Suchergebnisse

Articulation -- Audience -- Broadcasting -- Capitalism -- Communication(s) -- Convergence -- Criticism/critique -- Cultural form -- Culture -- Culture industry -- Cyberculture -- Deconstruction -- Digital -- Discourse -- Embodiment -- Encoding/decoding -- Freedom of communication -- Genre -- Globalization -- Hegemony -- Ideology -- Identity -- Image -- Influence -- Information society -- Interactivity -- Mass -- Media effects -- Media/medium -- Mobile privatization -- Modern -- Moral panic -- Network (society) -- News values -- Popular/populist -- Postmodernism -- Public sphere -- Regulation -- Ritual -- Sign -- Simulacra -- Tabloidization -- Technoculture -- Technological determinism -- Time-space compression

This detailed study of Williams unlocks his late sociology of culture. It covers previously overlooked aspects, such as his critique of Birmingham cultural studies, his use of an Adorno-like approach to 'cultural production', his 'social formalist' alternative to structuralism and post-structuralism and his approach to 'the media'

Effectively a double-height or larger void internal to a building, the atrium is a familiar architectural feature the world over. The global popularity of the space in contemporary urban buildings – including hotels, shopping malls, casinos, hospitals, museums, galleries, libraries, schools, office blocks, and universities – is a somewhat puzzling development, and one ripe for sociological analysis. Cultural political economy (CPE) helps to explain this affinity. Using this perspective guards against reductionisms of various stripes, while rigorously situating the atrium vis-a-vis the production and circulation of material and symbolic surplus value. By facilitating inquiry into how this architectural form stabilises and furthers capitalist arrangements, CPE allows for interrogation of the atrium's distinctive role in adding momentum and cultural meaning to contemporary urban accumulative strategies. In particular, the article draws out the atrium space's paradoxical relationships to (i) the intensification of rentiership in very tall buildings, and (ii) with respect to the demarcation of insider–outsider boundaries underpinning elite consumption. Positioning the atrium as being reflective of attempts to both intensify and embed capitalism in the built environment, key arguments concern the meaningful, experiential and out-of-the ordinary nature of the space, As such, the article contributes to and draws from sociologies of architecture, reconciling the atrium's materiality and meaning in a way that does not reduce either to the other.

Architecture is inextricably entangled with time. Illustrating this point, the article explores two moments of architectural production centred on London in the mid-19th century: the 'Battle of the Styles', a struggle over the social meaning of historicist architectural design and its suitability for state-funded public buildings; and the proto-modernist Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. While ostensibly involving different cultural orientations to pasts-presents-futures, both cases reflect how political claims can involve the mobilisation of temporalised architectural forms. The general contention is that architecture is a culturally experimental space through which nation-states and architects seek to orientate otherwise abstracted notions of temporality. While there is no straightforward or singular correspondence between temporality and architectural sites, the built environment is pushed and pulled by states' politicised claims regarding time and temporality. Architecture always involves the materialisation of particular and partial visions of the world as is, as was, and as could be; temporal registers in the built environment involve the stabilisation of some ways of being and the displacement of others. The political basis of these processes can be illuminated sociologically.

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This paper interrogates the practices of professional photographers working on commissions associated with urban regeneration. As distinct from analysis of the images that are an outcome of their labour, little is currently known about the knowledges of photographers working in such contexts. Drawing on research with one firm of photographers in Liverpool, UK, the article focuses on the ways in which these cultural producers describe and make sense of their productions vis-à-vis wider regeneration contexts; particular attention is paid to the ways in which they interpret and translate the criteria surrounding commissions into practice. A general contention concerns the photographers' reflexivity relative to the constraints and affordances they associate with commissioned regeneration work, which sees them operationalising the social visions emanating from clients working in urban policy sector. The article addresses the sets of social practices necessary to secure the conditions for making images in such contested contexts.

One of the uses of history is to free us of a falsely imagined past. The less we know of how ideas actually took root and grew, the more apt we are to accept them unquestioningly, as inevitable features of the world in which we move. One reason for the stifling solidity of received opinion about antitrust, why counterargument makes so little headway, is that most of us accept our first principles and even our immediate premises uncritically, as given, because we assume that they were established theoretically and confirmed empirically by legislators and judges long ago. If awareness of anomaly plays a role in the emergence of new sorts of phenomena, it should surprise no one that a similar but more profound awareness is prerequisite to all acceptable changes of theory.

This article argues that cultural sociology should take heed of conceptual and policy ambiguities that developed within British and Australian cultural studies. However, it also proposes that cultural sociology might build on the underdeveloped common ground between Frankfurt critical theory and cultural studies. Habermas's notion of the 'literary public sphere' is taken as a useful point of contact between these fields. This literary public sphere thesis is reconstructed in some detail and its fate in recent debates is explored. Habermas's concept of the contradictory institutionalization of political public spheres is applied to the literary public sphere thesis.The article proposes that the examination of differing modes of contradictory institutionalization of literary and political public spheres might aid comparison not only of nation-states' differing policy practices but also of intellectual traditions such as cultural studies as well.Throughout, the article advocates the relevance of a cultural production perspective to research on aesthetic public spheres.