Programme full

Friday 17 April 2015 11:00 - 12:30
PAPER SESSION 7
Culture, Media, Sport and Consumption 2
W702, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
Cultural Production and the Morality of Markets: Popular Music Critics and the Conversion of Economic
Power into Symbolic Capital
Varriale, S.
(University of Warwick)
The paper examines the strategies through which cultural producers may convert their market success into a form of
symbolic capital, that is, into a range of distinctive moral values and symbolic boundaries. This question is explored in
relation to the rise of popular music criticism in Italy. Drawing on Bourdieu's field theory, the paper reconstructs the
field's historical genesis and examines the strategies of a heteronomous organisation (the music weekly 'Ciao 2001').
In doing so, it counterbalances the focus of field studies on small scale cultural production and argues that
commercially-oriented producers may contribute to the broader legitimation of market imperatives. Further, the paper
argues that producers' position in the global cultural field is likely to shape their understanding of heteronomous
forces, and thus the way they mobilise and convert different capitals. The paper provides an empirical contribution to
debates about the impact of market forces on cultural production, and to the growing scholarship on global cultural
fields and cultural criticism. Theoretically, it argues that autonomy and heteronomy should not be conceived of as
mutually exclusive ideal-types, but as dispositions embedded in concrete practices and fields of relations, which may
co-exist in the work of both avant-garde and large-scale cultural organisations.
Post-1970s Detective Fiction and the Problem of Social Order
Moore, S.
(Royal Holloway, University of London)
How should sociologists make sense of the crisis of social order in late modern, twenty-first century societies? The
central proposition of this paper is that contemporary detective fiction provides us with particularly illuminating and
provocative answers to this question. The first part of the paper traces the global emergence of a distinctive new
detective fiction during the 1970s and places this sub-genre alongside key socio-cultural developments across Europe
and North America, including the emergence of law and order politics, the institutionalisation of the counter-culture,
the slow decline of welfarist policies, the steady growth of social inequalities, and a creeping pessimism concerning
the efficiency and desirability of hierarchical social structures. The second part of the paper considers the ways in
which detective novels of the post-1970s era — and the paper takes a sweeping, global view of the genre,
incorporating literature from Scandinavia, the UK, Ireland, and Italy — crystallise the problem of social order in late
modern societies.
(Im)permeable Boundaries: The Construction, Negotiation and Performance of Dance Consumer Identities
Bhardwa, B.
(Lancaster University)
This paper explores how dance consumer identities are constructed, negotiated and performed within three dance
settings. Dance settings and the leisure arena more broadly - as a distinct space away from the world of work and
responsibility or 'real-life' - provides a scaffold for the reflexive construction of self-identity in late modern society. As
traditional anchors of family, community, social class, religion and politics combine with a focus on individualism,
consumerism and mediated experience, it is suggested that participation in leisure has become an important vehicle
through which the 'project of the self' (Giddens 1991) is realised.
Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in clubs in the north-west of England, outdoor dance music
festivals in the UK and the 'party island' of Ibiza, I demonstrate how different 'types' of dance consumers construct,
negotiate and perform identity in-situ; mediated by the subjectively-defined rules of cultural inclusion and exclusion.
This produces boundaries between dance consumers, that are at once permeable and impermeable, or what I term,
(im)permeable boundaries.
Through the use of cultural markers such as alcohol and drug use, fashion, clothing and bodies, dance consumers
erect, defend and 'control' cultural boundaries; symbolic constructs that are used to reaffirm their own 'authentic'
identities in juxtaposition with 'inauthentic' others. The spatial manifestations of class, gender and ethnic 'othering' are
explored. It is concluded that dance settings provide a space for the creative expression of dance consumer identities
and calls for the reinsertion of social class and its intersections into contemporary studies of leisure.
BSA Annual Conference 2015 262
Glasgow Caledonian University