Title: Beyond Contexts: Taking Cultural Objects Seriously in Media, Popular Culture, and the Arts
Abstract: When we began our work on cultural production in the entertainment industry almost two decades ago, we were fortunate to be able to build on pioneering work that was foundational in the field. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White’s 1957 edited volume, Mass Culture , was a road map to many of the “popular arts” that command scholarly attention to this day—literature, film, television and radio, divertissement (which includes jazz, popular music, theater, and card playing), and advertising. It contained early insights into measurement and analysis of the so-called mass audience that unlocked its diversity. Its contributors recorded viewpoints both critical and hopeful about the presence of mass-marketed products in society and their impact that still pervade public debate and policy. Almost two decades later, Herbert Gans’s Popular Culture and High Culture (1974) challenged sociologists to probe the value-laden basis of the critique of mass culture and further legitimated the popular by offering insightful observations about its relationship to aesthetics. By clarifying the pluralism of taste publics and the relationship of taste cultures to social structure, Gans provided the foundation for sociological understanding of the relationship of popular culture to class interests and concerns in the United States. Richard Peterson focused attention on the relationship between market structure and the production of popular culture (in particular, his influential 1975 American Sociological Review article, “Cycles of Symbol Production: The Case of Popular Music,” with David Berger) and revealed how industry concentration and other forms of consolidation lead to product homogeneity. In subsequent work, his close analysis of the genre of country music yielded insights into the importance of authenticity in cultural production. Adding to the works of these key contributors were DiMaggio’s findings about aesthetic entrepreneurs and other leaders of cultural institutions who appropriate nonelite art forms as resources in their claims to elite status (see, e.g., his 1982 article in Media , Culture, and Society ). DiMaggio’s insights into the social construction of cultural
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 1
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot