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The sociological study of popular cinema provides an analytic entry point for exploring how economic realities are given meaning through cultural products. In this paper, I compare how two Hollywood movies about bike messengers, Quicksilver and Premium Rush, position their main characters in relationship to the new economy. Both films provide commentaries on work and social class, but, as products of unique socio-historical periods, I argue that their commentaries differ significantly. Produced in the 1980s, Quicksilver uses messengering as a form of middle-class redemption, allowing the protagonist to return to the world of capitalist finance. By contrast, as a product of the Great Recession, Premium Rush offers a utopian vision of self-determination for low-wage service workers at the same time that it reifies the uncertainty, unpredictability, and riskiness that increasingly characterize American labor. I also show that both films converge in their portrayal of women and working-class blacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When theorizing differences in action between structurally unequal groups, sociologists often disagree over the roles that structure, culture, and resources play. It is not uncommon for debates to arise in which structural explanations for unequal outcomes are pitted against cultural ones, with the former pointing to group resource disparities and the latter emphasizing differences in how groups think and do things. In this article, we develop a theoretical approach that conceptualizes culture as an element of social structure and draws on Sewell's multiplicity of structures and Bourdieu's habitus to theorize group differences in action as structural. This approach, we argue, advances a structural sociology of stratification that helps counter the tendency for U.S. individualism to promote interpretations of group differences/disparities as having individual-level rather than structural-level sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on an ethnographic study of the process by which a young man became a drug dealer in a in a small northeastern US city. Drug dealing was the principal occupation in his predominantly black neighborhood. This process is treated as an initiation into a criminal career that involved not only the mastery of specific steps of drug dealing but also learning the expectations of the local interaction order framing the space where he lives. Approached in this way, one young man’s story offers a window into the local interaction order of a drug-dealing space: a set of local social practices that must be routinely mastered in the area where he grew up. The pervasiveness of drug-dealing practices in the local interaction order offers valuable insight into how and why male youth in this locale would enter the drug trade and are at considerable risk of arrest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay brings together ‘commodity chain’ analysis with some of the central concerns motivating studies of consumption and consumer culture. It argues that we can, from the perspective of capitalist agents and agencies, discern important historical shifts in the economic significance of the various activities that generate modern consumer culture, or ‘consumer cultural production’. Shifts in both the nature and intensity of competitive pressures imply different roles for consumer cultural production within the portfolios and strategies of leading capitalist organizations over time. Thus, the essay provides a framework for periodizing and linking historical shifts in the organization of commodity chains in relation to transformations in the structure and nature of consumer cultural production over roughly the past century. More concretely, it connects the broad shift from commodity chains organized along a ‘producer-driven’ form to the ‘buyer-driven’ arrangement to different kinds of ‘market making’ through consumer cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]