How do we attribute a monetary value to intangible things? This article offers a general sociological approach to this question, using the economic value of nature as a paradigmatic case, and oil ...spills litigations in France and the United States as real world empirical illustrations. It suggests that a full-blown sociology of economic valuation must solve three problems: the "why," which refers to the general place of money as a metric for worth; the "how," which refers to the specific techniques and arguments laymen and experts deploy to elicit monetary translations; and the "then what" or the feedback loop from monetary values to social practices and representations. Adapted from the source document.
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The rise in subprime lending and the ensuing wave of foreclosures was partly a result of market forces that have been well-identified in the literature, but it was also a highly racialized process. ...We argue that residential segregation created a unique niche of minority clients who were differentially marketed risky subprime loans that were in great demand for use in mortgage-backed securities that could be sold on secondary markets. We test this argument by regressing foreclosure actions in the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas on measures of black, Hispanic, and Asian segregation while controlling for a variety of housing market conditions, including average creditworthiness, the extent of coverage under the Community Reinvestment Act, the degree of zoning regulation, and the overall rate of subprime lending. We find that black residential dissimilarity and spatial isolation are powerful predictors of foreclosures across U.S. metropolitan areas. To isolate subprime lending as the causal mechanism through which segregation influences foreclosures, we estimate a two-stage least squares model that confirms the causal effect of black segregation on the number and rate of foreclosures across metropolitan areas. We thus conclude that segregation was an important contributing cause of the foreclosure crisis, along with overbuilding, risky lending practices, lax regulation, and the bursting of the housing price bubble.
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What do sociologists mean when they describe culture as founded on "shared understandings"? Sharing an understanding does not necessarily imply having the same opinions but rather agreeing on the ...structures of relevance and opposition that make symbols and actions meaningful. Because meaning is contextual, different people might interpret the same reality in different ways. Yet standard quantitative sociological methods are not designed to take such heterogeneity into account. In this article, I introduce a new method -- relational class analysis -- that uses attitudinal data to identify groups of individuals that share distinctive ways of understanding the same domain of social activity. To demonstrate its utility I use it to reexamine the cultural omnivore thesis. I find that Americans' understandings of the social symbolism of musical taste are shaped by three competing logics of cultural distinction, in a manner that complicates contemporary sociological accounts of artistic taste. Adapted from the source document.
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Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful than average, suggesting that "the best" alternatives are qualitatively different from "the rest"; yet experts routinely fail to predict ...which products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by creating an artificial "music market" in which 14,341 participants downloaded previously unknown songs either with or without knowledge of previous participants' choices. Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible.
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•This paper ascertains how social norms are related to flood insurance decision.•Perceived flood risk failed to predict the likelihood of having flood cover.•Contrary to the dominant view, risk ...perception did not have direct impacts.•Perceived social norms created positive impacts and also varied with perceived risk.•Social norms played a mediating role between risk perception and behaviour.
Flood insurance plays an important role in climate adaptation by recovering insured losses in the event of catastrophic flooding. Voluntary adoption of flood insurance has been seen as a function of risk perception that is shaped by social norms. This paper attempts to clarify the relationship between these factors. It is based on a household survey conducted in the eastern cities of Australia and involving a total of 501 randomly selected residents. Results of a path analysis show that the likelihood of having flood insurance cover was associated with perceived social norms, but not perceived flood risk. In addition, perceived norms and risk were statistically related to each other. It is concluded that social norms played a mediating role between insuring decision and risk perception. Risk perception might influence the insuring decision indirectly through shaping perception of social norms. This implies that adaptive behaviour is not necessarily a function of risk perception, but an outcome of its impacts upon the ways in which the individuals situate themselves in their social circles or the society. There is a feedback process in which individual perceptions of risk manifest as both a cause and effect, shaping and being shaped by the socio-cultural context.
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In this paper we discuss the deadlocks of defining art in modern culture. The lack of criteria and modernism revisited are of crucial issue in this account. The theoretical mainframe of our approach ...is founded on the Frankfurt School thinkers (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin), and of course Jürgen Habermas. This theoretical apparatus also draws on contemporary accounts given by Sorbonne Professor Marc Jimenez and art critic John A. Walker.1 The paper discusses whether fine art may survive, in what forms – and to what purpose – in an age of mass media and in conditions of rapid networked communication. The paper sets off from the critical role radical art plays in today’s divided yet global world and on the continuing debates between high art and low culture, but reflects on the interaction between art, media and technology.
To support our argument we suggest Body Art and other web/digital and technological applications in art, and the cyber-art currently being produced for the internet. The paper acknowledges the numerous interactions between art and culture in a postmodern pluralistic world, and draws from the vast range of contemporary works of art to illustrate and to criticize theoretical points. The true test of theory in aesthetics is their application to particular cases. When a theory shows limitations in such an application, we gain clues as to what theoretical adjustments or innovations are called for to accommodate today’s works.
The introductory part of the essay comprehensively surveys recent debates on works of art, mass culture and society, and their socio-philosophical significance. The main discussion refers to the work of Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas, aptly commented on by Marc Jimenez;2 after exploring the complex relationships between culture and art as it’s reflected in that work, the argument provides an account of the 1980s political turn in aesthetics and explicates the impact of new communication technologies in modern culture. The narration is enhanced by specific examples of works of art in the era of mass media, web and digital culture, and underlines both the styles’ pluralism and the variety of parameters affecting the interaction between art and mass media communication. Critical findings and suggestions for further research conclude the paper.
1 Marc Jimenez, Qu’est-ce que l’esthétique, Paris: Gallimard, 1997; John A. Walker, Art in the Age of Mass Media, London: Pluto, 2001.
2 Jimenez, Ibid.
In recent debates about the ever-growing prominence of celebrity in society and culture, a number of scholars have started to use the often intermingled terms ‘celebrification’ and ‘celebritization’. ...This article contributes to these debates first by distinguishing and clearly defining both terms, and especially by presenting a multidimensional conceptual model of celebritization to remedy the current one-sided approaches that obscure its theoretical and empirical complexity. Here ‘celebrification’ captures the transformation of ordinary people and public figures into celebrities, whereas ‘celebritization’ is conceptualized as a meta-process that grasps the changing nature, as well as the societal and cultural embedding of celebrity, which can be observed through its democratization, diversification and migration. It is argued that these manifestations of celebritization are driven by three separate but interacting moulding forces: mediatization, personalization and commodification.
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This revised edition of a now classic text includes a new introduction by Henry Jenkins, explaining ‘Why Fiske Still Matters’ for today’s students, followed by a discussion between former Fiske ...students Kevin Glynn, Jonathan Gray, and Pamela Wilson on the theme of ‘Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular’. Both underline the continuing relevance of this foundational text in the study of popular culture.
What is popular culture? How does it differ from mass culture? And what do popular "texts" reveal about class, race, and gender dynamics in a society? John Fiske answers these and a host of other questions in Understanding Popular Culture .
When it was first written, Understanding Popular Culture took a groundbreaking approach to studying such cultural artifacts as jeans, shopping malls, tabloid newspapers, and TV game shows, which remains relevant today. Fiske differentiates between mass culture – the cultural "products" put out by an industrialized, capitalist society – and popular culture – the ways in which people use, abuse, and subvert these products to create their own meanings and messages. Rather than focusing on mass culture’s attempts to dominate and homogenize, he prefers to look at (and revel in) popular culture’s evasions and manipulations of these attempts.
Designed as a companion to Reading the Popular , Understanding Popular Culture presents a radically different theory of what it means for culture to be popular: that it is, literally, of the people. It is not imposed on them, it is created by them, and its pleasures and meanings reflect popular tastes and concerns – and a rejection of those fostered by mass culture. With wit, clarity, and insight, Professor Fiske debunks the myth of the mindless mass audience, and demonstrates that, in myriad ways, popular culture thrives because that audience is more aware than anyone guesses.
@contents: Selected Contents: Acknowledgements Why Fiske Still Matters Henry Jenkins Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular Kevin Glynn, Jonathan Gray and Pamela Wilson Notes on Contributors Preface Chapter 1 The Jeaning of America Chapter 2 Commodities and Culture Chapter 3 Productive Pleasures Chapter 4 Offensive Bodies and Carnival Pleasures Chapter 5 Popular Texts Chapter 6 Popular Discrimination Chapter 7 Politics References Index
John Fiske is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
•Using more than 750 estimates, we perform a meta-regression analysis of studies examining the relationship between economic growth per capita and natural disasters.•We conclude that there exists a ...negative genuine effect of natural disasters on economic growth which is increasing over the period of our analysis.•In particular, it turns out that climatic disasters in developing countries have the most significant adverse impact on economic growth.•We also find strong evidence that a large part of the negative impact of natural disasters found in studies is caused by a publication bias.
Using more than 750 estimates, we perform a meta-regression analysis of studies examining the relationship between economic growth per capita and natural disasters. The studies considered are very different with respect to the type of disasters considered, the sample of countries and time periods covered, model specification, estimators used and publication outlet. After extensive testing of our results, we conclude that there exists a negative genuine effect of natural disasters on economic growth which is increasing over the period of our analysis. Still, the magnitude differs across disasters included and country sample used. In particular, it turns out that climatic disasters in developing countries have the most significant adverse impact on economic growth. However, we also find some evidence that a part of the negative impact of natural disasters found in these studies is caused by a publication bias.
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