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A variety of concepts in the policing literature denote a so‐called “sixth sense” that police officers claim to possess. “Intuition,” “suspicion,” or “common sense” all specify a tacit knowledge said to heighten an officer's sensitivity to danger and potential suspects. This paper argues this type of knowledge exemplifies the application of “cultural schema” (DiMaggio, 1997): a shared knowledge structure that allows people to respond to environmental stimuli in ways that render their lives more predictable. We combine two case studies—one in Canada, the other in the Netherlands—which include ethnographic field notes and 199 interviews with police officers, to reconsider the police sixth sense in light of theoretical and empirical advances in cultural sociology and cognition research. This paper further discusses the benefit of studying this sixth sense itself as a form of cultural knowledge—that is, as “police culture”—to improve our understanding of cultural resources most or least compatible with emerging police reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates on musical taste have centred on the collapse of cultural boundaries between high art and popular culture. This paper examines Chinese hip‐hop as a unique case study to explore taste preferences in a relatively new popular cultural phenomenon in the understudied context of Eastern popular culture. Drawing from 42 interviews with Chinese young hip‐hop followers, the article examines musical taste preferences within Chinese hip‐hop and different modes of appreciation deployed by listeners. The findings reveal that young Chinese hip‐hop fans display cultural openness to foreign influences and genre mobility. The openness is employed as a marker of cultural capital for the Chinese middle class that values hybridity and innovation. However, even the most open‐minded individuals draw thematic hierarchies within hip‐hop through the unanimous rejection of vulgar and violent themes in favour of more serious and wholesome music. This rejection is framed as a strategy to authenticate hip‐hop within the broader popular culture arena while cultivating personal qualities of civility and wholesomeness that are highly valued in contemporary Chinese society. The paper contributes to the literature on musical taste preferences in cultural consumption by shedding light on the social relevance of cultural openness and music in contemporary Chinese popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study contributes to advancing research on a central problem in the sociology of celebrity: the sociopolitical impact of celebrity change. The paper argues for the need for more open‐ended analyses of the sociopolitical impact of contemporary celebrity change. These analyses utilize non‐Western data, avoid techno‐determinism, prioritize questions of why and how celebrity becomes progressive over monolithic assessments, and emphasize the investigation of celebrity's institutional and political contexts. It also supplies a partial solution to operationalize such analyses: focusing on whether and how a given celebrity system is becoming more (or less) democratized. Then it tests this solution by using it to examine Hong Kong celebrity change in the 2000s. My data sources include in‐depth interviews of 32 celebrities and industry insiders, participant observation, informal interviews, audiences' online discourses, and documentary materials. I find that Hong Kong celebrity became less democratized and that it was de‐democratized by six institutional changes: corporate suppression of media‐assisted paths of celebrity‐making, corporate corruption of fame reward systems, 'new ascribed celebrities,' corporate appropriation of celebrity news media, and the state's interference of celebrity. My findings demonstrate the utility of open‐ended analyses and my partial solution for operationalizing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the concern North Americans express about the impact their relatively higher incomes are having on lower income workers in Cuenca, Ecuador. North Americans who retire to Cuenca often perceive their impact to be minimal or benign, yet a large amount of discussion within the community of "expat" migrants is about different ways North Americans are affecting the local economy, and how to minimise these impacts. Of particular concern is the racialised price system that migrants perceive to be in effect. North Americans racialise their economic impact, seeing "gringo pricing," rather than their higher incomes, as a threat to the receiving community. Participants evoked moral codes to discuss price levels, and sought to diminish their impact – not merely out of concern for Ecuadorians who might be displaced by higher prices, but out of a sense of ruining the authenticity of Cuenca, a UNESCO World Heritage site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to facilitate more adequate critical engagement with current affairs events by journalists, and with current affairs texts by audiences. It draws on social theory to provide the intellectual resources to enable this. The academic ambition is for the framework to be adopted and developed by social thinkers in producing exemplary critical readings of news and current affairs texts. To this end it is offered as a research paradigm. The paper situates its argument in relation to the wider literature in media and cultural studies, acknowledging the subtle skills required to appreciate the relative autonomy of texts. However, it draws attention to the lack of an adequate perspective with which to assess the frames, representations, and judgments within news and current affairs texts. To address this lacuna it proposes the conception of a social-theoretical frame, based on a number of meta-theoretical approaches, designed to provide audiences with a systematic means of addressing the status and adequacy of individual texts. Social theoretical frames can reveal the shortcomings of media framing of the contextual fields within which news and current affairs events take place. Two illustrative case studies are used to indicate the value and potential of the approach: the analysis of a short newspaper report of the return of protesters to Cairo's Tahrir Square in 2011, and a critique of four current affairs reports from various genres on the political turmoil in Thailand leading up to the clashes of May 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life story methods in Europe commonly belong to the field of biographical sociology. This paper points out that biographical sociology is missing from American sociology and describes in-depth two well-known methods in this field in Europe, the narrative interview and objective hermeneutics. The absence of biographical sociology from U.S. sociology should be remedied, it is argued, for the following reasons: First, an analysis of biographical patterns could counteract the heavy emphasis on social structure in American sociology and enrich certain subfields within it. For example, some of the concepts used in European biographical sociology, such as the concept of the 'trajectory' can be related to conceptions of agency set forth by American and British sociologists and thus enrich sociology overall. Second, biographical sociology can help counteract the heavy orientation towards quantitative research in American sociology without falling into the pitfalls of purely interpretive methodologies. And third, biographical sociology can significantly enrich the still missing link between culture and cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 20 years, suicide rates have grown across most demographic groups in the United States, making the sociological study of suicide as imperative now as it was in Durkheim's day. For the most part, however, sociologists study suicide solely using Durkheim's analytic strategy. The following article recovers a text on suicide long since forgotten by sociology. Divided into three parts, the article begins first by revisiting Ruth Cavan's social disorganizational theory of suicide, eventually culminating in a formalization of her theory. Second, the article brings contemporary social scientific ideas to bear on her theory to modify and extend its empirical utility. Third, the article considers the implications this theoretical exercise has for an increasingly vibrant and creative sociology of suicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By leveraging the case of Hindu sati, this paper elucidates the ways in which structure and culture condition suicidal behavior by way of social psychological and emotional dynamics. Conventionally, sati falls under Durkheim's discussion of altruistic suicides, or the self-sacrifice of underindividuated or excessively integrated peoples like widows in traditional societies. In light of the fact that Durkheim's interpretation was based on uneven data, nineteenth century Eurocentric beliefs, and a theoretical framework that can no longer resist modification and elaboration, by reconsidering sati it is possible to sketch a new model that strengthens Durkheim's theory by making it more robust and generalizable. The following model is built on five principles. First, integration and regulation are not distinct causal forces, but overlapping contextual conditions. Second, to better explain the variation in suicidality across time and space, we must also pay attention to culture as it provides the underlying meanings of suicide that can increase the odds a person or class of persons become suicidal or are protected against suicidality. Third, structure still matters, but in many cases, the role power and power-differentials play must be considered. Fourth, understanding why and how people choose suicide depends on incorporating identity and status processes. Fifth, because the expression of social emotions like shame are patterned by structural and cultural conditions, to understand how suicidality is socioculturally patterned we must further explore the link between identity/status, social emotions, and structure and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive sociology has been split into cultural and interdisciplinary traditions that position themselves differently in relation to the cognitive sciences and make incompatible assumptions about cognition. This article provides an analysis and assessment of the cognitive and methodological assumptions of these two traditions from the perspective of the mechanistic theory of explanation. We argue that while the cultural tradition of cognitive sociology has provided important descriptions about how human cognition varies across cultural groups and historical periods, it has not opened up the black box of cognitive mechanisms that produce and sustain this variation. This means that its explanations for the described phenomena have remained weak. By contrast, the interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive sociology has sought to integrate cognitive scientific concepts and methods into explanatory research on how culture influences action and how culture is stored in memory. Although we grant that interdisciplinary cognitive sociologists have brought many fresh ideas, concepts and methods to cultural sociology from the cognitive sciences, they have not always clarified their assumptions about cognition and their models have sketched only a few specific cognitive mechanisms through which culture influences action, meaning that they have not yet provided a comprehensive explanatory understanding of the interactions between culture, cognition and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article examines knowledge production in the sociology of music. Focusing on the idea of cool music, we interrogate the nature of music researchers' relationship with their object of research. While the qualification and connotation of cool is widespread in popular music, sociology has largely neglected to engage with it as an object of research. Instead, the sociological investigation of music audiences is divided between two opposed but co-constructed paradigms that ultimately do not account for how cool emerges as a qualifier and connotation, how it performs as a discourse on music, and to what effect. Using the example of aging music researchers as a departure point, we examine how the cool connotations of music function as a mode of discourse that legitimates particular knowledge, practice, and taste, demarcating insider/outsider status. We explore how music acquires social connotations such as "cool" and whether that alters music researchers' approaches to it. We argue that apart from the disclosure of inclinations, social characteristics, and relationships to the object of research (music scenes, preferences, fandom, and so on), the tradition of reflexive empirical perspectives in music sociology should incorporate further deconstruction of the transformative dimensions in the relations between music and researcher. Music, as a complex and dynamic object, thus, requires sociology to produce accounts that both encompass people's enjoyment and experience as well as its boundary-defining capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the relationship between visual culture and the fight for visibility and attention in contemporary society. It draws on a concept of visual culture which not only sees the rising significance of the visual and the proliferation of images as its defining traits, but also the fact that, today, people are-to a much higher degree-both consumers as well as producers of images. Based on this definition, it is argued that in visually oriented communication and media societies, the anthropologically fundamental need for attention manifests itself as a fight for visibility which takes on the form of ever more extreme forms of public self-display. Furthermore, a portrait of two social figures-the star and the voyeur-will serve as further analysis and description of the social trends which can be tied to the emergence of today's visual culture. The article will close by discussing attention and visibility in terms of inclusion and exclusion and by proposing an analytical model for differentiating four modes of existence in a visual culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talk is easily regarded as having lesser value in studies of social phenomena than action, interaction, and organization. Yet talk is an important way in which humans act, interact, and organize themselves. In this article, I examine how talk has been used in recent decades in the study of religion and in related work on culture and institutions. I argue that careful empirical examination of talk has already significantly increased our understanding of both the micro and macro processes involved in the construction of social life. I discuss four objections to taking talk seriously and show that these objections should not deter investigations in which talk plays a central role. I offer examples of recent work that poses new conceptual and theoretical questions, complements quantitative studies, and provides insights about changing historical and contemporary social conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The determinants of and variations in processes of cultural valorization are of increasing interest to sociologists. In the case of high-culture literary texts, the central evaluation process takes place through canon formation. We explore the mechanisms of canon formation and of cultural valorization processes more generally by analyzing the critical history of Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Published in 1937 to lukewarm reviews, the novel is currently considered a core canonical text. We specify three processes involved in the reconstruction of Hurston's novel and in the establishment of the African American literary canon: (1) the application of new evaluative criteria, (2) the reconstruction of textual meaning through newly available interpretative strategies, and (3) changes in the institutional and organizational environment that allowed new claims on high-status critical positions to be made by those previously outside the literary hierarchy. The implications of this study for theoretical models of cultural valorization in sociology are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political conflict poses questions about social cohesion, power, and change that culturalist and materialist theories answer very differently. Comparative sociology requires a method for the integrated and weighted use of their answers. The following case study of environmental politics in Japan develops and illustrates the use of such a method. The types of sanctions used to build influence relations, analyzed through graphs and network matrices, indicate the relative validity of different theories. In this case, a class structure determines the main direction of environmental politics, but cultural legitimations sometimes divert it to other tracks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]