Cultural Sociology

This article analyses the development of the sociology of culture in Czechia. Its focus is on the sociology of the arts and cultural sociology, which, it is argued, are connected through the notion of the relative autonomy of cultural structures. While the Czech sociology of culture may have been rendered less dynamic by the lack of a critical mass of sociologists specialising in this area and by the country’s frequent political upheavals and its isolation from the international circulation of ideas, it has experienced moments of considerable vitality. Three periods in the development of the field are identified here, each of them marked by a movement toward a stronger and more sociologically adequate conceptualisation of cultural autonomy: (1) from the diffuse culturalism of the field’s founding figures to the functionalist theory of the interwar sociologist Inocenc Arnošt Bláha, whose view of the relationship between art and society was influenced by the work of the Prague School of Structuralism; (2) from the cultural reductionism of Marxist-Leninist theory after 1948 to the eclectic sociology of culture and the arts of the late socialist period; (3) from the demise of this transitional form of a sociology of culture in the 1990s to the increasingly internationalised but also heterogeneous landscape of the 2010s, which is constituted by a semi-institutionalised centre of cultural sociology at Brno and small groups or individuals in Prague and other academic locales. The thread of continuity in an otherwise discontinuous historical development is found in the recurrent motif of the relative autonomy of culture which the Czech sociology of culture absorbed through its exposure to art and literary theory.

Any policy requires a ‘frame’ and, by the same token, entails an ‘overflow’, externalizing a certain part of the world as irrelevant. This mundane business of policy framing and overflowing became an urgent matter of concern in Japan in March 2011, as the Fukushima nuclear disaster exposed how the existing frame of nuclear safety had permitted the fatal overflow of severe accident management. In fact, despite the creation of the new regulatory agency in September 2012, the post-Fukushima frame of nuclear safety continued to externalize off-site evacuation planning – a key component of severe accident management – until March 2015. To explain such persistence of the overflow, I borrow the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ from the policy-oriented strand of science and technology studies and infuse it with hermeneutical rigor of the strong program of cultural sociology. Specifically, I illustrate how the trajectory of Japan’s nuclear safety was decisively shaped by the pacifist imaginary and the safety myth, organized around the binary opposition ‘sacred = civilian use = safe vs. profane = military use = dangerous’, without reducing this deeper cultural logic of framing and overflowing to the political economy of nuclear energy or the global isomorphism of nuclear technology.

Since the 1990s, the central references of the sociology of cultural practices have been the theoretical frameworks developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Richard A. Peterson around the concepts of distinction and omnivorousness. This article is based on these frameworks; it revises them together with those of Donnat and Lahire and postulates that the terms of cultural classification and especially those of the upper classes (distinguished and omnivorous) require revision. The article also claims that there are diverse socio-cultural profiles due to the fact that there is never a single logic of differentiation of tastes, and that the results of the present research demand a new conceptual framework capable of showing the operation of diverse logics of differentiation and hierarchy.

In order to do this, an analysis of the socio-cultural profiles of the cultivated groups in Spanish society is carried out on the data obtained from the Survey of Cultural Habits and Practices in Spain 2018/19. This work proves the existence of three types of cultivated population – classical, modern and syncretic – with notable differences in their cultural interests and practices, as well as in their underlying sociodemographic features and aesthetic logics, and concludes by posing the need to delve into the latter in what it defines as the study of cultural practice regimes.

This article provides a sociological explanation for the global emergence of Slavoj Žižek as a public intellectual. It presents an integrative account encompassing both personal and institutional aspects. Drawing on positioning theory and performative frameworks, the article contributes to the sociology of intellectuals, as well as to the vast ‘Žižek-literature’ that focuses on his philosophical content or political activities. We analyse the distinctiveness of Žižek’s performances, arguing that Žižek acts as a ‘sacrificial intellectual’: he plays ‘the fool’ and relies on irony to undermine the traditional role of the authoritative intellectual. Within the context of the digital public sphere and declining intellectual authority, Žižek’s unique form of positioning has been particularly effective and has contributed to his celebrity status.

Small live music venues rely on complex systems of cultural and social capital to bring revenue into each venue space. Although these intangible forms of value are quickly exchanged for economic capital over the bar or through the ticket vendor, their initial state conveys the intrinsic value of small venues as spaces of sociality and cultural production. Throughout this article I demonstrate the intrinsic value of small venues through an analysis of how alternative forms of capital – social, cultural, and symbolic (Bourdieu, 1984, 1986, 1997, 2002) – are generated and mobilised by individuals working in small venues, and the venue spaces themselves. This utilisation of Bourdieu and his theoretical apparatus forms the conceptual framework of this article, as I assert that much of the ‘work’ that small venues ‘do’ is intangible, and thus difficult to measure in quantitative terms. However, Bourdieu’s alternative forms of capital allow us to qualitatively assess the intrinsic value of small live music venues, demonstrating the significance of this value whilst also prompting a discussion of the nature of intrinsic and instrumental value. This article is both a review of the literature connecting Bourdieu to the study of small live music venues and an analysis of how theories of value and Bourdieusian capital(s) play out in niche spaces of cultural production such as small live music venues.