) fashion media articles. Attributions of value and legitimacy construct a gendered image of the ideal fashion designer through discourses of art and culture that reinforce essentialist ideas about gender difference. Because cultural value is ambiguous, processes of valorization are shaped by gender essentialism, pushing male cultural producers down the glass runway and into the spotlight of fame, consecration, and legitimation. Finally, the case of fashion design offers insights into how intersecting inequalities can shape the glass runway. Gay designers experience both valorization and discrimination from intersections of gender and sexuality. (shrink)

The article opens with a brief discussion of the cultural economy of cities. A framework for investigating this phenomenon is then proposed, paying special attention to the interconnections between the system of production, its geographic milieu and the logistics of distribution. An overview of the structure and logic of the French film industry is laid out in which the fragmentation of production activities and labor markets is stressed. The policy system governing the French film industry is described in detail, and (...) the special role of the CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie) is highlighted. The industry is then shown to be deeply interwined with the urban milieu of Paris, both in terms of its locational structure and its cultural dynamics. The final major section of the article deals with issues of industrial survival and competitiveness in the new global economy. It is suggested that French film policy needs to shift from a posture of defensive support of the industry to a more clearly articulated and aggressive concern with rebuilding market share in both the domestic and international arenas. (shrink)

This paper is a conceptual essay rooted in two basic observations. First, felt dignity—the subjective sense people have of their own autonomy and self-worth—ultimately emerges from, and is thus most evident in the connective space between people. Second, stories are everyday works of art that afford unique insight into the subtle complexities of the socio-emotional realities of work. Building on these observations, we describe how personal stories about episodes of interpersonal connections and disconnections at work—moments in which we feel mutual (...) appreciation and empowerment or a sense of separation and distancing from another—can help us better understand the felt experience of dignity at work. In attending to such personal stories as art, we become more attuned to their felt, aesthetic qualities, which then helps us develop a more holistic and visceral appreciation of how actors experience, make sense of, and claim felt dignity. In support of our ideas, we present a few illustrative story excerpts and briefly consider how a select few aesthetic qualities—the way the stories’ elements are configured, the stories’ acuity or sharpness, and their rawness—enhance the felt impact of the stories and help to remind us of their and the storytellers’ intrinsic value. (shrink)

Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that rely on socially learned and transmitted information”. Once thought to be a distinguishing characteristic of humans relative to other animals it is now generally accepted to exist more widely, with especially abundant evidence in non-human primates, cetaceans, and birds. More recently, cumulative cultural evolution has taken on this distinguishing role. CCE, it is argued, allows humans, uniquely, to ratchet up the complexity or efficiency of (...) cultural traits over time. This “ratchet effect” gives the capacity to accumulate beneficial modifications over time beyond the capacities of a single individual. Mesoudi and Thornton define a core set of criteria for identifying CCE in humans and non-human animals that places emphasis on some performance measure of traits increasing over time. They suggest this emphasis is also pertinent to cultural products in the aesthetic domain, but is this the case? Music, art and dance evolve over time, but can we say they gain beneficial modifications that increase their aesthetic value? Here we bring together perspectives from philosophy, musicology and biology to build a conceptual analysis of this question. We summarise current thinking on cumulative culture and aesthetics across fields to determine how aesthetic culture fits into the concept of CCE. We argue that this concept is problematic to reconcile with dominant views of aesthetics in philosophical analysis and struggles to characterise aesthetic cultures that evolve over time. We suggest that a tension arises from fundamental differences between cultural evolution in aesthetic and technological domains. Furthermore, this tension contributes to current debates between reconstructive and preservative theories of cultural evolution. (shrink)

During the past two decades, there has been a significant growth of sociological studies into the ‘body pedagogics’ of cultural transmission, reproduction and change. Rejecting the tendency to over-valorise cognitive information, these investigations have explored the importance of corporeal capacities, habits and techniques in the processes associated with belonging to specific ‘ways of life’. Focused on practical issues associated with ‘knowing how’ to operate within specific cultures, however, body pedagogic analyses have been less effective at accounting for the incarnation of (...) cultural values. Addressing this limitation, with reference to the radically diverse norms involved historically and contemporarily in ‘vélo worlds’, I develop Dewey’s pragmatist transactionalism by arguing that the social, material and intellectual processes involved in learning physical techniques inevitably entail a concurrent entanglement with, and development of, values. (shrink)

Scientists, humanists, and art lovers alike value art not just for its beauty, but also for its social and epistemic importance; that is, for its communicative nature, its capacity to increase one's self-knowledge and encourage personal growth, and its ability to challenge our schemas and preconceptions. However, empirical research tends to discount the importance of such social and epistemic outcomes of art engagement, instead focusing on individuals' preferences, judgments of beauty, pleasure, or other emotional appraisals as the primary outcomes of (...) art appreciation. Here, we argue that a systematic neuroscientific study of art appreciation must move beyond understanding aesthetics alone, and toward investigating the social importance of art appreciation. We make our argument for such a shift in focus first, by situating art appreciation as an active social practice. We follow by reviewing the available psychological and cognitive neuroscientific evidence that art appreciation cultivates socio-epistemic skills such as self- and other-understanding, and discuss philosophical frameworks which suggest a more comprehensive empirical investigation. Finally, we argue that focusing on the socio-epistemic values of art engagement highlights the important role art plays in our lives. Empirical research on art appreciation can thus be used to show that engagement with art has specific social and personal value, the cultivation of which is important to us as individuals, and as communities. (shrink)

The ArgumentIt is not easy to point to the place of knowledge in our culture. More precisely, it is difficult to locate the production of our most valued forms of knowledge, including those of religion, literature and science. A pervasive topos in Western culture, from the Greeks onward, stipulates that the most authentic intellectual agents are the most solitary. The place of knowledge is nowhere in particular and anywhere at all. I sketch some uses of the theme of the solitary (...) philosopher across a broad sweep of history, giving particular attention to its deployment in and around the scientific culture of seventeenth-century England. I argue that the rhetoric of solitude is strongly implicated in individualistic views of society and empiricist portrayals of scientific knowledge. Solitude is a state that symbolically expresses direct engagement with the sources of knowledge – divine and transcendent or natural and empirical. At the same time, solitude publicly expresses disengagement from society, identified as a set of conventions and concerns which act to corrupt knowledge. Hence, the study of the social uses of solitude adds further support to the notion that problems of knowledge and problems of social order are solved together. (shrink)

This article is concerned with Niklas Luhmann's theory of art which he formulated in the 1990s, based on his general theory of autopoietic systems. This theory regards modern society as a functionally differentiated formation whose sub-systems operate according to their inner principles of communication. According to this, the domain of art can also be seen as an operationally closed and self-referential communicative system. The basic problem in these notions lies in the way in which their description of the relationships existing (...) between different systems is only in very narrow terms. Consequently they partially ignore the present process of de-differentiation which has noticeably changed the status of art in society. Instead, Luhmann's ideas expressly emphasize that functional differentiation is an ongoing process. In order to describe the process of de-differentiation, social theory does not need to abandon the concept of autopoiesis, but it does need to understand social systems as interlaced formations which, to an increasing extent, contain common normative and organizational constituents. Because social systems are not altogether self-referential formations, the concept of autopoiesis can describe them only in part. This particular concept of system has been developed in particular by Richard Münch, and as such it forms a productive alternative to the theory of autopoietic social systems. (shrink)

This paper is an extended exploration of Mead's phrase the emergence of the novel. I describe and characterize emergent systems-complex dynamical systems that display behavior that cannot be predicted from a full and complete description of the component units of the system. Emergence has become an influential concept in contemporary cognitive science [A. Clark Being there, Cambridge: MIT Press], complexity theory [W. Bechtel & R.C. Richardson Discovering complexity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press], artificial life [R.A. Brooks & P. Maes Artificial (...) life IV, Cambridge: MIT Press; C.G. Langton Artificial life III, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley; C.G. Langton et al. Artificial life II, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley), and robotics [S. Forrest Emergent computation, Cambridge: MIT Press]. I propose that novelty is a necessary property of emergent systems, and I'll explore a specific kind of emergent system: an improvisational theater ensemble. This is an example of emergence in a small social group, which I call collaborative emergence to emphasize several important contrasts with other complex systems that manifest emergence, such as connectionist networks and Alife simulations. (shrink)

Social scientists are often interested in understanding how the dynamics of social systems are driven by the behavior of individuals that make up those systems. However, this process is hindered by the difficulty of experimentally studying how individual behavioral tendencies lead to collective social dynamics in large groups of people interacting over time. In this study, we investigate the role of social influence, a process well studied at the individual level, on the puzzling nature of success for cultural products such (...) as books, movies, and music. Using a “multiple‐worlds” experimental design, we are able to isolate the causal effect of an individual‐level mechanism on collective social outcomes. We employ this design in a Web‐based experiment in which 2,930 participants listened to, rated, and downloaded 48 songs by up‐and‐coming bands. Surprisingly, despite relatively large differences in the demographics, behavior, and preferences of participants, the experimental results at both the individual and collective levels were similar to those found in Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006). Further, by comparing results from two distinct pools of participants, we are able to gain new insights into the role of individual behavior on collective outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Web‐based experiments to address questions of collective social dynamics. (shrink)

A study of culturally-embedded perceptual responses to aesthetic value indicates that learned perceptual capacities can secure compliance with social norms. We should therefore resist the temptation to draw a line between cognitive processes, such as perception, that can adapt to differences in physical environments, and cognitive processes, such as economic decision-making, that are shaped by social norms. Compliance with social norms is a result of perceptual learning when that same compliance modifies perceptible features of the physical environment.

La llamada transición al paradigma digital está erosionando la autonomía del campo cultural que se había conseguido durante los siglos XIX y XX, subyugándolo a las dinámicas económicas y tecnológicas. Sin embargo, el discurso hegemónico tiende a interpretar esta como un proceso netamente positivo para la creatividad, centrando la atención en el aumento de la disponibilidad de recursos informativos y de herramientas para la creación. No obstante, un análisis desde las teorías y los conceptos de la sociología de la cultura (...) nos revela un balance más ambivalente. Si bien la noción de autoría y creación puede ser interpretada desde un punto de vista más cooperativo y relativista, es discutible que pueda ser eliminada. Además, si bien el análisis de la intermediación cultural debe tener en cuenta el papel más complejo y activo de los intermediarios, difícilmente se puede concebir el sistema cultural sin su existencia. En definitiva, el artículo se propone contrastar los discursos sobre la transición a lo digital con las teorías clásicas y contemporáneas de la sociología de la cultura para, de este modo, plantear futuras líneas de investigación sociológica sobre las consecuencias en los agentes y en la industria cultural en su conjunto. Con ello se pretende generar una perspectiva neutral que tenga en consideración los efectos sociales y sistémicos de la tecnología en la creatividad de los sectores culturales. (shrink)

Current conceptions of meaning and culture tend toward extreme forms of disembodied abstraction, indicating an alienation from the original, earthy meaning of the word culture. I turn to the earlier meanings of the word and why the “cultic,” the living impulse to meaning, was and remains essential to a conception of culture as semeiosis or sign-action. Culture and biology are often treated by social scientists as though they were oil and water, not to be mixed. I am fully aware of (...) the assumed nature-culture dichotomy, but I reject it, not because I am a sociobiologist, quite the contrary, but rather because I am a semiotician, and my studies of signs have led me toward a critical reconstruction of the concepts of nature and culture. In my perspective, culture is a living, social metaboly of signs, not limited to a convention but in transaction with the inmost recesses of the person, and with the qualitative, physical, and significant environment. The question is not whether culture is a “system” or not, but whether we shall continue to conceive of culture as an inert, mechanical system or code, incapable of self-critical cultivation, or as a “living system”--a way of living--fully open to contingency, spontaneity, purposive growth and decay. Putting the “cult” back into culture requires a reconception of the relations between human biology and meaning, and between non-discursive, non-rational reason and modern rationality. Such a reconception involves considering how the technics of the biosocial human body itself form the primary source of culture. (shrink)

The marketisation of heritage has been a major topic of interest among heritage specialists studying how the online marketplace shapes sales. Missing from that debate is a large-scale analysis seeking to understand market trends on popular selling platforms such as eBay. Sites such as eBay can inform what heritage items are of interest to the wider public, and thus what is potentially of greater cultural value, while also demonstrating monetary value trends. To better understand the sale of heritage on eBay’s (...) international site, this work applies named entity recognition using conditional random fields, a method within natural language processing, and word dictionaries that inform on market trends. The methods demonstrate how Western markets, particularly the US and UK, have dominated sales for different cultures. Roman, Egyptian, Viking and Near East objects are sold the most. Surprisingly, Cyprus and Egypt, two countries with relatively strict prohibition against the sale of heritage items, make the top 10 selling countries on eBay. Objects such as jewellery, statues and figurines, and religious items sell in relatively greater numbers, while masks and vessels sell at generally higher prices. Metal, stone and terracotta are commonly sold materials. More rare materials, such as those made of ivory, papyrus or wood, have relatively higher prices. Few sellers dominate the market, where in some months 40% of sales are controlled by the top 10 sellers. The tool used for the study is freely provided, demonstrating benefits in an automated approach to understanding sale trends. (shrink)

While numerous studies have shown diverse effects of rankings, rather little is known about their production. This article contributes to a broader understanding of rankings in society, and does so by focusing on underlying worldviews. I argue that the existence of a ranking and its concrete methodology can be explained by the producer’s paradigmatic assumptions about a world-to-be-ranked. Referring to the sociology of knowledge and studies on commensuration, comparisons, quantification and valuation, I provide a general heuristic to analyze this relation (...) between underlying worldviews and observational regimes through which order is constructed systematically. Presenting empirical results on a ranking for the most famous artists in the world, I show how the review device’s initial problem and its construction of order derive from consistent assumptions about contemporary art, its symbolic structures and its social embeddedness. These findings have implications for both research on rankings and sociology of the arts. (shrink)

Drawing on interviews with women and men musicians, this study examines women's overrepresentation in an instrumental specialty, the electric bass, in alternative rock music. Structurally, this phenomenon may be explained by the instrument's greater ease of learning and lesser attractiveness to men, yet women bassists frequently advance an alternative theory of “womanly” affinity. The entrance of women into rock bands via the bass may provide them with new opportunities and help legitimate their presence in a male-dominated site of artistic production, (...) yet it may simultaneously work to reconstruct a gendered division of labor and reproduce dominant gender ideologies. (shrink)

Recently, two prescription drugs have become salient to breast cancer prevention. With the advent of these drugs, referred to as “chemoprevention,” a mandate has emerged to classify certain women as high risk for breast cancer to determine a group of legitimate users of the drugs. This article examines the development and standardization of the model used to create such a group of high-risk women. The author argues that while the model remains uncertain and controversial, it has become the standard tool (...) for the many jobs associated with legitimizing chemoprevention use in the United States. It has become the assumed standard—shaping practices, identities, and definitions—through its organizational embeddedness in the multiple practices and public images of chemoprevention despite its uncertainty and widespread critique. (shrink)

The fear of the other is the main focus of this paper, which analyse Tehran protest squares as inside-out spaces where the state attempts to maintain some form of control, and where the public attempts to occupy it. The fear of ‘others’ can lead to exclusion from the public space of those who are seen as threatening. This process of ‘otherness’ renders fear as an arena of conflict and highlights the political utility of fear by particular groups and individuals.

Visual artists and scientists frequently employ the labour of assistants and technicians, however these workers generally receive little recognition for their contribution to the production of artistic and scientific work. They are effectively “invisible”. This invisible status however, comes at the cost of a better understanding of artistic and scientific work, and improvements in artistic and scientific practice. To enhance understanding of artistic and scientific work, and these practices more broadly, it is vital to discern the nature of an assistant (...) or technician’s contribution to the production of a work, which is difficult as it is uncommon to discuss these workers. To address this, I investigate how different kinds of parallel working arrangements in collective artistic and scientific practices affect the creative potential of individuals involved. Different working arrangements permit different degrees of autonomy for individuals involved in these practices. Significantly, a lack of autonomy precludes the opportunity to act spontaneously and so exercise, what I term, “creative agency”. Evaluating the contribution of an assistant or technician based on the degree of autonomy that they are granted in the production of a work is an approach that I show can be used to precisely determine the nature of their contribution to the production of a work and accordingly, what kind of recognition an agent should receive for this. Importantly, this approach has the advantage of explaining the artistic and epistemic significance of different kinds of contribution to the production of artistic and scientific work. (shrink)

This paper discusses how theories of definition and probabilistic theories of categorization could help distinguish between translation and adaptation, and eventually between translation and adaptation studies. Part I suggests readopting the common parlance definition of “translation” as the accurate rendition of the meaning of a verbal expression in another natural language, and “adaptation” as change that leads to better fit. Readopting these common parlance definitions entails categorical implications. The author discusses three parameters: whereas “translation” represents an invariance-oriented, semiotically invested, cross-lingual (...) phenomenon, “adaptation” refers to a variance-oriented phenomenon, which is not semiotically invested, and entails better fit. Part II discusses how theories of categorization could help distinguish between TS and LFAS. The study of the disciplinarization of knowledge involves epistemic and socio-political conditioners. This section concludes that medium specificity, i.e., the linguistic versus lit-film paradigm, plays a major role in separating TS from LFAS. Another player that deserves more attention is the Romantic as opposed to the Classicist value system. (shrink)

This paper explores a fundamental similarity between cognitive models for crying and conceptions of insight, enlightenment or, in the context of art, “aesthetic experience.” All of which center on a process of initial discrepancy, followed by schema change, and conclude in a personal adjustment or a “transformation” of one’s image of the self. Because tears are argued to mark one of the only physical indicators of this cognitive outcome, and because the process is particularly salient in examples with art, I (...) argue that crying may provide an intriguing marker for empirical study of perceiving art. To explore this parallel, I offer a review of crying theory as well as of tearful cases with art, pointing out the key cognitive elements. I then introduce an expanded crying model, based upon our recent model of art experience which does consider insight and adjustment or application of the self. I also consider multiple emotional and evaluative factors, which may co-vary with crying response. This theoretical discussion is then applied in three exploratory, survey-based studies, conducted within U.K., Japan and U.S. museums, and including what is claimed to be the 20th century’s most tear-inducing abstract paintings. Results showed—with cross-cultural consistency—significant correlation between “feeling like crying” and a collection of responses posited to indicate a full progression to aesthetic experience. This also found correlation to positive assessment of artwork goodness, beauty, understanding of meaning, and to final reported self reflection and epiphany. I argue that, beyond the question of why we may cry, by considering implications of what tears may indicate for information processing, feeling like crying may be a compelling basis for identifying outcomes of perceptual (art) experience. (shrink)

In Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Book. European Sociological Association; Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. pp. 59--60 (2015) .

Can matter, things, nonhuman organisms, technologies, tools and machines, biota or institutions be seen as creative? How does such creativity reposition the visionary activities of humans? This article is an elaboration of such questions as well as an attempt at a partial response. It was written as an editorial for the special issue of the Digital Creativity journal that interrogates the conception of Post-Anthropocentric Creativity. However, the text below is a rather unconventional editorial. It does not attempt to provide an (...) overview of the issue’s theme but, instead, samples it via a particular example. The idea of the issue was to think about post-anthropocentricism by considering (1) agents, recipients and processes of creativity alongside with its (2) purpose, value, ethics and politics. This article addresses the first subtheme by puzzling at the paradoxes of “field learning” and picks at the second by considering the texture of “automated beauty”. Both of these parts use chess for an example. The narrative on chess is intermitted by a section “on creativity” that attempts to contextualize the case-based discussion in the wider context and to consider motivations and implications. (shrink)

The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenthcentury France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the (...) nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state. (shrink)

Medical anatomy is one of the key sites of the scientific production, reproduction and maintenance of sex and gender. Our Human Anatomies Project explores the construction, reconstruction and maintenance of difference in genital anatomies, focusing especially on the clitoris. This article focuses on representations of human genitalia in the form of cyberanatomies - video, CD-ROM and internetbased renderings of human bodies. In cyberspace as elsewhere, the biomedical expert remains the proper and dominant mediator between humans and their own bodies, despite (...) the democratization of knowledges supposedly possible through the Internet. Special attention is given to the specific sites of production and distribution of these different cyberanatomies. Through our review of the globalization of cyberanatomies, we have come to witness the very sedimentation of sex/gender/sexuality in new arenas of representations of human bodies. Western biomedical imperialism and globalization of a standardized (American) body are taken up as core theoretical concerns. (shrink)

Abu Nasr Farabi focuses on influence of the music on emotions and emotional problems including extreme emotions and moods. But how effective is music in changing a specific emotional issue? This essay reports what is probably the first scientific study of the effect of music on a precise extreme mood. Using a randomized experiment, we measure how a music affects sexism. More specifically, the experiment measures the extent to which a piece of music that we have created weakens the belief (...) among some Muslims that women are not as suitable as men for positions of chairmanship. We find that the music reduces sexism by 22.48 percent, compared to a control treatment that presents the same argument and story verbally. Results, moreover, indicate that prejudice against women is not an inherent feature of Islam and is rather a function of the descriptive beliefs that prevail in some Islamic societies regarding women’s capabilities. (shrink)

Digital photo manipulation is often treated in the literature as a problem that occurs when individuals stray from a single set of ethical standards. It is proposed in this study that the newsroom comprises various subgroups, each with unique norms and values, and each seeking to shape newsroom decision making. It is expected that photo manipulation should result from subgroups' perceptions of, and reactions to, this plurality of newsroom norms. This expectation is assessed through both in-depth interviews and a national (...) phone survey of visual journalism managers. In-depth interviews reveal the existence of various sets of norms; these include integrative norms, which reflect the needs of the organization, art norms, and journalistic norms. Journalistic norms are perceived as dominant, but where art norms are stronger, photo manipulation is slightly more likely. Findings also suggest photos are more likely to be manipulated when newsrooms are large and complex and when visual journalists strain to fit visuals with story theme. (shrink)

Aesthetic values give agents reasons to perform not only acts of contemplation, but also acts like editing, collecting, and conserving. Moreover, aesthetic agents rarely operate solo: they conduct their business as integral members of networks of other aesthetic agents. The consensus theory of aesthetic value, namely that an item’s aesthetic value is its power to evoke a finally valuable experience in a suitable spectator, can explain neither the range of acts performed by aesthetic agents nor the social contexts in which (...) they operate. This paper proposes a new theory of aesthetic value specifically to explain facts about the sociality of aesthetic agents. (shrink)

Focusing on the production of lists of evaluative criteria has oversimplified our judgments of qualitative research. On the one hand, aspirations for global criteria applicable to “qualitative” or “interpretive” research have glossed over crucial analytic differences among specific types of inquiry. On the other hand, the methodological concern with appropriate ways of acquiring trustworthy data has led to an overly narrow proceduralism. I suggest that rational evaluations of analytic worth require the delineation of species of analytic tasks and the exercise (...) of genre-appropriate judgments, to determine what constitutes explanatory, interpretive, or explicatory adequacy. I focus on the parameters of judgment for interpretations and explications because their analytic differences have not yet been made distinct in qualitative research. (shrink)

The development of art marketing as a new field of management occurs in a context of great confusion as to what constitutes the very definition of art, one aspect of this confusion being nothing else but the confusion between art and marketing itself. This confusion leads to conflicts between those who consider that art should be defined by a clear aesthetic criterion and those who accept the absence of such a criterion as a legitimate consequence of the principle of freedom (...) which applies both to the creation of the artist and to the taste of the public. This state of confusion does not seem to be experienced in the same way in France where it has tended to be considered as a symptom of crisis in the world of art and in the United States where it has raised as a dominant force in contemporary art. Hence the confusion of art and marketing varies as a function of time (as shown by the emergence of a new field of management) and of space (as shown by the comparison of the French and American cases). It will be proposed that it is possible to account for these historical fluctuation thanks to an institutional approach based on the notion of system of legitimacy. We shall propose the essentially dynamic institutional foundations of modernity leading to the proliferation of innovations which consequences are ever more difficult to anticipate as a reason why, in America, philosophers coming from the analytic tradition found it meaningful to address questions such as “What is art” (Arthur Danto) or “When is there art” (Nelson Goodman”) expressing the need to go beyond pragmatism as expressed by John Dewey’s Art as Experience to promote a positive attitude towards contemporary art, while, in France confusion between art and marketing has been commonly considered negatively as the sign of the triumph of the most radical form of rhetoric, i.e. sophism. (shrink)

This article develops an analytical framework to study the role of narratives in markets and argues that there is a relationship between the structure and composition of narratives produced by market actors and market dynamics. With respect to theory, the article bridges the perspectives that study markets as cultures and as fields and draws from the organizational studies approach to the analysis of narratives. Two empirical cases of the crises narratives in the emerging contemporary art markets of Russia and India (...) illustrate the use of the framework. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with artists and art dealers as well as observations in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, New Delhi, and Mumbai conducted between April 2012 and June 2013. The article shows that there is a widely shared crisis narrative with a coherent structure in the Indian art market. In contrast, fragmented and contested stories that lack narrative structure dominate in the Russian art market. The analysis of the first case highlights the narrative structure and shows the productive work it does in the Indian market—it provides a moral justification of existing market norms and produces a perspective for the future. The analysis of the second case focuses on the context of narrative production and connects the conflicting interpretations of the crisis in the Russian art market to contested hierarchies and persistent uncertainty. (shrink)

This paper is a conceptual essay rooted in two basic observations. First, felt dignity—the subjective sense people have of their own autonomy and self-worth—ultimately emerges from, and is thus most evident in the connective space between people. Second, stories are everyday works of art that afford unique insight into the subtle complexities of the socio-emotional realities of work. Building on these observations, we describe how personal stories about episodes of interpersonal connections and disconnections at work—moments in which we feel mutual (...) appreciation and empowerment or a sense of separation and distancing from another—can help us better understand the felt experience of dignity at work. In attending to such personal stories as art, we become more attuned to their felt, aesthetic qualities, which then helps us develop a more holistic and visceral appreciation of how actors experience, make sense of, and claim felt dignity. In support of our ideas, we present a few illustrative story excerpts and briefly consider how a select few aesthetic qualities—the way the stories’ elements are configured, the stories’ acuity or sharpness, and their rawness—enhance the felt impact of the stories and help to remind us of their and the storytellers’ intrinsic value. (shrink)

Do psychological perspectives constitute the only way through which the role of musical creativity in education can be addressed, researched and theorised? This essay attempts to offer an alternative view of musical creativity as a deeply social and political form of human praxis, by proposing a perspective rooted in the thought of the political philosopher and activist Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997). This is done in two steps. First, an attempt is made to place the pursuit of the concept of musical creativity (...) within a larger educational and societal context of conflicting trajectories that run through (a) Modernity and (b) Education. Then, I revisit the issue of educational value of improvising and composing through creating conceptual links between the process of music-making through improvisation and composition and the project of political autonomy as conceived by Castoriadis. By foregrounding instituting imaginary over instituted imaginary, improvising and composing become active processes of positing new legitimacies, and of creating a music-making context that searches for its own foundations. It is in and through creative musical praxis that we can think about issues of hierarchies, musical values, social dimensions of different music-making processes, our relationship to past values and to historical dimensions of music. By arguing that improvisation and composition might be seen as ways of positing the issue of political autonomy in musical terms, this paper emphasises the role of improvisation and composition as a mode of potentially transformative educational practice that may foster the development of critical consciousness, linking music education to a larger project of re-discovering and at the same time re-defining democracy. (shrink)

This article presents the implications, objectives and initial results of a current ethnographic research project on music lovers. It looks at problems of theory and method posed by such research if it is not conceived only as the explanation of external determinisms, relating taste to the social origins of the amateur or to the aesthetic properties of the works. Our aim is, on the contrary, from long interviews and observations undertaken with music lovers, mostly in the classical field, to concentrate (...) on gestures, objects, mediums, devices and relations engaged in a form of playing or listening, which amounts to more than the actualization of a taste `already there', for they are redefined during the action, with a result that is partly uncertain. This is why amateurs' attachments and ways of doing things can both engage and form subjectivities, rather than merely recording social labels, and have a history, irreducible to that of the taste for works. (shrink)

Artistic and scientific activities pertain to the world of ‘vocation’, which demonstrates a close relationship with recognition issues. Referring to recent trends in French, German and American sociology and political philosophy, this article addresses both the status of recognition in present-day sociology and the necessity of prizes in vocational activities. Grounded on two empirical surveys about literary and scientific prizes, it displays the various axiological problems raised by such a mode of recognition, as the ‘felicity conditions’ of this mode of (...) recognition have to ensure a feeling of justice and avoid envious reactions. On a more theoretical ground, the article aims to demonstrate the necessity for sociology to shift, first, from material to ‘symbolic’ or, rather, ‘intangible’ outcomes; second, from a concern with power and domination to a concern with interdependency; and third, from recognition conceived as egalitarian respect to recognition conceived as un-egalitarian esteem. (shrink)

Despite the growing sociological interest in the object, and the long-standing tradition in the humanities and social sciences concerned with the creation of art and artefacts, there is relatively little research about how people in ordinary day-to-day circumstances explore and respond to exhibits in museums and galleries. In this article, we address the conduct and interaction of visitors to museums and galleries and consider how they examine and experience objects and artefacts in collaboration with each other. In particular, we address (...) the ways in which one participant shapes, through gesture and talk, how those they are with look at and respond to exhibits. The article is based on the analysis of audio-visual recordings gathered in museums and galleries both in the UK and abroad. (shrink)

Dreaming is a communicative activity between the most sensitive archive of the enregistered experience of life on the earth, the brain, and the most plastic medium for the discovery and practice of meaning, the mind or culture. Both love and war have been made on the basis of dreams, not to mention scientific discoveries. In ancient Greece dreams were medicinal parts of curative sleeping or "incubation" rites in the temple of Aesculapius, and many psychoanalytic physicians today still consider dreams as (...) possessing therapeutic potential. The ethnographic literature gives ample testimony to the great significance accorded to dreams by all of the world cultures. Dreams form a rich store of ethnographic evidence, and their indigenous interpretations can often illuminate the central issues and conflicts of a people otherwise hidden from obvious view. Given these facts, plus the physiological facts that the dream process itself involves deeply-rooted material brain functions, and that rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, which is the key indicator of human dreaming, is shared by all mammals, it remains strange how little attention is given to dreaming as a formative aspect of human evolution and culture. -/- This essay addresses dreaming as a formative aspect of human evolution and culture by viewing dreaming as a borderland between biology and culture, a thoroughly social, yet private experience. Dreaming not only highlights the "cultic" roots of culture—the spontaneous impulse to meaning—but also illustrates one of the ways in which the technics of the biosocial human body itself form the primary source of culture. I show why dreaming, although private, is a thoroughly cultural, biological, communicative activity. -/- Culture and biology are often treated by social scientists as though they were oil and water, not to be mixed. I should inform the culture theorist at the start that I am fully aware of the assumed nature-culture dichotomy, and that I reject it. I do so not because I am a sociobiologist, quite the contrary, rather because I am a semiotician, and my studies of signs have led me toward a critical reconstruction of the concepts of nature and culture. In what follows I beg the reader's patience, since I will draw from diverse materials and project some speculative hypotheses in places in order to make my argument. -/- . (shrink)

Pragmatism has recently gained ground as a theoretical perspective in sociology. The approach is not without its critics, however. One common charge is that pragmatism is oriented toward the micro and not well suited for the explanation of meso- or macro-level events, processes, or outcomes. In this paper—a review essay—I consider whether the charge has merit. I examine four studies that draw heavily on pragmatism and give some indication of its explanatory potential. Taken together, these studies suggest that pragmatism has (...) much to offer analysts of large-scale social phenomena. At the same time, key issues remain to be worked out. (shrink)

Although it has been argued that digital technology liberates workers from spatial constraints, the materiality of physical space still matters in the new economy. In this article I emphasize the importance of place in the digital age by highlighting the growth of coworking spaces where small startups, telecommuters, and freelancers rent flexible office space on a month-to-month basis. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Manhattan to show how coworking participants make use of these spaces as social and spatial resources (...) for mobile work. Coworking spaces rely on aesthetics, ideology, and style to brand their workspaces to members while promoting new-economy work as meaningful, collaborative, creative, and fun. Recent years have given rise to the audience segmentation of the coworking marketplace as competitors target niche communities underserved by more mainstream offerings, while others attempt to repurpose otherwise underutilized commercial spaces into revenue-generating coworking ventures. The rapid expansion of coworking in places like Manhattan exemplifies how digitization has reshaped the uses of urban space around mobile work in the new economy. (shrink)