(SCL7) Cultural Production and Consumption

Presentations in this session will explore the production and circulation of cultural goods from a sociological perspective. Researchers featured in this session will present work that spans methodological approaches to the sociology of culture while theorizing creative work, arts funding, market emergence, and traditions. Tags: Culture, Work And Professions

Organizers: Taylor Price, New York University, Sonia Bookman, University of Manitoba; Chair: Kim de Laat, University of Waterloo

Presentations

Kim de Laat, University of Waterloo

What lies beyond the field? Understanding the relationship between cultural production and social reproduction

Like other forms of paid labour, paid creative work is made possible for many by the unpaid reproductive labour of others. Compared to other sites of work, the role of caregiving responsibilities in creative industries has received scant attention. Emphasis on precarity, which has dominated the research agenda over the past decade, includes characterizations of creative work as entrepreneurial and self-expressive on the one hand, or self-exploitative and anxiety-inducing on the other. Both extremes contain an unstated assumption that creative work is nevertheless possible, albeit under less-than-ideal circumstances. But caregiving constrains the very opportunity to pursue creative work, based on family dynamics. Through couple interviews with parents working in or opting out of creative work (N=20), this paper investigates how social reproduction within families helps or hinders the pursuit of creative practice. Empirically, it identifies the experiential dimensions of time as a major influence. Namely, individuals find time, flex time, or forego time for creative practice, with each approach holding major implications for creative career longevity and financial precarity. Theoretically, this paper highlights the conceptual purchase gained from synthesizing socio-cognitive theories of time and temporality (Sharma, 2014; Zerubvael 1981) with feminist theories of care (Doucet, 2023; Tronto, 2013).  

Tonya Davidson, Carleton University

Slutty Pumpkins: The production, circulation, and consumption of Halloween costumes

The histories of Halloween, its origin in Celtic, Irish and Scottish traditions, as a synthesis and reworking of various nighttime rituals dating from the 1st century B.C Celtic feast of Samhain have been well-established (MacKillip 2004; Morton 2012; Rogers 2002). Sociologists have also devoted some scholarship to researching specific aspects of contemporary Halloween traditions like dressing up in costumes, and trick or treating in specific contexts. Some sociologists have found that, in the context of American college parties, White students feel comfortable dressing up in racially-coded costumes, while racialized students in turn experience the holiday as hostile, and parents use Halloween as an opportunity to express their identity, and class distinction through their children’s Halloween costumes (Levinson et al 1992; Mueller et al 2007). However, sociological research on the production, circulation, and donning of Halloween costumes is limited. Drawing on Simmel’s understanding of fashion, I understand wearing costumes to serve the twin functions of: individualization and social conformity. Costumes are key to identity-crafting practices at the individual and collective level. Wearing costumes (like wearing masks in many cultures around the world) is an identity-transforming moment for individuals. Yet options for costumes, the reception of costumes, and the procuring of costumes all happen within broader social contexts of local communities and Halloween industries. Costume wearing sets people apart, and a part of larger communities. The designing and wearing of costumes are also characterized by an overwhelming spirit of play, and joke-making, mockery, and also more straightforward frivolity. As such, costume wearing is amenable to a symbolic interactionist analysis. Considering the power dynamics inherent in joke-telling, larger structural analyses of various power structures. This is true of children’s and adults’ Halloween costumes. Sociologists have detailed how parents perform their parenting identities through the careful selection of costumes for their children (Levinson et al, 1992). The options for children’s store-bought Halloween costumes sit within what Beryl Langer refers to as the “paradox of childhood” (Langer 2002)— they are both enchanting, positioning childhood itself within the realm of the sacred, yet at the same time the costumes are mass-produced and consumed, and worn in the interests of the mass consumption of candy. This tension between individual creativity and conformity is at the crux of the debates around racist and culturally inappropriate Halloween costumes. Challenges to these costumes are often framed as assaults on freedom of speech, and more broadly individual freedom—freedom to individual creativity—which costumes are imagined to express. However, framing problematic costumes as expressions of creativity and individuality, ignores the ways into which so many of these costumes are explicitly expressions of imitation rather than individuality, that racism is something we are socialized into, that it has age-old histories, and articulations of racist and sexist logics, are, instead of being highly individual, expressions of group belonging—both in current moments (belonging to a school community, to a local community) and to broader historic belonging to certain structures (belonging to the un-maligned race, the gender with historic and ongoing power, etc). In this paper, drawing on contemporary stories of fraught (racist, sexist, otherwise offensive) costumes worn at adult parties, and extant research on children’s Halloween costume choices, I offer a sociological reading of the politics, solidarity-building and fracturing functions of designing and wearing Halloween costumes, with a focus on racist costumes, and highly sexualized costumes for women.  

Ethan Shapiro, University of Toronto

Brewing Niches: Towards a Cognitive-Field Theory of Market Emergence

In recent decades, culture and cognition scholars have demonstrated the necessity of understanding practice at the level of thought to clarify the background assumptions of previous social theory (DiMaggio, 1997). However, such research tends to underemphasize the ways in which cognition is embedded within external social structures, or explains this embeddedness in terms of durable, socially derived dispositions. This paper argues for a conception of fields as cognitive constraints, directing actors to draw on automatic and deliberative cognition, habitual and nonhabitual practices, nondeclarative and declarative culture to construct strategies of action within concrete relational circumstances. I first outline two dominant levels of cognition and the modal forms of culture through which actors construct strategies of action, suggesting that the use of these cultural-cognitive processes is dependent on the social contexts of practice (i.e., fields). Markets operate as fields that provide varying degrees of socio-cognitive scaffolding contingent on their stage of development – emergence, stability, or crisis. These market phases shape the degree of habituality a practice is likely to take on, the cognitive level through which it is achieved, and the type of culture it employs. I then apply this typology of practice to an empirical case of niche cultural production: the craft beer industry. Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with craft brewery owners and operators, I show that this emergent market exerted key constraints on practice, making habitual/non-habitual practice and deliberative/automatic cognition more or less feasible. Instead of arising through the mere application of aesthetic dispositions, I suggest that novel cultural markets emerge, in part, through actors’ emanantmarket orientations: the deliberative, attentional process of monitoring and evaluating the positions and practices of other market actors. Finally, I discuss the implications of this cognitive-field view for sociological theories of cultural production and intermediation, market emergence and change, as well as dual-process models, the material and temporal dimensions of cultural cognition, and the cognition-structure dialectic.