We tend to think of consecration as something happening to individuals: We say that someone has been consecrated when they have been declared a saint, inducted into a hall of fame, or presented with ...a lifetime achievement award. The present article explores the analytical payoffs of looking at consecration as a population-level phenomenon, that is, as the delineation of clear-cut divides between the chosen and the rest in a population of candidates. This approach, I argue, brings out the unique character of consecration as an abstract process of status formation: It enhances the perceived worth of the consecrated, not by confirming that they are individually worthy, but by asserting the existence in a field of a reliable hierarchy of worthiness. A population-level approach also implies that consecrating institutions derive some of their authority from the forcefulness of the divides they draw between elected individuals and others. The article shows how this explains some of the salient features of retrospective consecration projects. To make these points I analyze cases of consecration in a variety of empirical domains, from politics to the arts, sports, and religion.
Past research has posited that occupations are distinct and exclusive communities of workers and used single-entry questions in surveys to measure occupational self-identification. Our study ...challenges that view by reporting the existence of polyoccupationalism, or workers’ simultaneous identification with multiple occupations. We predict this phenomenon co-occurs with postindustrial forms of work organization and that its expression varies with workers’ position in the occupational structure. Using a survey on creative workers that uniquely allowed respondents to identify with multiple occupations, we find individuals report higher levels of polyoccupationalism when their work is more contract- and project-based, net of other individual and occupational attributes. We further show that polyoccupationalism takes different forms at the top and the bottom of the occupational hierarchy: whereas the polyoccupationalism of high-status “entrepreneurs” stretches expertise—they identify with occupations that are similar in status but functionally distinct—that of lower-status “hustlers” stretches status—the occupations they report involve similar tasks but stand farther apart on the occupational status scale. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding workers’ occupational identities and the dynamics of occupational hierarchies.
The Architecture of Status Hierarchies ACCOMINOTTI, FABIEN; LYNN, FREDA; SAUDER, MICHAEL
RSF : Russell Sage Foundation journal of the social sciences,
11/2022, Letnik:
8, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We argue that the properties of status hierarchies, independent of the positions actors occupy within them, have important effects on the degree of inequality in material rewards generated by status ...processes. We first discuss how a focus on status hierarchies differs from, complements, and extends the traditional focus on individual-level status positions. Drawing on a range of empirical case studies, we then identify three architectural features of status hierarchies—variations in their verticality, the clarity of their distinctions, and their rigidity—that affect the extent of inequality in the rewards received by the incumbents of high versus low status positions. We conclude by highlighting promising research questions and hypotheses that this macroscopic, status hierarchies approach raises.
The aesthetics of hierarchy Accominotti, Fabien
The British journal of sociology,
March 2021, 2021-Mar, 2021-03-00, 20210301, Letnik:
72, Številka:
2
Journal Article
This article revisits David W. Galenson's work on the relationship between artistic creativity and the life cycle of artists. Galenson introduces a simple classification of creativity careers (early
...vs. late-bloomers), relates it to a bipartite typology of creativity (conceptual
vs. experimental innovators) and builds on this typology to explain the decreasing trend of age at which artists were most creative over several generations in the 19th and 20th centuries. Drawing on Galenson's measures, the present paper uses a different approach to overcome possible criticisms to his design. Applying sequence analysis to creativity careers of 41 major modern painters, it also yields a fairly different story from the one Galenson proposes. In particular, I show that a typology of creativity should distinguish between creativity occurring within artistic movements and other forms of creativity. This distinction is important, for the decrease in age at peak creativity over time seems actually driven by the evolution of movement-related creativity alone. Investigating the specific issue of creativity over the life cycle of artists, and showing that movements and interactions play an important part in the picture, the paper thus suggests there is something more than the mere individual involved in artistic creativity.
This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find ...support for the classic account of high culture’s purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers hailing from an emerging professional, managerial, and intellectual middle class. Importantly, the inclusion of this new audience was segregated: they did not mingle with elites in the concert hall. This segregated inclusion paved a specific way for the constitution of cultural capital. It meant that greater purity and greater inclusiveness happened together, enabling elite cultural participation to remain distinctive while elite tastes acquired broader social currency.
This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find ...support for the classic account of high culture’s purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers hailing from an emerging professional, managerial, and intellectual middle class. Importantly, the inclusion of this new audience was segregated: they did not mingle with elites in the concert hall. This segregated inclusion paved a specific way for the constitution of cultural capital. It meant that greater purity and greater inclusiveness happened together, enabling elite cultural participation to remain distinctive while elite tastes acquired broader social currency.
In most contemporary societies, people underestimate the extent of economic inequality, resulting in lower support for taxation and redistribution than might be expressed by better informed citizens. ...We still know little, however, about how understandings of inequality arise, and therefore about where perceptions and misperceptions of it might come from. This methodological article takes one step toward filling this gap by developing a research design—a blueprint—to study how people’s understandings of wealth and income inequality develop through social interaction. Our approach combines insights from recent scholarship highlighting the socially situated character of inequality beliefs with those of survey experimental work testing how information about inequality changes people’s understandings of it. Specifically, we propose to use deliberative focus groups to approximate the interactional contexts in which individuals process information and form beliefs in social life. Leveraging an experimental methodology, our design then varies the social makeup of deliberative groups, as well as the information about inequality we share with participants, to explore how different types of social environments and information shape people’s understandings of economic inequality. This should let us test, in particular, whether the low socioeconomic diversity of people’s discussion and interaction networks relates to their tendency to underestimate inequality, and whether beliefs about opportunity explain people’s lack of appetite for redistributive policies. In this exploratory article we motivate our methodological apparatus and describe its key features, before reflecting on the findings from a proof-of-concept study conducted in London in the fall of 2019.
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