The article aims to theoretically intervene in the debate surrounding the supply-side approach in the sociology of religion. While proponents of this paradigm have used economic laws to explain patterns of religious participation, critics have held that such concepts are an inadequate rendering of the religious realm. This article proposes a third way to studying religious markets, analogous to the performative turn in economic sociology. Instead of rejecting the ontology of (religious) markets from the outset, this line of inquiry asks how actors and socio-technical arrangements projecting such an ontology are inadvertently engaged in constructing a reality in tune with economic notions. To illustrate the utility of this approach, the paper uses the case of nineteenth-century evangelical missions to show how a missionary theology, congruous with the tenets of the supply-side paradigm, effectively spawned a religious economy in foreign fields as envisioned by missionaries (and supply-side theorists).

For a creative expression to be widely recognized as art, sociology of art scholars argue that proponents must apply a legitimizing discourse that supporters of past art forms have successfully used. Unfortunately, sociology of art scholars have ignored the affective connections people have with these art forms and how proponents draw upon these meanings in their push for legitimation. To be sensitive to this dimension, scholars must adopt principles from the Strong Program (SP) of cultural sociology. To demonstrate the insights we gain from a SP approach, I examine how video game fans responded to disparaging comments made by the prominent film critic Roger Ebert. My findings indicate that certain aspects of fans’ push for artistic recognition are consistent with previous research. However, fans also express meaningful attachments to video games, and this affective dimension influences the narratives they construct in their pushes for legitimation. Moreover, the narratives fans construct disagree on whether video games are or can become art. Despite these disagreements, all the narratives emerge from the same affective foundation. These findings demonstrate the need for sociologists to examine how pushes for artistic legitimation build upon a deeply felt foundation.

In this paper, we draw on the case of Chinese Model Opera during the Cultural Revolution to demonstrate not only an extreme case of political control over cultural production but to consider the role of the state’s involvement in the consumption side of cultural politics. In addition to a textual analysis of the videos and librettos of 11 Model Operas, we analyze 274 reports and reviews related to Model Operas in the People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao) from the period 1964 to 1976, as well as supplement government documents. Our analysis of Chinese Model Opera extends our theoretical understanding of the potential relationships between political power and culture. Totalitarian regimes that take culture seriously, understanding art as a crucial resource in the reconstruction of society, may expand their involvement to direct not just what type of art is produced, but the conditions of its viewing, interpretation, and evaluation.

The 2016 presidential election has precipitated a significant crisis in the world of journalism, prompting journalists and media critics to consider the shifts that have taken place in the media ecosystem. Journalists have had to narrate their sense of failure in order to understand it, and to integrate it within their larger worldview and their normative professional commitments. They have had to think about why they failed to see the Alt-Right as an independent and alternative public sphere. They have had to think about how the new media environment has challenged the taken-for-granted epistemological privileges of traditional journalism. They have had to confront the rise of populist discourse, and consider how it challenges journalists’ authority by equating them with elites. In their self-reflection after the election, journalists have sought to update the sacred discourse of journalism and to justify their central position in a democratic society. In order to do this, they have mobilized around a new battle narrative, which foregrounds the collective memory of Watergate and encourages a reconsideration of alliances that might be formed with new media.

Characterizing Trump supporters either as “duped” by Fox News or as speaking from their lived experience misses the fact that both are true. We draw on scholarship on narrative and on the media to trace the ways in which elite-produced stories simultaneously reflect and forge a political common sense. We argue that narrative’s allusiveness (the fact that stories work by calling up other stories) helps to explain why stories produced by media elites come to feel as if they reflect people’s experience. The fact that people often share stories as a way of building collective identity, for its part, helps to explain why stories’ plausibility may be relatively unimportant to those people. Both features of storytelling are intrinsic to the form, but their political effects have been sharpened by two significant changes in the media landscape: the rise of right-wing media outlets and the profusion of user-shared digital news. We trace these developments as a way to make sense of Trump’s electoral support in 2016.

The finding that ethnic prejudice is particularly weakly developed among those with interethnic friendships is often construed as confirming the so-called ‘contact theory,’ which holds that interethnic contact reduces racial prejudice. This theory raises cultural–sociological suspicions, however, because of its tendency to reduce culture to an allegedly ‘more fundamental’ realm of social interaction. Analyzing data from the first wave of the European Social Survey, we therefore test the theory alongside an alternative cultural–sociological theory about culturally driven processes of contact selection. We find that whereas interethnic friendships are indeed culturally driven, which confirms our cultural–sociological theory, contacts with neighbors and colleagues do indeed affect ethnic prejudice. They do so in a manner that is more complex and more culturally sensitive than contact theory suggests, however: while positive cultural stances vis-a-vis ethnic diversity lead interethnic contact to decrease ethnic prejudice, negative ones rather lead the former to increase the latter.

This paper documents an exchange for healthy human subjects of medical experiments brokered and carried out by a labor union (The United Mine Workers of America) and the federal government (The US National Institutes of Health). The organizations legally established the exchange in a 1960 contract; jobless people took part in the exchange throughout the decade; and the exchange served as a “prototype” for additional exchanges between NIH and organizations in blue-collar communities. The exchange was successful because the organizations negotiated two “dissonant descriptions” of the same action to manage two different audiences – one legal, one vernacular. The case engages three issues in cultural sociology. First, the episode illustrates how philosopher GEM Anscombe’s concept of “action under a description” solves a puzzle embedded in studies of culture-in-action and offers a way to more systematically study symbolic action. Second, it demonstrates precisely how organizations, paradoxically, use the language of voluntarism to accomplish market goals. Third, it illuminates the terms of engagement with new commodities and markets in the age of biocapital and in doing so helps deepen understandings of moral markets.

The study of rumor is used to examine claims about “live organ harvesting” told by a new religious movement, Falun Gong. The veracity of the rumor is debated and its truth status remains unsettled. I argue that an unsettled rumor told by a marginal community is a problem for the sociology of rumor. This problem is partly resolved by examining how the rumor fits within the culture of its carrier group. An analysis based on ethnographic materials and publications shows how mythic significations evoked by the rumor within Falun Gong influenced how participants communicated to non-Falun Gong audiences. Advocates of the rumor attempted to align its details with deeply held meanings shared within the Falun Gong community. Because non-Falun Gong audiences did not share these mythic associations, such rhetoric made the rumor less plausible to general audiences. How rumor details were represented contributed to public skepticism but has no bearing on the truth status of the underlying rumor. This conclusion has implications not only for evaluating the present rumor but also for the wider study of rumor: evaluating an unsettled rumor told by a marginal group requires a culturally sensitive analysis in order to account for the potentially distorting effects of narration.

Whereas theorists of nationalism often consider mass solidarity to be an abstract relation between strangers, this essay presents a new theoretical approach for studying national solidarity through the prism of friendship and sociability. Building on Simmel’s relational approach and Neo-Durkheimian accounts of intermediate associations, it is argued that modern institutions operate as social clubs of sorts where unaffiliated strangers can transform into friends. Drawing on a range of examples ranging from the mass army and Masonic lodges to interactive media, it is shown how social club sociability engenders a form of “public intimacy” that extends feelings of familiarity, exclusivity, and loyalty to wider society. The growing segmentation and differentiation of institutional life place increasing demands on individuals to successfully transform strangers into friends. This competence carries symbolic meanings and is part of what enables a mass society to be continuingly imagined as a nation.