(SCL6a) Culture and Inequality I

This session presents papers that develop culturally informed perspectives on social inequality. While the discipline of sociology has had a longstanding interest in understanding the interplay of culture and individual, interactional, and institutional processes of inequality, there remains much to understand and debate regarding the influences social inequality has on culture and the influences culture has on social inequality. The papers represent diverse methodological and substantive areas, including empirically driven or theoretically oriented contributions. They address a range of topics, including: representations of wealth and privilege in Hollywood; comedy and critical discourse; the cultural repertoires that people draw on to evaluate policing; as well as the culture of failure and societal critique. Tags: Culture, Equality and Inequality

Organizers: Taylor Price, New York University, Sonia Bookman, University of Manitoba; Chair: Elisabeth Rondinelli, Saint Mary's University

Presentations

Jordan Foster, University of Toronto; Michelle Maroto, University of Alberta

Nepo Babies and the Myth of Meritocracy

In December 2022, Nate Jones, a senior writer for New York Magazine presided over “the year of the Nepo Baby.” The story set the internet alight with debate surrounding Hollywood’s rich history of nepotism—born of benefits handed down through favour, friends, and family–and brought unflattering attention to a cast of new stars and “the salience of their dynastic ties” (Jones, 2022). This story comes on the heels of increasing income and wealth inequality in the United States and around the world, with the greatest share of riches now concentrated in the hands of a small number of elites (Freeland 2012; Mijs 2019; Zucman 2019; Kuusela 2020). Among them, celebrity children and their concomitant privilege are highly visible, raising some alarm about the avenues through which their wealth and privilege are legitimated and maintained. These stories of nepotism and the intergenerational transmission of wealth are alarming, in part, because they violate equal opportunity norms and undermine America’s persistent faith in meritocracy (Solon 1992). Meritocracy, or the idea that individuals succeed and earn rewards based on their own efforts and abilities within a system defined by equal opportunity for all, tends to dominate political discussions and policy in the United States (Bell 1972; Young 1958; McNamee and Miller 2009; Mijs and Savage 2020; Lamont 2023). The premise that anyone can get ahead if they work hard enough is a central component of the American dream for a “better, richer, and happier life” and one that is endorsed by most Americans (Adams 1931; McNamee and Miller 2009; McCall 2013). Rooted in upward intergenerational mobility—another hallmark of American society—and success, meritocracy promises a fair trade to those who invest in hard work, training, and personal development (Hing et al. 2011; Hoschschild 2014). In practice, however, merit is rarely rewarded so straightforwardly (Erickson and Goldthorpe 2002). Social and economic resources distributed through inheritance and good fortune, as well as embodied social privileges along the lines of race and gender, shape merit-based outcomes in profound and uneven ways (McNamee and Miller, 2004; Hing et al., 2011). Despite the advantages that come with intergenerational wealth, the very wealthy tend to credit their privilege to merit and hard work. By appealing to widely shared cultural scripts surrounding entrepreneurialism, they legitimate their relative class positioning (Khan and Jerolmack 2013; Kuusela 2020). Others dress their wealth in a veil of “ordinariness,” suggesting that they are middle class or quite like everyone else (Sherman 2018; Friedman and Reeves 2020), and eschew moral criticisms targeted toward them. But, the children of Hollywood’s most famous names have no such veil to hide behind, raising important questions about their privileged positioning amid growing class-based inequalities. We use the case of Hollywood’s “nepo-babies” and their coverage in the mainstream media to better understand how wealth and privilege are communicated to the public. Specifically, we ask: How are the children of the very wealthy represented in the mainstream media? Do these representations support or refute an ideology of meritocracy? And, what do they indicate about contemporary patterns of economic and class-based inequality? Answering these questions is especially necessary now as distributions of wealth and income grow surreptitiously uneven (Zucman 2019), and as the very wealthy become better insulated from matters related to inequality (Mijs 2019; Kuusela 2022). Drawing from a sample of 331 press articles published both in-print and online from December 2022 through December 2023, we perform a frame analysis to highlight how members of the mainstream media make sense of and frame nepotism and its privileges. Although a significant share of news media coverage surrounding nepotism objected to the privilege that it confers, most news media articles framed the children of the very wealthy and their concomitant privilege as defensible . Still others sensationalized their wealth and privilege, eschewing criticism in favour of reports on the glamourous trappings that surround the children of nepotism and their enviable lives. A minority of articles in the mainstream press, meanwhile, vacillated between criticism and sense-making, as if to contextualize privilege and produce “order.” Taken together, these frames reinforce the American ideology of meritocracy, suggesting, by and large, that hard work, virtuousness, and talent explain the success of Hollywood’s sons and daughters. All the while, structural inequalities and the insidiousness of privilege are hidden from view. 

Galiba Zahid, University of Alberta

Beyond the Punchline: Exploring Social Commentary and Theorizing in Stand-Up Narratives

“But, the bright side is because we gave you cinnamon we get to feel part of your process, you know what I mean? At least now you know that Muslims and Hindus gave you that Christmas spirit. Cinnamon! Yeah, that came from us, guys. Those things Santa Claus was whipping? They were brown but they werent reindeer. That wasnt Rudolph, that was Rajesh…..” (Das, 2020: 00.38.12-40.01.64). Previous research examined stand-up comedy as a type of rhetorical argument, explored within the context of performative art and discourse, and as an object to qualitative inquiry to understand the culture and work surrounding stand-up. I situate stand-up comedy as a unique form of narrative and theorizing discourse, challenging traditional perspectives that view it solely as a medium for art or entertainment. Through a combination of storytelling, wit, and observational humour, stand-up comedians engage with their audience by providing social commentary. I explore the role of stand-up comedy, particularly focusing on non-White bodies, the marginalized, and the colonized, in fostering endurance, resistance, and social commentary. My exploration centers around an analysis of Indian stand-up comedian Vir Das’s Netflix Special Vir Das For India- a stand-up narrative on the history of India, its people, and the relationship between India and the Global West. Drawing primarily from post-colonial literature by scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins, Barbara Christian, Indigenous scholar Dian Million, and Indian scholar Poulomi Mitra, I illustrate how stand-up comedy, with its distinctive narrative structure and humour, serves as a powerful tool for social theorizing. Christian and Collins highlight that people of colour have always theorized in ways distinct from Western abstract logic, often through narratives, stories, and proverbs. Million posits storytelling as a form of social theorizing, emphasizing an Indigenous inclination to connect diverse experiences. Mitra explains the Bengali concept of "Adda," a free-flowing, casual conversation with intellectual significance that fosters connections and community engagement. Stand-up transcends storytelling for marginalized and colonized bodies; it is a dynamic dialogue connecting experiences through punch lines and stories to present narratives charged with political significance. This theoretical essay, essentially a decolonial project, reflects my conscious effort to cite and draw from the knowledge of non-White and non-Western scholars. I deliberately build extensively on non-White theory, creating resisting knowledge projects that bring together ideas from various knowledge sites with distinct histories of critical theorizing. Traditionally, stand-up comedy has included jokes and routines that mock others, often containing sexist, racist, and discriminatory content. While this is characteristic of comedy, there are openings for subversion in the directions of gender justice, anti-racist, and anti-colonialist movements. The form of stand-up that weaves together storytelling, social commentary, and expressive language to craft comedic narratives has been labelled "post-comedy" or "anti-comedy." The problem with labelling certain stand-ups as post-comedy or anti-comedy lies in creating two distinct categories: one for frivolous jokes aimed solely at eliciting laughter and another for narrative, theoretical, and discursive jokes. However, to varying degrees, all stand-up is political, narrative and theoretical. Tensions over what the audience finds humorous not only showcase the comedians skill but also reflect societal acceptance. Thoroughly examining stand-up narratives, punch lines, and emotional cues reveals hidden social theories and explores how humour shapes audience beliefs. This redefinition positions stand-up comedy as a distinctive form of narrative and theorizing discourse, challenging norms, amplifying marginalized voices, and providing alternative narratives for endurance. Taking stand-up seriously opens doors in the theorizing landscape, fostering the development of theories within jokes, performances, and storytelling, offering new, engaging, and entertaining avenues for non-violent resistance and endurance.

Jimmy Xing, University of Toronto

Evaluating Policing and Inequality: Making Evaluative Claims in Toronto Police Board Meetings During 2018-2023

This paper is about how the cultural repertoires people draw on to evaluate urban policing shape and are shaped by peoples understanding of inequality. Evaluation is a cultural process that contributes to the production and reproduction of inequality. (Lamont et al. 2014). Threads of empirical evidence that support the claim that evaluation helps create the conditions from which inequality takes shape are often drawn from private sectors and the labour market. That is, how evaluative practices on the organizational level during different stages of hiring, recruitment and promotion discriminate against or favour certain groups of employees (Castilla and Benard 2010; Rivera 2012). In turn, the existing literature often overlooks state institutions and how the evaluative claims aimed to scrutinize or reinforce state legitimacy can provide insights into the relationship between repertoires of evaluations and inequality. In an effort to dive into this less-studied area, I turn to police board meetings as my data source as previous studies that utilized police board meetings or police-organized community meetings suggest that nonenforcement practices involved in these public forums can promote inequality (Cheng 2022). More specifically, I draw on six years of Toronto Police Service Board meeting transcripts (2018-2023) to identify the cultural repertories meeting participants use to evaluate policing and to articulate their normative ideals about justice, inequality and community wellbeing, as well as how these repertories changed before, during and after George Floyd protests in Toronto. How people draw on empirically diverse repertoires of their evaluations is at the core of research in French pragmatic sociology (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). The theoretical framework I use to code and analyze the data follows the line of work that explores the cultural repertories and economies of worth people marshal in various contexts to articulate values and evaluations (Lamont et al. 2016) as well as how orders of worth, which are systems of evaluations, provide actors with cultural repertoires for them to sustain their claims (Levi et al. 2020). I find that participants of police board meetings mainly draw on two economies of worth to evaluate local policing (civic and domestic) and the evaluations both shape and are shaped by meeting attendees changing understandings of inequality. On the one hand, people care about whether police practices are procedurally just and the civility of policing. They invoke repertories of fairness and equality to judge the quality of services the police provide. On the other hand, people are also mindful of local circumstances and draw on repertories of community and locality to evaluate how and if police tailor practices to ensure the neighbourhood and residents they police feel empowered, dignified and respected. I also find that since the wave of protests in 2020, evaluative narratives sustained by domestic order of worth experienced higher engagement rates in this particular local political forum. The implication of this trend will be discussed in the paper. This work aims to contribute to the literature on culture and inequality by looking at what institutionalized processes and cultural repertoires are in place to reinforce and challenge existing urban inequality. Moreover, because systems of evaluation are established through the availability and usage of cultural repertoires, the present paper also hope to offer insights into the politicizing process of cultural repertories that social movement activism supplies and its implications on the ground. 

Elisabeth Rondinelli, Saint Mary's University; Katherine Pendakis, Memorial University

Toward a Cultural Sociology of Failure

In this presentation we offer reflections on a newly emerging ‘culture of failure’ in North American society that has within it a critique of the ways in which our society is organized. This culture is mainly aimed at, concerned with, and produced by Millenials and Gen Z, and is expressed in mainstream media and social media ranging from observations of changes in the labour market (like ‘the great resignation’ and ‘quiet quitting’) to reflections on the mundane failures of everyday life (like ‘goblin mode’ and ‘bedrotting’). Importantly, this culture disrupts the dominant therapeutic narratives of failure, which tell us that it is best thought of as something from which to learn and a necessary stepping stone on the way to success and self-development. Because such narratives are oriented toward young people transitioning into adulthood, failure is represented as providing lessons on the way to achieving conventional and normative markers of adulthood. As sociologists, what tools do we have to make sense of this emerging culture of failure? In the absence of a ‘sociology of failure,’ we provide a systematic overview of the discipline’s implicit attempts to understand failure. Framing our overview in terms of the promises and limitations of these attempts, we examine contributions from both critical and cultural sociology. Critical sociologists have long been preoccupied with the power and pervasiveness of individualistic discourses that encourage people to take personal responsibility for their circumstances and status. We demonstrate that given critical sociologists’ preoccupation with critiquing the ways in which capitalism produces ideologies that justify inequality, they tend to narrowly treat discourses of failure as evidence of internalized individualism, false-consciousness, and neoliberal subjectivity (see, for instance, the work of Jennifer Silva in Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty). Since our interest is precisely in the critical capacities that are evident in contemporary discourses of failure, we argue that the critical sociological tradition requires considerable intervention if it is to recognize and explore how a culture of failure can also be a culture of critique. We then turn to cultural sociology. Given its foundational premise that social actors are agents engaged in creative meaning-making activity that cannot be reduced to reflections of structure, we would expect to find conceptual tools that could provide a more expansive analysis of cultural discourses of failure. While we do indeed discover these, we argue that, in practice, cultural sociologists tend to avoid taking up failure as a social fact requiring careful theoretical elaboration and detailed empirical investigation. Indeed, the closer cultural sociologists come to investigating failure, the more they rely on analyses from critical sociology that reduce actors’ talk of failure to evidence that they lack critical capacity and an understanding of the conditions that shape their lives. This overview of sociological treatments of failure is part of a larger research project that aims to develop theoretical and methodological tools for a more expansive sociological analysis of contemporary cultures of failure.