Television streaming services afford experiences that align with and go beyond what linear television affords. These experiential differences relate to self-scheduling opportunities and how on-demand services are organized as libraries of content. The aim of this article is to conceptualize and investigate how conditions related to streaming and agency are associated with the enjoyment of watching on-demand television. The article first conceptualizes and develops measures that reflect how audiences experience watching on-demand television, and secondly validates and tests how these measures predict enjoyment. Results suggest that enjoyment is primarily explained by social significance, immersive viewing, lower levels of deliberate viewing, and positive perceptions of programmed paths. The article argues for the need for analytical approaches where viewers are neither treated as gullible targets of media power nor all-empowered subjects.

From business events such as content trade fairs, we can learn about the institutional logics of contemporary cultural industries. In our ethnographic fieldwork at six different trade fairs in three industries (book, music and TV), we identified five ways of legitimating the commercial production and distribution of cultural goods: cultural industries are represented as an idealized form of business, as art for art's sake, as innovation and technology, as entertainment and as a public sphere. Our findings both confirm and contradict Bourdieu's theory of cultural production fields. In accordance with Bourdieu's description of the field as a reversed economic world, we observed an industry which struggles to disguise ordinary economic transactions, such as negotiating deals, ordering services or making contracts. In contrast to Bourdieu, we do not find a strong homology between a position in the field and its symbolic representation. Rather, we observed that small enterprises from the restricted field of cultural production as well as large-scale producers and distributors of cultural goods use the same narratives to legitimate their practices. Borrowing from recent advancements in organizational institutionalism, we interpret the symbolic representations at trade fairs as a cultural toolkit from which people in the industry strategically choose in order to pursue their interests.

How does a community with a history punctuated by responding to disasters understand the slow risk posed by industrial toxic exposure? Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a contaminated informal settlement in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, I explore the neighbors’ understanding of toxicity as mediated by previous experience with disaster and displacement. Esmeraldas is home to the largest refinery in Ecuador. Located only meters away from smoke stacks and other industrial structures, 50 Casas is one of the neighborhoods in closest proximity to the petrochemical complex. Since their arrival in the area, residents of the neighborhood have faced a variety of disasters ranging from earthquakes and intermittent floods to industrial accidents. I present a case in which the conjunction of temporally distinct risks has shaped the community's protective strategies to focus on the urgency of impending disasters, while deprioritizing the mitigation of slower contaminants. Drawing on the concept of slow violence, I show, first, that a conjunction of threats with varying temporalities may have the unintended consequence of minimizing the danger of slower threats, second, that risk perceptions are intimately tied to personal experience and history, and third, that residents mobilize their identity as “contaminated citizens” to demand infrastructural works aimed at minimizing the danger of sudden disasters.

This paper critically examines how cosmetic surgery and ‘other’ beauty products are presented as forming a continuum in UK women's lifestyle magazines. Having analysed 744 adverts and various editorial features published across different lifestyle magazines, this paper qualitatively examines the categorization of cosmetic procedures and beauty products and treatments. The implications of this categorization for current attempts to regulate the marketing of the cosmetic surgery industry are considered.