Category: Sociology of Culture

Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

What to Wear Today?

 by ishein1 Teenagers, especially during the years of economic prosperity, consistently cast their consumer vote at various clothing retail stores.  Marketers respond by relentlessly attempting to woo this coveted demographic.  Various stores, even ones owned by the same corporation, create varying images in order to create a perspective of “cool”.  “Coolness,” they believe, will induce the most profit.  In schools around the country teenagers define themselves by what they are wearing.  Brand names are signifiers that display identity.  An individual’s...

Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

Ten Years Later: Three Academic Perspectives on the Columbine Massacre

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_lBgaUpmu4] by NickieWild A decade after teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students, one teacher, and wounded 23 at their high school in Colorado, academic writers in different fields still debate the source of their rage. Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters by Langman is a new book offering a psychological evaluation of the incident, which argues that sociocultural factors have been overemphasized. He writes that certain children are predisposed to violence through schizophrenia or...

Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Consuming in a Recession

by bmckernan While at the start of the economic downturn many media outlets were claiming the video game industry to be “recession proof,” recent sales figures seem to indicate that even an industry often characterized as “escapist” seems not to be fully impervious to financial realities. A recent article in the New York Times reports that sales figures for the game industry were down in March from the previous year, leading the article to conclude that the economic downturn may...

Class & Stratification / Political & Economic Sociology / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

George Ritzer Guest Post: Are Today’s Globalized Cathedrals of Consumption Tomorrow’s Global Dinosaurs?

By: George Ritzer Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland A decade ago I wrote a book dealing with what I called the “cathedrals of consumption”. These are consumption settings that had, in the main, come into existence in the United States in the post-WWII era. Of particular interest were the most grandiose of these consumption settings including major indoor shopping malls, mega-malls (e.g. Mall of America), theme parks (especially Disneyland and Disney World), cruise ships, and above all the themed...

Class & Stratification / Gender & Sexuality / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture

Toilets: The New Model of Social Parity?

nmccoy1 Forty years after second wave women’s movements took to the streets demanding equal pay and legal protections we are finally seeing a move in the direction of parity and it is taking place in the bathroom.  The recent decision by Yankee Stadium (see article below) to take gender into consideration in its architecture is both an historic and sobering moment.  Gender, race, class, and sexual discrimination is not simply a matter of laws and codes, it is also culturally...

Class & Stratification / Gender & Sexuality / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture

The Struggle Continues

by rbobbitt Sitara Achikzai, a prominent women’s rights activist was assassinated in outside her home in Kandahar, Afghanistan this past week. Achikzai, who lived in Germany during the Taliban rule, had returned to Afghanistan after the ousting of the Taliban to fight for women’s rights. A member of Kandahar provincial council, she was often vocal in urging women to take jobs and join the fight to regain their rights and push for equality. This senseless murder sheds light on the...

Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Welcome to the Real "Earth"

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T6APT6_w7I] linanne Mass media and technological advancement have created webs of images of reality, which often serve as resources for audiences and social actors to refer to while interpreting and understanding the world around them. Sociologist and cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard understood such mass production, imitations and constant reproduction of images and goods as “second order” simulation. This second order simulation, according to Baudrillard, disturbs and blurs the line between the “real” and the “copy,” threatening to detach social actors...

Gender & Sexuality / Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Culture

Asian Values and Women's Rights

by christinablunt Last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in a move to bolster support in the upcoming presidential elections, signed a law which stipulated that, “Unless the wife is ill, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband.” Human rights groups are calling foul play. To say nothing of the fact that a woman’s rights are being used as a tool of negotiation, the UN is arguing the new law essentially legalizes...

Class & Stratification / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

Super-Anomie? U.S. Shooting Incidents in the Last 30 Days

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J22mLsZd2C8] by NickieWild As of today, according to msnbc.com, 43 people have died in the last 30 days in mass-shooting incidents across the U.S. There are several sociological theories that could potentially explain this. Messner and Rosenfeld’s “American Dream” structural strain theory posits that when there is a gap between what one wants to achieve and what seems possible, violence increases. For the immigrant who shot 13 people and himself in Binghamton, NY last week, there is evidence that points...

Political & Economic Sociology / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

Visual Culture according to the Police

by kiddingthecity It sounds more and more likely that the Police have something to do with the death of a newsagent at the rally in the City of London. Many witnesses have come forward and most importantly there is The Picture: the evidence, the forensic clue, the probatio, the real stuff judges love and on which the surveillance culture of the streets in this country has been built upon. Mr Tomlinson is on the floor, surrounded by police officers, his...

Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Video Games = Art?

by bmckernan In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyou Baumann examines the sociological factors that led to Hollywood’s historical transformation from being considered merely a form of mass entertainment to an artistic medium. Adopting a sociology of culture framework, Baumann identifies what he considers to be the three essential factors needed for any cultural medium to be considered an art, including: an opportunity space, institutionalized resources/activities, and intellectualization. Given the massive popularity of video games in contemporary America, it may be useful to...

Class & Stratification / Science & Technology / Sociology of Culture

Is Evolutionary Psychology Just Sociology in Disguise?

by theoryforthemasses A recent book written by philosopher Dennis Dutton draws from the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology to explain the biological foundations of creativity.  Dutton attempts to synthesize Darwin’s theory of evolution with culture, suggesting that creative capacities have been passed on from one generation to the next as a mode of survival.  Storytellers, for example, would have been able to work out “what if” scenarios through making up stories, a practice that would keep them from risking their...

Sociology of Culture

Selling the Emotional Self

nmccoy1 Critical Theorist Eva Illouz offers a cultural historical revision to our understandings of the relationship between emotions, capitalism, and psychological discourse.  Her conception of emotional capitalism links the fundamental convergence of notions of self in modernity as both subject of emotional exploration and objectified commodity.   A recent article (see below) about how to sell yourself using Internet technology exemplifies the naturalized use of psychological and self-help discourse as a means to understand oneself and to sell oneself in...

Political & Economic Sociology / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Authentic Reproduction

by ishein1 It was only a few weeks ago when I saw an Olive Garden Restaurant advertisement depicting its culinary school in Tuscany.  It utilized this image to support its claim that the restaurant provides an authentic Italian dining experience.  Wary of the veracity of this advertisement’s culinary school postulations, I researched the said school.  As it turns out, the Olive Garden did indeed open a culinary school in Tuscany.  This is an attempt by the Olive Garden to put...

Political & Economic Sociology / Science & Technology / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

britannica is putting customers to work

by nathan jurgenson The very idea of Wikipedia -the open-source encyclopedia that anyone with an internet connection can edit- has sparked many discussions about knowledge construction, such as the politics behind truth, the social construction of knowledge, the tyranny of epistemic expertism or populism, and so on. In these discussions, the Encyclopedia Britannica is often posed as the antithesis to Wikipedia. So it came as big news earlier this year that the Encyclopedia Britannica, the model of old-school expertism, is...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

Mediated Domestic Violence: Is the New Visibility Short Lived?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mr4kXW6mOU] by NickieWild The media in the United States, especially television, re-discovers the severity of violence against women when a highly visible image or story occurs. The latest incident, involving singers Chris Brown and Rihanna, has been extensively covered on local, national, and cable news, and talk shows like Oprah and Dr. Phil. However, as academic writers on the subject have noted, the media continually “rediscover” this problem in response to a specific incident that is either particularly horrific (such...