Sociology

Recent technological change and the economic upheaval it has produced are coded by social meanings. Cultural codes not only trigger technological and economic changes, but also provide pathways to control them, allowing the democratic practices of independent journalism to be sustained in new forms. Even as they successfully defend their professional ethics, however, journalists experience them as vulnerable to subversion in the face of technological and economic change. Indeed, independent journalists and the social groups who support them often feel as if they are losing the struggle for autonomy. Just as current anxieties have been triggered by computerization and digital news, so were earlier crises of journalism linked to technological shifts that demanded new forms of economic organization. Digital production has created extraordinary organizational upheaval and economic strain. At the same time, critical confrontations with digital production have triggered innovative organizational forms that allow new technologies to sustain, rather than undermine, the democratic culture and institution of news production. If news producers are making efforts to adapt professional journalism to the digital age while maintaining journalistic civil values, there are parallel adaptations from the digital side: digital journalism becoming more like professional journalism.

(This essay will form the introduction to Jeffrey C. Alexander, Elizabeth Breese, and Maria Luengo, eds., The Crisis of Journalism to Reconsidered: Cultural Power (Cambridge University Press). It was first presented at a conference of the book’s contributors in Barcelona, Spain, hosted by the Social Trends Institute, on April 25–26, 2014. The project benefited significantly from the conference that STI made possible.)

Avant-garde theatre is often invoked as the bellwether for a society that has become postdramatic – fragmented, alienated, and critical of efforts to create collectively shared meanings. A theatre whose sequenced actions have no narrative (so the story goes) mirrors a social world where the most conflictual situations no longer appear as drama but merely as spectacle: a society where audiences look on without any feeling or connection. Because only half right, these theses about postdramatic theatre and society are fundamentally wrong. As modern societies have expanded and differentiated, the elements that compose performances have become separated and often fragmented in both theatre and society. If they can be brought back together again, performances are viewed as authentic and meaningful. If (re)fusion cannot be achieved, performances fail to communicate meaning. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that a shared ambition to (re)fuse fragmented performative elements has defined the most important strain of avant-garde theatre over the last two centuries. Most radical theatrical innovation has sought to open live drama back up to the telos of myth and ritual. Neither in theatre nor social life can the world transcend dramaturgy; it is fundamental to the search for meaning in a world beyond cosmological religion.

In its hermeneutically rich reconstructions of "Axial Age" breakthroughs in the world's great religions, RHE provides an all-important historical explanation for the autonomy of culture vis-à-vis social structure in the present day. Powerfully documenting "Eastern" as well as "Western" Axial breakthroughs, RHE goes beyond the Orientalism that distorted Weber's own historical and comparative sociology of religion, which restricted such breakthroughs to the Judeo-Christian tradition and its offshoots. Because RHE is a progressive narrative about the creation of new capacities, it cannot systematically address the dark side of post-Axial societies. RHE advances two possible lines of explanation. One is that earlier, Archaic modes of subordination and domination have continued to stick; the other is that there are contradictions inside Axial transcendence itself. Is it possible that Axiality facilitates reification and othering? If so, what cultural and institutional resources might serve as antidotes?

In this essay, I sketch a brief history of power in its sociological form. My animus will be anti-cultural theories,
my premise that progress in power studies depends on taking distance from Weber, not only from his sociology of
domination but from his understanding of legitimation. Moving to late-Durkheim and theories of cultural texts can
help overcome this legitimation deficit, but they alone are not enough. Only a performative turn to cultural pragmatics
will allow a new and better political sociology to arise.

This article develops a non-reductive approach to celebrity, treating it as an iconic form of collective representation central to the meaningful construction of contemporary society. Like other compelling material symbols, the celebrity-icon is structured by the interplay of surface and depth. The surface is an aesthetic structure whose sensuous qualities command attention and compel attachment; the depth projects the sacred and profane binaries that structure meaning even in postmodern societies. While celebrity worship displays elements of totemism, it also reflects the eschatological hopes for salvation that mark post-Axial Age religion. The attacks on celebrity culture that inform critical public and intellectual thinking resemble iconoclastic criticisms of idol worship more than they do empirical social scientific study.

In 2008, we needed a hero. We still do. Political narratives are all about heroes, and never was it more plainly evident than in the 2008 presidential contest between Barack Obama and John McCain. Like all candidates, Obama and McCain worked to craft their own heroic narratives, from despair to redemption to, each hoped, glory. And sociologists watched as the American public joined in on this process, seeing their hopes, dreams, and concerns filtered through opinion polls that were used to form the politicians into just the heroes these times called for. Candidates and voters colluded in myth-making in that block-buster election, but how has the victor's heroic reputation served him as he holds office?

An essay is presented regarding the impact of the economic development in China on the culture in the U.S. It discusses the rapid growth of China's labor and human capital, and gross domestic product (GDP) compared to the U.S. The author also discusses the economic relationship between the two nations. He also explores the possible response of the U.S. to China's economic growth.

In this essay, the author analyzes social science thinking about the capitalist market from instrumentalism to institutionalism and the recent turn toward more cultural economics, and propose to enlarge the latter opening via the 'strong program' in cultural sociology. Nineteenth century' big thinkers' conceptualized the market as if it were entirely deracinated, based on alienation and pure calculation. The profession of economics subtracted the social critique from this dismal understanding and converted the dismal science into mathematical predictions and production functions. The new economic sociology exposed the institutional framework of market decisions, emphasizing social networks and status competition. Cultural economic sociology has challenged institutionalism, showing how social meanings, not just institutional position, determines economic value. The next step is to demonstrate that the market itself depends on cultural meanings. The strength of a market depends upon narrative projections of future economic conditions. An optimistic scenario creates confidence and sparks investment. A pessimistic narrative creates fear and leads investors keep their money tight. Confidence in the future depends on constructions of 'character': will economic actors constrain themselves by acting in a sober and moral way or will they be hedonistic, indulging in short-term satisfaction? This cultural-sociological theory is illustrated with reference to Keynes' General Theory about the 1930s Great Depression and U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke's policy vis-à-vis the current Great Recession.

Despite anxieties about the growing power of neo-liberalism, the crisis of the EU and the upsurge of right-wing political movements, it is important to recognize that utopian movements on the left have also in recent years been symbolically revitalized and organizationally sustained. This article analyses three recent social upheavals as utopian civil society movements, placing the 2008 US presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the Egyptian uprising in Tahrir Square and the Occupy Movement in the USA inside the narrative arc that began with the non-violent democratic uprisings against authoritarian governments four decades earlier. In this new utopian surge, however, there is an unprecedented connection of eastern and western impulses, demonstrating that the tide of democratic thought and action is hardly confined to Judeo-Christian civilizations.

Documenting the extraordinary potency and reach of the European backlash against multiculturalism, this essay provides a new theoretical model for explaining it. Rather than focusing primarily on demographic and institutional facts about Islamic immigration – such as education, wealth, participation and mobility – the author proposes a cultural-sociological approach that focuses on meanings and emotions as core issues for civil societies. As the demographic presence of Islamic immigrants has intensified, the anti-civil construction of Islamic qualities has led European masses, leaders and intellectuals, not only from the right but from the centre and left, to demand homogenizing assimilation. Representing public practices of Islam as threatening European democracy, newly restrictive citizenship tests have emerged alongside growing xenophobic political parties and newly threatening neo-fascist violence. Initially brought to Europe for economic and political reasons, the question has now become whether the children and grandchildren of Islamic immigrants can be incorporated into European civil society. The conflict is not over whether immigrants should be incorporated but over the grounds for doing so.

Is electoral success based only on demographics, strategy and money? Jeffrey C. Alexander begs to differ, and he offers a new way of looking at the process of attaining and keeping political power in “The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power,” released this week by Oxford University Press. Alexander, a professor of sociology at Yale, focuses on powerful subtle and not-so-subtle messages a candidate conveys through emotion, images and performance to achieve cultural meaning and symbolic importance. Here, Alexander traces these issues through the 2008 presidential campaign and ruminates on the limits of heroic symbolism in politics.

In [. . .] The Performance of Power, I examine the strategies and statements of those who planned, directed, and fought the 2008 Presidential campaign. While I pay close attention to
the broader contexts that defined its social backdrop, I also enmesh myself in the day to day reports of print, television, and digital media, not simply to find out factual details but to gain access to the symbolic flows that are the actual determinates of victory and defeat. Meaningful texture dictates political power. What decides campaigns are the cultural frameworks that candidates lay down and work through and that journalists not only referee but help create. I investigate this textually mediated back and forth between Barack Obama and John McCain from June to November of 2008.

Common knowledge suggests that elections are
won or lost based on demographics, finances, and other
structural elements. Whether candidates win or lose,
however, is a matter of action. Symbolic identification,
metaphor, and an unfolding narrative—and how they are
managed and interpreted in the flow of events—determine
who will emerge victorious from the democratic struggle
for power. The McCain campaign’s effort to cast Obama as
a celebrity, with the hollow trivialities and self-aggrandizement of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, proves to be one
of the most dangerous episodes for the Obama campaign. In
response, the Democrats must adjust the staging of
Obama’s Thursday night acceptance speech in Denver as
a performance of purpose and gravitas, rather than glitz
and adoration

During those early days of the 1980s, the outlook for democratic reformist politics looked bleak. Inside the US, Reagan was becoming a popular president, and the world outside seemed increasingly, if not fatally, endangered
by a Cold War between an anti-social capitalism in the West and a totalitarian Marxism in the East. The Marxism that was becoming a major theoretical force on my home turf, among the university disciplines, was setting itself up as an
aggressive antagonist to the classical tradition of sociology that I was myself struggling to revise and sustain.

This environment set the conditions of my ‘Marxism project’, as I was calling it. I wished to show that the Marxist tradition had no monopoly on fundamental criticism or egalitarian social reform. In the broad sweep of religious history I document below, I read Weber’s sociology as laying out the
cultural origins of an egalitarian and critical project. Religious rationalization allows community membership to be extended to lower classes; criticism to be applied to corrupt and undeserving authority; and unhappy fate to be challenged by world-mastering reason.

Ignazio Silone, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, has written strikingly about the role of moral commitment in radical theory. ‘The more Socialist theories claim to be “scientific”’, he suggests, ‘the more transitory they are; but Socialist values are permanent. The distinction between theories and values is not sufficiently recognized, but it is fundamental. On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men.’ When Silone gave up his Marxism in the 1930s, he became a devout Christian, but he remained an ardent socialist throughout his life. The juxtaposition of these faiths – Marxism, Christianity, and socialism – is what this essay is all about.

This article examines a key question emerging from the strong program in cultural sociology – can art provide a window into social life? An examination of Giacometti’s Standing Woman shows that art attempts to express cultural structures via immersion into and through the material surfaces of aesthetic
form. Through an analysis of the iconic significance of family photos, furniture and celebrities, the article goes on to suggest that such iconic experience remains at the basis of contemporary social life. It explains how we feel part of our surroundings, how we experience the ties that bind us to the people we know and how we develop a feeling for cultural hierarchy.

This article suggests an iconic turn in cultural sociology. Icons can be seen, it is argued, as symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made iconically visible, in other words, by the beautiful, sublime, ugly, or simply by the mundane materiality of everyday life. But it is via the senses that iconic power is made. This new approach to meaning is compared with others – with materialism, semiotics, aestheticism, moralism, realism, and spiritualism.