Cultural Sociology

We analyze the court-martial of Sabrina Harman, one of the alleged `seven rotten apples' associated with specific incidents of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, vis-a-vis the Parsonian distinction between `instrumental' and `expressive' pattern-variables. The Parsonian distinction between instrumental and expressive roles served a multitude of functions simultaneously, and especially given the masculine code of the military. We move beyond Parsons to introduce the new concepts of `expressive abuse', `expressive torture', and `instrumental misuse of expressive functions' to capture the overall thrust of the courts-martial as well as important aspects of the abuse at Abu Ghraib as revealed through testimony, government reports, interviews, and other sources of data. Both co-authors were participant-observers at the courts-martial of Sabrina Harman and Lynndie England, and draw upon the testimony and data from those trials in addition to the documents that are cited.

Bourdieu's cultural sociology has become increasingly attractive to sociologists of music looking to account for the complex interrelations between industry, institution and practice. There remains, however, a tendency in such work to reduce the complexity and scope of Bourdieu's ideas. This paper attempts to apply Bourdieu's field theory to music, but does so with a critical orientation. The focus of the paper is the fin de millénaire music style called glitch, a style characterized by sonic fragments of technological error. While we learn a lot about the social trajectories of glitch from greater sensitization to its position in a structured setting of socio-economic relations, it becomes difficult to account for the centrality of technological mediators to this contemporary style of music using Bourdieu's categories alone. The paper pursues the possibility of supplementing or combining a Bourdieusian approach with actor network theory.

This article examines how cultural classification processes develop over time. Specifically, we analyse author selection in literary textbooks for Dutch secondary education, and how this selection has changed since the 1960s. The content analysis of 34 literary textbooks addresses both structural properties of classifications (levels of consensus, hierarchical order and innovation) and background characteristics of selected authors. Results show textbooks increasingly focus on a more limited group of authors, raising the overall levels of consensus and hierarchy. At the same time, textbooks have become more heterogeneous and innovative, inasmuch as they increasingly include female, ethnic minority and semi-literary authors as well as authors who recently made their debut. These results suggest, first, that literary experts continue to influence curriculum content and, second, that the erosion of boundaries between `high art' and `low art' may not be as clear-cut as has recently been suggested.

In the USA, economic inequality, while arguably one of the most material sites of `difference', is often one of the least visible. The presence and meaning of class in daily life may be more vague than at any other time in US history. This article examines how commonsense knowledge about class leads people to engage in practices that systematically disorganize the presence of social and economic capital. The over-arching analytical framework builds a performative analysis of class by situating the personal agency of talk within broader cultural discourses that shape and constrain possibilities for talk. I draw from ethnomethodology and post-structural discourse analysis to analyze talk about class in 1600 pages of transcript from interviews with 23 people. By linking the interpretive practices of talk in interviews to the circulation and repetition of cultural knowledge in discourses, I demonstrate how class identities are constituted through conditions not generally associated with economic processes.

This article discusses the connection between brands, national identity and the social and historic practices of the Canadian nation-state. Specifically, it examines the long-running `True Stories' ad campaign of Tim Hortons coffee shops, Canada's most successful quick-service restaurant chain. These ads insert Tim Hortons into customers' stories about travel, endurance and adventure, and authorize Tim Hortons itself as both the site and source of Canada's self-image.This authorization occurs in three ways: 1) by taking advantage of a space generated by overt, statist, bureaucratic management of Canadian identity and culture, 2) by locating national identity within mundane, sensual consumptive desire, and 3) by capitalizing on the ambiguities of articulating Canadian national culture, especially within the context of an officially multi-cultural project.

This article seeks to lift the lid on the `black box' of fashion production by exploring the role of the customer image within the working practices of UK high street womenswear retailers. Following production of culture and symbolic interactionist approaches to the culture industries, the author suggests that the customer images — that is, practitioners' notions of the likes and dislikes of target customers — facilitate teamwork by smoothing conflicts that arise through the division of labour between designers, buyers and merchandizers. The customer image serves as an ordering principle that helps fashion workers to narrow down the wealth of competing ideas and generally guides their decision-making processes. The creation of colour palettes and `storyboards', as well as the selection and modification of sample garments, will be used as examples of how the ordering principle is applied by designers, buyers and merchandizers throughout the production process.