Cultural Sociology

Studies of the diffusion and translation of social movements has traditionally interpreted the adopting context of a movement as culturally homogenous and explained the adoption of a matter of similarity between transmitters and adopters. As a consequence, most existing theoretical and methodological approaches to diffusion and translation are ill-suited to interpret culturally fragmented cases in which adoption patterns do not reflect cultural similarities. Building on social movement field literature, this article introduces a field-translation approach to account for fragmented cases with ‘dissimilar’ adoption patterns – specifically the adoption of the temperance movement in Denmark at the turn of the 20th century. Using mixed-methods – Social Network Analysis on temperance leaders’ organizational affiliations and content analysis of key texts – the article shows how attention to field-specific doxa can provide a satisfying interpretation of why rural progressives embraced an originally evangelical movement, while evangelicals first rejected it and only later became its most ardent supporter – and why the movement could not make inroads with urban progressives.

In the performing arts, discrimination is a widely recognized issue occurring in relation to multiple social divisions. Through a qualitative analysis of personal stories of discrimination, we investigate the relationship between intersectional categories emerging in the telling and orientation of performing artists. Discrimination is tied to gatekeeping practices that are of varying significance to the artists depending on the power relationships between the parties concerned and the precariousness of the artists’ positions. Recognizing such experiences as discrimination requires an awareness of category relationships that can be implicit, explicit, or intrinsic. A sensitivity to these category relationships and the ways in which stories are constructed has important implications for promoting social justice among freelancers.

Taste is central to the sociology of culture and a frequently invoked explanans in the discipline at large. Yet, it remains a semantically ambiguous polyseme that has been understood and operationalized in often divergent ways by sociologists. In this essay, we survey contemporary empirical research on cultural tastes and use retroductive reasoning from measurements of taste to clarify the semantic ambiguity surrounding taste. We argue that taste should be conceptualized as a person’s thick subjectivity in a cultural field, that is to say a fundamentally multidimensional orientation that describes how we feel, consume, and praise in cultural fields. Recognizing the inherent multidimensionality to taste allows us to refine our understanding of complex taste phenomena. We outline a family of complex tastes using characteristic antinomies among their constituent modalities of action, and use a case study to show how each variety corresponds to extant folk concepts about taste.

Boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow products and practices of consumption are blurring, notably in food consumption. In this article, we want to understand how consumers experience and make sense of products that are seen as uniting highbrow and lowbrow by authoritative voices in the field. We focus on gourmet burgers and more specifically the case of McDonald’s collaboration with Michelin chefs in Denmark and the attitudes of middle-class consumers towards this collaboration and its products. Empirically, we demonstrate that consumers, in theory, are very favourable towards food products that transgress the highbrow–lowbrow distinction. At the same time, understandings and evaluations vary. The majority of consumers are favourable, while a minority are strongly negative. These perceptions are strongly shaped by consumers’ initial perception of the collaboration. The favourable informants see it as a fun experiment while those who are critical see it as a fake branding strategy. Via a comparison to another gourmet burger, the NOMA cheeseburger, served at one of the world’s best restaurants, we further suggest distinguishing between highbrow and lowbrow transgression of the highbrow–lowbrow divide. We argue that while both seem legitimate for consumers, it seems that highbrow transgressions confer more status to the consumer. However, in both cases, there is a risk that consumers are disappointed and experience a mismatch between expectations and the tangible product. Finally, we posit that consuming lowbrow–highbrow hybrids differs from what has been labelled ironic consumption, for example, lowbrow products consumed by highbrow consumers in an ironic manner, because highbrow–lowbrow hybrids connect objects and actors from antithetical spheres in the object of consumption. We argue that the focus on highbrow–lowbrow hybrids offers a new lens to study fields of cultural consumption and how consumers subjectively make sense of fields and their dynamics and position themselves via sense-making narratives and taste judgements.

This study examines the evolving materiality of music in the streaming era, arguing that music’s materiality in streaming contexts is not fixed and predefined, but a dynamic and relational phenomenon emerging through the interplay of user practices, technological affordances and cultural meanings. Drawing on qualitative interviews and online ethnography with indie music enthusiasts in China, the research explores two key aspects of streaming music consumption to examine music’s materiality: playlisting practices and users’ reflexive interactions with recommendation algorithms. The findings reveal a co-evolutionary relationship between user practices and technological affordances, where both users and algorithms actively shape the experience and materiality of music. Playlist curation emerges as a new form of meaning-making, transforming intangible streaming music into personalised, structured objects; while user-algorithmic interplay creates a dynamic environment where music perception and engagement are constantly negotiated. These cases illuminate a new perception of music materiality – one that is constantly emergent and relationally constituted. The article contributes to broader debates on the digitalisation of culture, the changing nature of cultural consumption, and the role of technology in shaping cultural experiences. It invites a re-examination of the concept of materiality in the context of digital platforms.

Growing numbers of people are commodifying their leisure activities on the internet. This article’s mixed-method study of French food bloggers and Etsy handicrafters focuses on the overflow of digital market work into amateurs’ domestic lives. Building on the sociology of ‘serious leisure’, the study examines the novelty of such social phenomena. We show that traditional serious leisure activities have already revealed comparable forms of overflow and similar motives for consent to such spillover effects. However, the study also brings to light three specific effects of online commodification on leisure activities: the new forms of extra work in which amateurs are involved, the transformation of the leisure activity, and the shortening of amateurs’ careers.

In this article, I think through the role of culture in making individuals vulnerable to suicide. I examine the relationship between public culture – embedded in and (re)produced through social institutions – and declarative and nondeclarative personal culture, as well as circumstances under which this relationship can engender suicidal distress. Orders of worth, dominant within public culture and integrated by individuals, are argued to influence individuals’ sense of purpose and to shape their agency and future orientation. Some individuals durably and experientially embody nondeclarative personal culture – dispositions and associations – that differ drastically from their learnt declarative orders of worth, leading to feelings of unworthiness. This mismatch may intensify into the hysteresis effect, where individuals lose their belief in a meaningful future, rendering suicide seem like a possible escape from an eternal present devoid of future prospects. Although this article focuses on suicide, its relevance extends to broader discussions within the sociology of mental health, particularly regarding how public culture and institutions shape individuals’ aspirations, experiences, and consequently, their suffering.

The digital age exposes young people to a celebrity-saturated ‘beauty regime’ that reinforces ideals of physical perfection. Cultural sociologists and feminist scholars have highlighted the role of appearance as an important dimension of social stratification and demonstrated the prominence of celebrity images in popular culture and everyday imaginings. While beauty is increasingly recognized as an important element of culture and inequality, research is lacking on how young people understand the contemporary beauty regime and its intersectional complexities. This study explores how diverse Canadian youth navigate this complex landscape, focusing on their interpretations of beauty icon and billionaire Kylie Jenner. We draw from focus groups centred on the following question: How do young people understand beauty and its relationship to privilege and inequality? Our discussions highlight the intersectional nature of beauty and reveal three antinomies that young people navigate in the current beauty regime: (1) an aesthetic tension between fake and natural beauty; (2) a relational tension between elite beauty and democratic accessibility, and (3) a moral tension between looking good and being bad. The beauty bind describes the delicate balancing act young people face when navigating these tensions. Through an intersectional analysis, we aim to deepen scholarly understanding of beauty culture’s evolving dynamics, young people’s understandings of a celebritized beauty regime, and how beauty emerges as a powerful ideal that commands attention even as it often feels painfully out of reach.

There is now an expansive literature on the manosphere – the loosely connected groups of digital communities that revolve around men’s rights, aspirations and entitlements, and the perceived constraints upon these. Such studies have produced important critical insights into the collective and organized dimension of the networked harassment of women in digital settings, as well as highlighting the manosphere’s craving to reanimate regressive modes of masculinity. At this time, however, scholars have written relatively little about the manosphere’s high -profile key figures; so-called ‘manfluencers’. While ‘manfluencers’ are symptomatic, rather than a cause, of unequal gender relations, their cultural traction and their role in amplifying misogyny situates these figures as worthy of sociological investigation. In this article, we are concerned with Andrew Tate, the globe’s most prolific and most followed social media producer of masculinity-related content. Building on studies that analyse Tate’s viral video content, here we centre his written discourses, providing an empirically and theoretically driven analysis of his longer-form written content appearing on his website (16,029 words across 64 webpages) and on his Telegram messaging platform (150,288 words across 2191 posts), domains where his more committed followers access unfiltered and persistent communications. Deploying the concept of masculinism as a framework, we combine computational keyword and keyword co-occurrence analysis with a qualitative, close reading of a purposefully derived sub-sample of data. While somewhat subtler compared to his video content, our analysis exposes how Tate’s emphasis on self-help advice for boys and men and his glorifying of essentialism, gender hierarchy and individualism operates as the insidious ideological scaffolding that allows for, leads to and celebrates misogyny, and does so in ways that permits it to be taken up by young men trying to make sense of a context in which previous norms that privileged them are being challenged.

This article reports on a community-engaged research study of Princeville, North Carolina, the first formally chartered autonomous Black town in the United States, that has been in continuous existence. The article seeks to enhance historical understanding of the Black town in the United States and of the lesser-known history of Black resistant histories of North Carolina. Reporting on interview and observation research, the article analyzes (and reports on) key themes specifically related to cultural processes: those of place-making and meaning-making in the contexts of collective memory and forgetting. Analysis of themes that arose in interviews and observations uncovered three general sources of non-memory, each of which is also shown to be in conversation with ‘rememory’: landscape erasure as a proxy for social memory erasure; population dispersal as social non-memory; and narrative displacement. The findings also highlight the importance of cultural memory: intentional acts of keeping Princeville town doors open. It is argued that the dynamics uncovered may be particularly relevant for understanding the loss of the Black town across the United States more generally.