This article examines how cultural policy frames embody and shape inequalities in cultural participation within urban settings. It explores both historical and contemporary policy frames, scrutinizing various approaches to cultural democratization and intersectional equity. From this perspective, we study how the cultural policies advanced by the Barcelona City Council framed inequalities in urban

There is a growing consensus that climate fiction might be an effective communication strategy to move the public on climate. However, empirical evidence documenting such an effect is limited, especially when it comes to climate fiction's potential to induce emotions of hope and fear, which are of key importance to the ongoing debate about the social effects of climate messages. To address this gap

Craft and design are art forms that teeter on the boundary of being considered art. Because of this, these mediums are an ideal case to examine how the Danish Art Foundation funds these arts and what this says about the distinction of the arts in a Danish context. This article analyses 1898 full-text applications for funding - both the ones that have been awarded funding and the ones that have been

When investigating relational structures in culture, research in Europe has often either mapped the relationship between cultural tastes in a particular context, or mapped differences in cultural tastes (measured consistently) in different countries, without assessing how these differences can vary across them. Indeed, the idea of national homology (namely that the structures of cultural capital would

The study presents a new approach for constructing an epistemological coordinate system that locates individual researchers within the disciplinary landscape of science. Drawing on a comprehensive national dataset of scientific outputs, we build a topic model based on a semantic network of publications and terms derived from textual content comprising titles, abstracts, and keywords. Compositional

The use that agents do of cultural knowledge to navigate institutions is a major explanation of inequalities. Nevertheless, the difficulties accessing culture knowledge have led sociologists of education to often rely on declarative forms of culture to gauge explanations on inequalities. Based on the case of Chile, this study contributes to educational inequality research by using factorial survey

This research note studies how cultural participation impacts affective well-being in everyday life by taking a novel methodological approach via Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM). The potential for culture to improve the well-being of citizens has been a long-running subject of study. Through participation in cultural activities, individuals would gain experiences that foster feelings of liberation

Haiku, the world's shortest form of poetry, has usually been deemed ambiguous owing to its length. However, studies have shown that ambiguity lowers the aesthetic evaluation of a haiku, which contradicts the belief that ambiguity is a characteristic of both the haiku and art in general. One reason for this contradiction may be the interaction with the readers’ attributes, in particular, their expertise—a

This article suggests a comparative field analytical approach to fields of cultural production. Combining concepts from field analysis and focusing on homology with topic modeling and multiple correspondence analysis, we compare four scientific disciplines and show homological structures along both internal and external principles of differentiation. The empirical analysis suggests that despite major

The death of an artist can act as a costly signal of their authenticity, and cause enduring changes in audience valuations of their work. Drawing on novel digital trace data of audience evaluations from a major online music community, we show how the death of an hip-hop artist induces improvements to the valuations of their antemortem work. Such death-induced changes to audience valuations are mediated

This article presents an analysis of discourses performed in communities that share and disseminate knowledge refused by institutional science. The study focuses on an online community concerned with alkaline water, food, and lifestyle, aiming at understanding how promoters of refused knowledge in this community enrol other forms of knowledge, including science. Theoretically, this work is framed in

Very few studies have deployed a historical focus in investigating how changes in the media environment in the twenty-first century have altered the connection between cross-media consumption, political (dis)interest, and dimensions of social stratification. This paper contributes to the literature on the nexus between democracy, citizens, and media through a historical study of media use among Danish

When sociology deals with differences within groups of similar socioeconomic status, research and theorizing tend to focus on the heterogeneity among the socioeconomically advantaged thus representing the socioeconomically disadvantaged as homogeneous. This study is a case of the opposite. For at set of high-stake cultural practices, parental strategies for social reproduction, I find most heterogeneity

In recent years, there has been a rise in career development programs for artists, including various types of mentoring programs. However, research on mentoring is scarce within the field of cultural policy. In this paper, we analyse mentoring as a tool for developing creative careers by investigating three different programs implemented in the Norwegian art field. The analysis is based on qualitative

The rooted dichotomy between art and economy tends to simplify our understanding of the conditions under which makers of cultural products operate. The contingencies of the last decades, leading to a greater plurality of artists’ practices, urge us to create new conceptual tools to seize the effective cultural production structures. This paper aims to open this dichotomy - anchored in institutional

In the last decades a new organizational population of private museums has seen substantial proliferation. While multiple hypotheses for the spread of this new form have been raised, systematic analyses of these have been lacking. In particular, the rise of private museums has been hypothesized to stem from tax incentives, reductions in government spending, increasing inequality and increasing elite

Cultural-creative crowdfunding (CCCF) intersects the culture sector production chain and alternative finance technology as a global web-enabled phenomenon for funding cultural-creative activities. Yet, busking or aspects of patronage are not new to artists and cultural-creative agents; the novelty is doing so through a virtual intermediator space, a crowdfunding platform (CFP). CFPs have proliferated

When personal meaning and knowing emerge for a space, that space moves beyond a labeled locale to become a such that one develops an idiosyncratic knowing or Sense of Place (SoP). Decades of scholarship have animated understandings of SoP for locales, however that work is inconsistent in operationalizing the construct and largely limited to positively valenced, physical spaces. To begin addressing

In US K-12 education, the Spanish language is subject to practices and policies that limit its expression, especially among racialized Latinx students. However, higher education claims to view Spanish as a positive form of diversity. We therefore examine college admissions essays to analyze how students strategically deploy Spanish in light of these contradictions. We use two years of undergraduate

Hip-Hop as a music genre is a popular music genre both in commercial success and global impact and there is a variety of academic studies on the origins, creation, effects, and uses of hip-hop. What remains understudied, yet fundamentally important, is a perspective that takes hip-hop consumers and the way they give meaning to hip-hop as a musical genre. The current in-depth interview study (N = 20)

This article advances understanding about book reading as a sociocultural phenomenon in the 2020s. We make a contribution to the cultural sociology of reading by investigating Finnish self-identified book readers by analysing the significance of sociodemographic variables (gender, education, age, and place of residence) in terms of reading activity and access to books. Our study is placed in the context

Sociologists usually conceptualize events as unexpected occurrences bringing about long-lasting transformations of social structures. Following this definition, most empirical studies of events focus on pre/post-measurement strategies. Yet not all events are unexpected (e.g., Eurovision, Oscar nominations, the Olympics). Moreover, pre/post-measurements cannot capture the temporality in which meaning-making

This article reports the findings of an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of ten interviews with participants aged 13 to 23 from international contexts on youths’ experiences of literary socialisation. Guided by affect theory and cultural geographies, the research examines the affective intensities arising from those experiences that render possible digital participation around books,

Much of the research on cultural and creative industries has been ‘Western-centric’, but recent interest into cultural and creative industries in the Global South confirms that this conceptual frame is not always directly transferable. This first comprehensive analysis of the last three decades of cultural and creative industries in Santiago de Chile is based on detailed participant observations and

In Trentino and the Pyrenees, the population of bears has grown since the 1990s, when new specimens were released into the wild to recover this endangered species. The reintroduction generated a conflictive cohabitation with village dwellers, the shepherding sector, and rural initiatives in both areas. The aim of this research is to evaluate how local media and two audiovisual documentaries covered

This article analyses classificatory encounters in a unique library with integrated academic and public book collections. Employing Walter Benjamin's image of the organised bookshelf as a ‘magic circle’ of independently relating items, I follow the choreography of classification in library spaces: from the formality of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) through which books are organised, to their

A world in movement is visible in the arena of the performing arts. Since the “long summer of migration” (also known as the 2015 “refugee crisis”), the field of performing arts for a young audience in Sweden has shown a growing interest in staging migration while elaborating new artistic strategies and modes of participation. Migrant/non-white youth share the stage-audience encounter with a white audience

How does an artwork's referencing of creative content affect its peer recognition? Artists constantly seek to balance the tension between originality and conformity. Previous research argues that peers tend to reward socially well-embedded artists that signal community involvement and literacy of established conventions. Another stream of sociological research argues that the criteria for peer recognition

Cultural production is to an increasing degree characterized by digitalization, mediatization, platformization and the use of social media. In this article, we investigate how digital cultural labour is experienced by platform-dependent cultural producers. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews with more than twenty Norwegian content creators, we more specifically analyse how they describe and valuate

Viewers form enduring bonds, or parasocial relationships (PSRs), with media characters. They suffer breakup distress when such relationships are dissolved and show emotional reactions similar to those from the dissolution of social relationships. Alongside definite and temporary breakups, this paper introduces the term , and the three breakup types are analyzed and compared. In a two-survey study with

How does families’ social networks influence the transmission of cultural capital to their children? Earlier research on this process has mainly focused on within-family mechanisms, and the role of social capital as conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu has here received little attention. This article explores this question through a study of parents’ social ties and parents’ and children's cultural, leisurely

This paper explores the collaborative networks of Yacht Rock, a genre of music that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and is currently experiencing a resurgence of popularity in the United States and beyond. In addition to using formal social network analysis to explore the development and transformation of Yacht Rock's collaborative musical network through time, we identify its most influential

How are racial representations created? I compare two kinds of jazz album cover from the 1950s and 60s to show that the production of culture approach has untapped potential for answering that question. After demonstrating that photographic and modern art-based work constructed Blackness in different ways, I account for photography's domination of the sleeve by focusing on the structure and history

This study investigates the use of coagents in the book industry. To reach international markets, domestic publishers typically license a title’s rights to third-party international publishers, a practice known as 'selling rights’. Rights sellers can either choose to work directly in a local market or with intermediaries known as coagents. Using a data set of over 2000 international rights sales for

Recent work in the sociology of taste has begun to grapple with the relational properties of traditional survey-based data using techniques inspired by network analysis. Despite productive results from this endeavor, critics rightly question the face and ecological validity of the vague macrogenre labels included in standard arts participation surveys (e.g., Classical, Rock, Rap) which feed into these

This study investigates the motivations and practices of information professions using a digital platform, with a focus on expanding definitions of cultural authority. While prior research has explored models such as citizen science and engaged journalism, which propose changes in the relationships between information producers, consumers, and content, limited attention has been given to professionals'

This content analytical study ( = four series, 59 characters, and 2411 scenes) investigates how success stories are portrayed in work-related television series (i.e., television series centered on the working environment) that are available in several countries, namely , and . Based on the ideas of , this study explores how such television series define (professional) success and whether the accomplishments

This study explores university students’ engagement with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools for creative writing and graphic storytelling, drawing on Jacques Rancière's philosophy of intellectual equality and emancipation. Qualitative data analysis from a co-curricular creative writing programme, including reflections, surveys, and focus-group interviews, reveals emerging artificial intelligence

I find that jazz gained a toehold in U.S. concert halls, music awards, festivals, and schools in the 1930s, 60s, 70s or 80s. I reconcile this with extant research, which identifies the 1940s and 50s as the crucial moment for jazz, by linking the processes that transpired in the sites I examine to those past research has focused on. During the 1940s and the 50s, facing resistance in the mainstream institutions

The article has a double purpose. On the one hand, it contributes to theories of cultural legitimacy and classification. Based on data about consumers’ music evaluations, it shows that taste hierarchies are configured as nested and relational classificatory systems. Nested, because rank systems of symbolic value are collectively recognized, reproduced, and negotiated by consumers not only at the level

Science fiction has become very popular across all mediatic forms (e.g., in short stories, in novels, in movies, in TV series). The cultural success of this genre is both geographically widespread and rather recent in history. Although such observations seem consensual, many problems remain and are debated in science fiction study, notably (1) the defining characteristics of the genre, (2) the reasons

Music and politics have been interconnected for centuries, and it is difficult to explain a political event without mentioning the subsequent music creation and vice versa; examples include anti-war music during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, a shift to country music with patriotic undertones after 9/11, and so on (). Preliminary research suggests that there could be a connection between political ideologies

Despite a wealth of research about unequal transitions to adulthood in the U.S., we know less about how classed daily life (or “habitus”) carries with individuals as they age and experience socioeconomic mobility. Taking weekly time spent watching television as a form of class habitus, this research traces the trajectories of television time from adolescence to adulthood using the National Longitudinal

The purpose of this paper was to examine the effects of genre-specific and mainstream Billboard chart popularity on RIAA gold or platinum certification of #1 R&B/Hip-Hop singles in the Pre-SoundScan (1977–1992) and SoundScan (1993–2008) eras. The first aim was to determine if there were any statistically significant differences in genre-specific and mainstream popularity between singles that achieved

Researchers have advanced two opposing accounts of the relationship between status and cultural innovation. We aim to reconcile these views – and their conflicting findings that high- low-status cultural producers are more likely to innovate – by adopting a dynamic view of status. We argue that changes in status – at the individual and the field level – affect the relationship between status and innovation

We study the symbolic value of places using the case of global tourism where places are explicitly objectified for valorization. Unlike most prior research that uses tangible measurements like UNESCO's World Heritage Sites for global comparison of place-based symbolic values, we harness the power of computational text analysis to measure the symbolic value of places based on travel writings of the

Abstract not available

Student's intrinsic reading motivation is key to their reading proficiency and spills over to other domains of development. Prior studies show that girls are more intrinsically motivated to read than boys but little is known about how reading socialization in families and schools relate to gender inequality in reading motivation. This study investigates a) how reading socialization activities in families

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have developed rapidly, and generative AI in particular challenges human creativity. Therefore, people's perspectives about this transformative change involving creativity and art must be examined. We investigated attitudes toward using AI in art from the perspective of self-determination theory. We used data from a two-wave survey of Finnish respondents aged

Despite the long history of debating its meaning and its current unprecedented ubiquity both in scholarly and popular discourses, little is systematically known about how “culture” is conceived by ordinary people. This paper examines how evaluations of the contents and boundaries of expressive culture are patterned among people in and across present-day European societies, and to what degree these

This paper investigates the impact of atypicality on cultural goods reception. While prior research has assumed controlled and highly cognitive mechanisms in audience evaluations, this paper probes the influence of affective states. We suggest that crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, trigger affective states and sway evaluations of atypical cultural goods. In a longitudinal study on movie evaluations

Abstract not available

Despite their essential role in conceptualizing cultural capital, genres have been left out of most quantitative empirical studies in this research tradition. Based on data from the French Ministry of Education with measures of detailed genre consumption for reading and TV watching, this article uses multiple correspondence analysis to show differences in consumption by gender, race/ethnicity, and

This essay situates the Nobel's institutional charisma within the “laureate position,” an older but still relevant socio-institutional formation that frames literature as a “higher good” (as distinct, say, from “mere” entertainment). The first three sections place the Nobel within the landscape of literary prizes, discussing its particular currency of value (strong rather than weak), its relation to

This article takes a fresh look at Pierre Bourdieu's notion of consecration by applying a mixed methods approach to the way authorship unfolds around the Nobel Prize. Drawing on both conceptual literary history and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the case study of Herta Müller's ‘unexpected’ win in 2009 is taken as a starting point for establishing how different ‘modes of authorship’ play out in

According to Bourdieu's theory, literary prizes are those specific authorities which contribute in the long run to the conversion of symbolic capital into economic capital. The Nobel Prize played a major role in the unification of a relatively autonomous international literary space, as described by Casanova. It helped create a new canon of world literature, as the Nobel prize winners were widely translated