Posts Tagged culture

The higher stoopidity

| Gabriel |

I recently listened to Donald Kagan’s Intro to Ancient Greek History (itunes link) course and really enjoyed it. Kagan is of course well-qualified to teach the course (he wrote the book on the Peloponnesian War). In addition, he’s witty and has a definite point of view (he describes Rousseau as a “cancer on humanity”) and the course is in dialogue with issues in other disciplines, like the question of “balancing” in IR poli sci. The most obvious thing (especially in the intro and conclusion lectures) about which Kagan is opinionated is that Western civ a) derives from the Greeks and b) is the ultimate source of, such on-the-whole beneficial things as (lower-case “l”) liberalism, “the tragic vision,” and rationalism.

Putting aside Kagan’s opinions about the “hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go” question, Kagan’s most interesting lens is a methodological tendency that he calls “the higher naivete.” By this he means that we ought to give a heavy presumption in favor of the ancient sources even when they are speaking of things somewhat distant from the ancient writer’s direct knowledge. So if the ancients believed that there was a Trojan War, a Dorian invasion, a historical Homer, etc, then we ought to believe them unless we have good evidence to the contrary, rather than being skeptical of the written sources and demanding confirmation from archaeology. He’s not completely credulous though, for instance (like Plutarch) Kagan thinks that Lycurgus may have been a historical Spartan politician, but didn’t actually create the entire Spartan political-social system whole cloth. More controversially, Kagan reads Thucydides skeptically, seeing him as an apologist for Pericles against a prevailing anti-Pericles consensus for which we have no surviving history but of which we can find hints in Aristophanes. [According to Kagan, the ancient controversy centered on whether Pericles was right to demand that the Megarian decree be decided by arbitration since simply giving into Spartan demands to drop it outright would have been appeasement. There were also accusations against his personal character].

This is interesting in its own right, but in a weird way reminds me of pop music. To paraphrase Tertullian, you might be asking what hath Herodotus to do with (newly inducted Rock and Roll Hall of Famers) Abba? Well, last year I saw Jenn do a paper on the “rockism” critical perspective in which “pop” and other genres are disdained as less serious than rock. When I was younger and really seriously into music (as a fan, not a scientist) I was very much an ardent rockist, but now I’ve achieved what you might call the higher stoopidity. So for instance, when I was in college I thought “Enema of the State” was a disgraceful cheapening of punk rock (which of course is supposed to be really serious), whereas now it’s one of my favorite albums and I haven’t listened to “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death” in years.

As I see it, rockism is really a special case of romanticism, seeing the artist as an autonomous actor whose work expresses his soul. With the exception of guitar-playing, it denigrates craft, especially when that craft is outsourced to short-term collaborators like songwriters or producers. Both simply aging and a deeper scientific understanding of art as a collaborative process has convinced me that a) craft is really hard and autonomy is a romantic myth and b) self-serious pop music is ridiculous.

David Galenson provides us with a typology of experimentalists (i.e., crafts) vs conceptualists. Although he is mostly interested in 20th century painters, you can apply the method to pretty much any type of art. The original context is interesting though because (unlike Galenson) I hate conceptualist visual art. Once you start thinking about it in a context like that you appreciate that there really is something to craft, including in the much maligned Tin Pan Alley and it’s heirs in Swede-pop (“Tin Pan Fjord”?). You can appreciate the craft with which something is put together even if it doesn’t transcend conventions, genre or otherwise. I mean, Blink-182’s “Don’t Leave Me” is just a beautifully crafted pop song that (like about half the songs on the album) is both musically catchy and lyrically expresses a fairly subtle and ironic take on romantic love.

Likewise from a variety of work — Howard Becker’s Art Worlds, Lena and Peterson’s ASR, Uzzi et al’s work on Broadway, my own work with Esparza and Bonacich on the Oscars — we see that artistic production is inherently and irreducibly collaborative. Once you undermine the autonomous artist you undermine romantic inspiration and the contrast between inspired breakthroughs and hack work starts to look a lot less tenable.

I don’t claim this is a professional opinion so much as a matter of aging, but I also have an increasingly low opinion of pop music that takes itself really seriously. A lot of people like to make fun of Allan Bloom’s essay “on rock music” as the musings of a clueless old snob, but I think he nailed it in criticizing the “infinite seriousness” with which we talk about rock music and its “three great lyrical themes: sex, hate, and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love.” All three of these Nihiline themes were perfectly captured in the video “Do Something” from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and especially the “Sodomize Intolerance” sign he holds up at one point:

One of the most self-serious bands of my youth was Rage Against the Machine, who even went so far as to include a reading list in one of their liner notes. Their politics can broadly be summed up by the “arm the homeless” sticker on Tom Morello’s guitar and more broadly as “let’s fantasize about revolutionary violence to eliminate inequality.” [gee, what could possibly go wrong with that?]. Even if rock songs were a coherent means of articulating a political philosophy, and Rage did do a pretty decent job of it,  the kinds of politics they are best suited to express tend towards nihilism. The don’t-fuck-with-me ideologies of Mikhail Bakunin or Franz Fanon (or on the right, Robert Nozick) are really compelling and energizing which is why they can make for great pop music. In contrast it’s hard to imagine a really exciting and angry song advocating a centrist ideology of a basically liberal economy as overseen by sensible regulation and a moderate welfare state. (Now climbing to the top of the pop charts is the Wonks’ hit single “let’s make a revenue-neutral swap of the payroll tax for a pigovian carbon tax” from the album “Unintended Consequences”). The only examples I can think of for political but centrist pop music are Dropkick Murphys (center-left) and Oingo Boingo (center-right), but I think it’s noteworthy that this kind of thing tends to be rare and these bands aren’t nearly as focused on politics as bands with extremist politics like Dead Kennedys.

I mean, take Nirvana, which was probably the most critically acclaimed band of my youth. At the time I thought their best songs were really artsy-fartsy stuff like “Heart-Shaped Box” whereas “Sliver” was basically just pop candy, but in retrospect I see the former as an unstructured amalgam of pretentious imagery (see Dylan, Bob) and the latter as the perfect distillation of the subjective experience of childhood (or maybe it’s that my toddler recently pulled the “grandma take me home!” act).

I think this works in fine art too. This may be a minority opinion, but I think John Adams is at his best when he’s not trying to be hugely political (e.g., “Death of Klinghoffer” and “Nixon in China”) but when he’s evoking primal myth. I found “El Nino” to be incredibly moving largely because (if you ignore the didactic film Sellars shot to accompany it) it’s not meant to make any point other than to evoke the mythic power of the Christmas story (which makes for not just a great opera, but also a great movie).

I’m not entirely down on political art — I like “Nixon in China” in part because it expresses something really important about American character and foreign policy that’s hard to articulate in nonfiction. Nonetheless I see it as a higher stoopidity to embrace Abba and look forward to the day when Blink-182 and Beyonce take their places in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

1 comment December 17, 2009

12 weeks of culture

| Gabriel |

Jenn posted her draft syllabus for grad soc of culture / cultural sociology. It looks like about the best survey of the literature you could get in 12 weeks and about a thousand pages of material. Aside from simply choosing good readings, she’s managed to organize them into weeks in a way that imposes a good sense of order on an often messy and amorphous set of issues. She also does a much better job than I do of covering all parts of the field. (My syllabus is unabashedly production-centric, as it’s part of a two quarter sequence with a sister course taught by a colleague on meaning-centric approaches). I highly recommend checking it out for any grad students prepping for a field exam or faculty prepping a course.

Add comment November 23, 2009

Team Sorting

| Gabriel |

Tyler Cowen links to an NBER paper by Hoxby that shows that in recent decades, status sorting has gotten more intense for college. Cowen asks “is this a more general prediction in a superstars model?” The archetypal superstar system is Hollywood, and here’s my quick and dirty stab at answering Tyler’s question for that field. Faulkner and Anderson’s 1987 AJS showed that there is a lot of quality sorting in Hollywood, but they didn’t give a time trend. As shown in my forthcoming ASR with Esparza and Bonacich, there are big team spillovers so this is something we ought to care about.

I’m reusing the dataset from our paper, which is a subset of IMDB for Oscar eligible films (basically, theatrically-released non-porn) from 1936-2005. If I were doing it for publication I’d do it better (i.e., I’d allow the data to have more structure and I’d build confidence intervals from randomness), but for exploratory purposes the simplest way to measure sorting is to see if a given film had at least one prior Oscar nominee writer, director, and actor. From that I can calculate the odds-ratio of having an elite peer in the other occupation.

Overall, a movie that has at least one prior nominee writer is 7.3 times more likely than other films to have a prior nominee director and 4.4 times more likely to have a prior nominee cast. A cast with a prior nominee is 6.5 times more likely to have a prior nominee director. Of course we already knew there was a lot of sorting from Faulker and Anderson, the question suggested by Hoxby/Cowen is what are the effects over time?

This little table shows odds-ratios for cast-director, writer-director, and writer-cast. Big numbers mean more intense sorting.

...+--------------------------------------+
...| decade    cd       wd       wc       |
...|--------------------------------------|
1. | 1936-1945 6.545898 6.452388 4.306554 |
2. | 1946-1955 9.407476 6.425553 5.368151 |
3. | 1956-1965 12.09229 8.741302 6.720059 |
4. | 1966-1975 4.697238 5.399081 4.781106 |
5. | 1976-1985 4.113508 6.984528 4.450109 |
6. | 1986-1995 4.923809 7.599852 3.301461 |
7. | 1996-2005 4.826018 12.35915 3.641975 |
+-----------------------------------------+

The trend is a little complicated. For collaborations between Oscar-nominated casts on the one-hand and either writers or directors, the sorting is most intense in the 1946-1955 decade and especially the 1956-1965 decade. My guess is that this is tied to the decline of the studio system and/or the peak power of MCA. The odds-ratio of good director for nom vs non-nom writers also has a jump around the end of the studio system, but it seems there’s a second jump starting in the 80s. My guess is that this is an artifact of the increasing number of writer-directors (see Baker and Faulkner AJS 1991), but it’s an empirical question.

Putting aside the writer-director thing, it seems that sorting is not growing stronger in Hollywood. My guess is that ever more intense sorting is not a logical necessity of superstar markets, but has to do with contingencies, such as the rise of a national market for elite education in Hoxby’s case or the machinations of Lew Wasserman and Olivia deHavilland in my case.

The Stata code is below. (sorry that wordpress won’t preserve the whitespace). The data consists of film-level data with dummies for having at least one prior nominee for the three occupations.

global parentpath "/Users/rossman/Documents/oscars"

capture program drop makedecade
program define makedecade
gen decade=year
recode decade 1900/1935=. 1936/1945=1 1946/1955=2 1956/1965=3 1966/1975=4 1976/1985=5 1986/1995=6 1996/2005=7
capture lab drop decade
lab def decade 1 "1936-1945" 2 "1946-1955" 3 "1956-1965" 4 "1966-1975" 5 "1976-1985" 6 "1986-1995" 7 "1996-2005"
lab val decade decade
end

cd $parentpath

capture log close
log using $parentpath/sorting_analysis.log, replace

use sorting, clear
makedecade

*do odds-ratio of working w oscar nom, by own status

capture program drop allstar
program define allstar
preserve
if "`1'"!="" {
keep if decade==`1'
}
tabulate cast director, matcell(CD)
local pooled_cd=(CD[2,2]*CD[1,1])/(CD[1,2]*CD[2,1])
tabulate writers director, matcell(WD)
local pooled_wd=(WD[2,2]*WD[1,1])/(WD[1,2]*WD[2,1])
tabulate writers cast, matcell(WC)
local pooled_wc=(WC[2,2]*WC[1,1])/(WC[1,2]*WC[2,1])
shell echo "`pooled_cd' `pooled_wd' `pooled_wc' `1'" >> sortingresults.txt
restore
end

shell echo "cd wd wc decade" > sortingresults.txt
quietly allstar
forvalues t=1/7 {
quietly allstar `t'
}

insheet using sortingresults.txt, delimiter(" ") names clear
lab val decade decade

 

*have a nice day

4 comments November 8, 2009

Astro-baptists

| Gabriel |

On NPR the other day I heard a story about how a lobbyist forged letters to Congress from the NAACP and AAUW opposing the Waxman-Markey cap-trade bill. I thought this was amusing on several levels, only the first of which is that apparently the bill wasn’t convoluted and toothless enough to buy off all of the incumbent stakeholders as some of them hired this guy. The real interest though is that the blatant absurdity of this story heightens the basic dynamics of the bootlegger and Baptist coalition dynamic in that in this case the bootlegger was so desperate for a Baptist that he imagined one, much as the too-good-to-be-true quotes conjured by fabulist reporters heighten the absurd genre conventions of journalism.

The bootlegger and Baptist model is a part of public choice theory that argues that policy making often involves a coalition between stakeholders motivated by rentseeking and ideologues with principled positions. In the titular example, the policy is blue laws which would be supported both by Baptists who don’t like booze violating the sabbath and clandestine alcohol entrepreneurs delighted to see demand pushed from legitimate retailers to the black market. We had something close to a literal bootlegger-baptist model with the Abramoff scandal, in which various gambling interests paid the Christian Coalition to kneecap the competition. Another recent prominent example is that, before being airbrushed out of history for having, ahem, unorthodox political affiliations, Van Jones was best known for “green jobs,” which can be uncharitably described as a bit of political entrepreneurship proposing a grand bargain in which his constituents would get patronage jobs in exchange for supporting green policies.

Although bootlegger-Baptist is an econ model, soc and OB folks independently arrived at this same model by noting that resource dependence on the state is not a pure Tullock lottery, but is contingent on facial legitimacy. If you read chapter 8 of External Control of Organizations you’ll see that it’s not only the bridge between resource dependence and neo-institutionalism, but also a bootlegger-Baptist model avant le lettre.

One of the interesting things is that lately civil rights groups seem to have been the (real or imagined) Baptists of choice, and not just in the anti-Waxman-Markey forgery. So for instance a few weeks ago 72 Democratic Congressmen sent a letter to the FCC opposing net neutrality. It’s not surprising that the blue dogs were among them as you’d expect fiscal conservatives to oppose a new regulation. The interesting thing is that the letter was also signed by most of the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as “the Hispanic Technology and Telecommunications Partnership, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Asian American Justice Center.” Their (plausible) logic was essentially that preventing telecoms from charging content providers would delay the rollout of broadband and therefore maintain the digital divide. So here we have an issue combining rent-seeking telecoms hoping to soak content providers and prevent competition from VOIP forming a coalition with civil rights groups and their legislative allies who have a principled commitment to eliminating inequality in use of technology.

I got total deja vu when I read this as the exact same thing happened a few years ago when Nielsen was attacked by the Don’t Count Us Out Coalition. The backstory is that Nielsen and Arbitron traditionally rely on diaries to collect the audience data that is used to set advertising rates. Unfortunately respondents are too lazy/stupid to complete diaries accurately. In recognition of this problem both Arbitron and Nielsen have been trying to switch to more accurate passive monitoring techniques that aren’t dependent on the diligence and recall of the respondent, but they still use diaries for sweeps.

Nielsen had the bright idea of the Local People Meter project, which would eliminate sweeps diaries in the largest media markets and rely entirely on a large continuous rolling sample using passive monitoring. This implies a substantial improvement in data quality for a large part of the advertising market. This sounds like a good thing but Nielsen found itself attacked by the “Don’t Count Us Out Coalition” which argued that Nielsen was a racist monopoly, mostly on the basis that in one or two of the test markets for LPM they undersampled blacks. The “Coalition” got some serious support in Congress until Nielsen was able to demonstrate that it was just an astroturf* group set up by NewsCorp, which stood to see a ratings drop under the improved technology. (Or more technically, the new technology would reveal that the old technology had been exaggerating the ratings of NewsCorp properties. Peterson and Anand have a great article on a similar dynamic in recorded music sales).

—–

*Given the rather promiscuous way that people throw around the term “astroturf” it’s necessary to clarify the term. I reserve the term “astroturf” exclusively for fax machine and letterhead operations organized by a lobbyist, pr firm, or the like. It is not analytically useful to extend the term to cover things like the tea parties where elites mobilize ordinary people to come and protest. If you want to distinguish such things from the Platonic ideal of grassroots mobilization fine, call them “fertilizing the grassroots” or something, but astroturf they ain’t. Likewise, it is lazy and slanderous conspiracy-mongering to assume without further evidence that anyone who takes the same position on an issue as a stakeholder must of course be bought by the stakeholder. If you want to echo Orwell and call such people “objectively pro-X” then fine, but that don’t mean the Baptist lacks a principled reasons for siding with the bootlegger on a particular issue.

Add comment November 4, 2009

Don said you were the market, and you were

| Gabriel |

AdAge has a report on who drinks different kinds of beer. For instance, it describes Heineken drinkers as “They love their brand badges—a role the distinctive green glass bottle may play—and in fact, this group is attracted to luxury products in general.” Ouch, better hope Betty Draper doesn’t read Don’s copy of AdAge.

Anyway, I mention it because this speaks to cultural capital, which for a long time was about musical taste but is increasingly focused on food. Likewise, there’s some very good niche partitioning literature on beer, which has been pretty salient lately given the advertising blitz for “BL Golden Wheat” (Anheuser-Busch’s brand of hefeweizen).

Add comment November 3, 2009

Why Jay Leno is like classical music

| Gabriel |

As the logical conclusion of a trend that began with reality tv, NBC has concluded that it’s just too expensive to make scripted television. And so they filled their 10pm slot every week night with a dirt cheap variety show. Not surprisingly, the show has much lower ratings and ad revenues than the traditional one hour scripted dramas that filled the slot until this season. On the one hand it’s embarrassing for the network that ruled tv in the 1990s to embrace a low-cost, low-revenue model or, as some industry people call it, the ”winning by losing” model. On the other hand, it’s a much more profitable strategy because low as the revenues are, the costs are even lower.

People have mostly been focusing on the short-term revenues and in that sense NBC has indeed made the smart (but shameful) call. The long-run picture is more uncertain, even if you put aside Podolny-esque status issues and affiliate defections. Scripted television has always lost money on the first run and only turned a profit over the long-run. For decades this was mostly an issue of syndication (re-run) rights but for the last ten years it’s been dvd box sets. In contrast, non-scripted tv produces basically no long-term revenues — almost nobody watches ESPN Classic or buys dvds of game shows or “the Tonight Show”. There have been some troubling signs lately for the long-run revenue streams. Gilmore Girls is one of the best shows ever on television and you can buy the dvds for $20/season, a huge drop from the $50 or $60 a season the studios were asking a few years ago for tv. Likewise, it’s not clear that the studios will be able to effectively monetize streaming video, despite Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to get media companies to charge for content.

Thus you can read the Leno-ization of NBC as not just the idea that drama production budgets have gotten out of control, but also a bet that streaming video won’t produce long-term revenue streams at all comparable to those produced by syndication or dvd. Note that SAG and WGA seem to be making the opposite bet, as for the past few years Hollywood labor has been doing extremely painful strikes and soft strikes primarily over residuals on streaming. My hunch is that NBC is right and the unions are wrong on this, but it’s an empirical question.

The other interesting thing is that NBC is doing the exact opposite of what public radio did the 80s and 90s. Originally, public radio mostly consisted of classical music and jazz djs, which was dirt cheap content to produce but brought in little revenue. Them CPB and NPR bought some Arbitron reports and noticed that “All Things Considered” brought in the lion’s share of listeners. They checked pledge drive data and found that it also brought in most listener contributions. On this basis NPR added “Morning Edition,” and a little later, “Weekend Edition,” and it’s gotten to the point that pretty much all public radio stations play news and talk either in their best time slots (e.g., KCRW Santa Monica) or pretty much 24/7 (e.g., KPCC in Pasadena, WHYY in Philadelphia). Of course news is much more expensive to produce than just hiring a dj to spin Bach, but it also brings in more numerous, young, and affluent listeners. So we’ve seen public radio experience shift from low revenue & low cost to high revenue & high cost, pretty much exactly the opposite of what NBC is doing this season.

2 comments October 28, 2009

Towards a sociology of living death

| Gabriel |

Daniel Drezner had a post a few months ago talking about how international relations scholars of the four major schools would react to a zombie epidemic. Aside from the sheer fun of talking about something as silly as zombies, it has much the same illuminating satiric purpose as “how many X does it take to screw in a lightbulb” jokes. If you have even a cursory familiarity with IR it is well worth reading.

Here’s my humble attempt to do the same for several schools within sociology. Note that I’m not even to get into the Foucauldian “whose to say that life is ‘normal’ and living death is ‘deviant’” stuff because, really, it would be too easy. Also, I wrote this post last week and originally planned to save it for Halloween, but I figured I’d move it up given that Zombieland is doing so well with critics and at the box office.

Public Opinion. Consider the statement that “Zombies are a growing problem in society.” Would you:

  1. Strongly disagree
  2. Somewhat disagree
  3. Neither agree nor disagree
  4. Somewhat agree
  5. Strongly agree
  6. Um, how do I know you’re really with NORC and not just here to eat my brain?

Criminology. In some areas (e.g., Pittsburgh, Raccoon City), zombification is now more common that attending college or serving in the military and must be understood as a modal life course event. Furthermore, as seen in audit studies employers are unwilling to hire zombies and so the mark of zombification has persistent and reverberating effects throughout undeath (at least until complete decomposition and putrefecation). However race trumps humanity as most employers prefer to hire a white zombie over a black human.

Cultural toolkit. Being mindless, zombies have no cultural toolkit. Rather the great interest is understanding how the cultural toolkits of the living develop and are invoked during unsettled times of uncertainty, such as an onslaught of walking corpses. The human being besieged by zombies is not constrained by culture, but draws upon it. Actors can draw upon such culturally-informed tools as boarding up the windows of a farmhouse, shotgunning the undead, or simply falling into panicked blubbering.

Categorization. There’s a kind of categorical legitimacy problem to zombies. Initially zombies were supernaturally animated dead, they were sluggish but relentlessness, and they sought to eat human brains. In contrast, more recent zombies tend to be infected with a virus that leaves them still living in a biological sense but alters their behavior so as to be savage, oblivious to pain, and nimble. Furthermore even supernatural zombies are not a homogenous set but encompass varying degrees of decomposition. Thus the first issue with zombies is defining what is a zombie and if it is commensurable with similar categories (like an inferius in Harry Potter). This categorical uncertainty has effects in that insurance underwriters systematically undervalue life insurance policies against monsters that are ambiguous to categorize (zombies) as compared to those that fall into a clearly delineated category (vampires).

Neo-institutionalism. Saving humanity from the hordes of the undead is a broad goal that is easily decoupled from the means used to achieve it. Especially given that human survivors need legitimacy in order to command access to scarce resources (e.g., shotgun shells, gasoline), it is more important to use strategies that are perceived as legitimate by trading partners (i.e., other terrified humans you’re trying to recruit into your improvised human survival cooperative) than to develop technically efficient means of dispatching the living dead. Although early on strategies for dealing with the undead (panic, “hole up here until help arrives,” “we have to get out of the city,” developing a vaccine, etc) are practiced where they are most technically efficient, once a strategy achieves legitimacy it spreads via isomorphism to technically inappropriate contexts.

Population ecology. Improvised human survival cooperatives (IHSC) demonstrate the liability of newness in that many are overwhelmed and devoured immediately after formation. Furthermore, IHSC demonstrate the essentially fixed nature of organizations as those IHSC that attempt to change core strategy (eg, from “let’s hole up here until help arrives” to “we have to get out of the city”) show a greatly increased hazard for being overwhelmed and devoured.

Diffusion. Viral zombieism (e.g. Resident Evil, 28 Days Later) tends to start with a single patient zero whereas supernatural zombieism (e.g. Night of the Living Dead, the “Thriller” video) tends to start with all recently deceased bodies rising from the grave. By seeing whether the diffusion curve for zombieism more closely approximates a Bass mixed-influence model or a classic s-curve we can estimate whether zombieism is supernatural or viral, and therefore whether policy-makers should direct grants towards biomedical labs to develop a zombie vaccine or the Catholic Church to give priests a crash course in the neglected art of exorcism. Furthermore marketers can plug plausible assumptions into the Bass model so as to make projections of the size of the zombie market over time, and thus how quickly to start manufacturing such products as brain-flavored Doritos.

Social movements. The dominant debate is the extent to which anti-zombie mobilization represents changes in the political opportunity structure brought on by complete societal collapse as compared to an essentially expressive act related to cultural dislocation and contested space. Supporting the latter interpretation is that zombie hunting militias are especially likely to form in counties that have seen recent increases in immigration. (The finding holds even when controlling for such variables as gun registrations, log distance to the nearest army administered “safe zone,” etc.).

Family. Zombieism doesn’t just affect individuals, but families. Having a zombie in the family involves an average of 25 hours of care work per week, including such tasks as going to the butcher to buy pig brains, repairing the boarding that keeps the zombie securely in the basement and away from the rest of the family, and washing a variety of stains out of the zombie’s tattered clothing. Almost all of this care work is performed by women and very little of it is done by paid care workers as no care worker in her right mind is willing to be in a house with a zombie.

Applied micro-economics. We combine two unique datasets, the first being military satellite imagery of zombie mobs and the second records salvaged from the wreckage of Exxon/Mobil headquarters showing which gas stations were due to be refueled just before the start of the zombie epidemic. Since humans can use salvaged gasoline either to set the undead on fire or to power vehicles, chainsaws, etc., we have a source of plausibly exogenous heterogeneity in showing which neighborhoods were more or less hospitable environments for zombies. We show that zombies tended to shuffle towards neighborhoods with low stocks of gasoline. Hence, we find that zombies respond to incentives (just like school teachers, and sumo wrestlers, and crack dealers, and realtors, and hookers, …).

Grounded theory. One cannot fully appreciate zombies by imposing a pre-existing theoretical framework on zombies. Only participant observation can allow one to provide a thick description of the mindless zombie perspective. Unfortunately scientistic institutions tend to be unsupportive of this kind of research. Major research funders reject as “too vague and insufficiently theory-driven” proposals that describe the intention to see what findings emerge from roaming about feasting on the living. Likewise IRB panels raise issues about whether a zombie can give informed consent and whether it is ethical to kill the living and eat their brains.

Ethnomethodology. Zombieism is not so much a state of being as a set of practices and cultural scripts. It is not that one is a zombie but that one does being a zombie such that zombieism is created and enacted through interaction. Even if one is “objectively” a mindless animated corpse, one cannot really be said to be fulfilling one’s cultural role as a zombie unless one shuffles across the landscape in search of brains.

Conversation Analysis.

1  HUMAN:    Hello, (0.5) Uh, I uh, (Ya know) is anyone in there?
2  ZOMBIE1:  Br:ai[ns], =
3  ZOMBIE2:       [Br]:ain[s]
4  ZOMBIE1:              =[B]r:ains
5  HUMAN:    Uh, I uh= li:ke, Hello? =
6  ZOMBIE1:  Br:ai:ns!
7  (0.5)
8  HUMAN:    Die >motherfuckers!<
9  SHOTGUN:  Bang! (0.1) =
10 ZOMBIE1:  Aa:ar:gg[gh!]
11 SHOTGUN:         =[Chk]-Chk, (0.1) Bang!

17 comments October 13, 2009

They never did this on Mad Men

| Gabriel |

DDB (the world’s biggest ad agency) is pretty pissed off at its Brazilian office right now. Recently an unsolicited spec ad “for” the World Wildlife Fund showed up in which an entire squadron of commercial jet liners are aimed squarely at the Manhattan skyline as it appeared at 8:45am on 9/11/01 (although in the ad the sky is overcast). AdAge describes it as:

The description of the ad submitted by the agency said “We see two airplanes blowing up the WTC’s Twin Towers…lettering reminds us that the tsunami killed 100 times more people. The film asks us to respect a planet that is brutally powerful.”

Note that this is not just morally odious (at least to Americans both in and out of the ad industry — apparently foreign ad men and ad prize judges don’t feel this as uniformly as we do) but scientifically illiterate as tsunamis aren’t plausibly connected to human activity. (The ad seems to be confusing them with hurricanes, which are plausibly connected to global warming).

Once the ad became notorious in the ad world, various people tried to track down its provenance, with the Brazilian trade magazine Meio & Mensagem finding old entry records for advertising creative competitions showing it came from DDB Brasil, which at that point ‘fessed up. Needless to say, neither the WWF nor the DDB parent company are happy about this and the responsible team at DDB Brasil was fired. To me the whole thing is best summed up in an AdAge op-ed that sees this ad as the extreme manifestation of creative run amuck in search of prestige and expression, rather than an old-fashioned sell.

Creative directors are entirely to blame for this state of affairs. The main problem is that most of them got where they are today by, you guessed it, winning creative awards. And guess the No. 1 target they’re driving — and I mean driving — their teams to achieve.

This scandal, and the attribution of the malfeasance to the awards mentality, reminded me of some interesting work lately on how prizes can shape fields. (See the bottom of the post for cites).

In advertising specifically you see a real conflict between ad people who see themselves as basically artists and those who see themselves as salesmen. The former are obviously more aligned with the awards mentality, but the latter have the “effies” (for “effective,” as compared to self-indulgent, marketing). Anyway, as seen in this little case study, some ad agencies are:

  • interested in shock value that will attract the attention of prize juries but alienate many consumers
  • so desperate to win awards that they will create spec ads without the knowledge or consent of the putative client, arrange to have them published, and then submit them in the competition.

Cites for awards literature:

[Update: for a much more pleasant PSA story, see Jay's post on “Don’t Mess With Texas.”

1 comment September 7, 2009

Production of culture

[Below is a recent list Peterson wrote outlining the production of culture perspective. You can view it as an update to his ARS with N Anand. Pete wrote it to accompany a talk he gave and circulated it to some friends. I copy-edited/tagged it and am posting it with permission. If you know links for any of the non-tagged citations email me or put them in the comments and I will update the post. --Gabriel]

| Richard A. Peterson |

Examples of works written in the spirit of the Production of Culture Perspective

Created for the working conference
Euro-Pop: The Production and Consumption of a European Culture
Villa Vigoni, Lake Como, Italy 9-10 June, 2009

Richard A. Peterson

A. The production of culture perspective focuses on the ways in which the content of symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved. Initially practitioners of this perspective focused on the fabrication of expressive-symbol elements of culture such as art works, scientific research reports, popular culture, religious practices, legal judgments, journalism, and other parts of what are now often called “the culture industries”. More recently the perspective has been successfully applied to a range of quite different situations where the manipulation of symbols is a by-product rather than the purpose of the collective activity.

In the 1970s, when it emerged as a self-conscious perspective, it challenged the then-dominant idea that culture and social structure mirror each other. A symbiotic relationship between a singular functioning social system and its coherent overarching culture was then embraced by a wide range of theorists of contemporary society including most Marxists who distinguished between material structure versus superstructural values on the one hand and functionalists — among them Talcott Parsons. The former asserted that those who controlled the means of producing wealth shaped culture to fit their own class interests; the latter believed that a set of monolithic abstract values determined the shape of social structure. Breaking from these mirror views, the production perspective — like most of the other contemporary perspectives in cultural sociology — view both culture and social structure as elements in an ever-changing patchwork. In this view then culture is seen as not so much society-wide and virtually unchanging as it is situational and capable of rapid change.

A number of bellwether studies of the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s exemplified aspects of what would become the production perspective. [See, for example, the studies discussed in section C. below.] Such studies illustrate the emerging production perspective in so far as they: a. Focus on the expressive aspects of culture rather than values, b. Explore the processes of symbol production, c. Use the tools of analysis initially developed in the study of organizations, occupations, networks, communities, and symbolic interaction, and d. Make possible comparisons across the diverse cites of culture creation.

While there was a scatter of provocative studies, not until publication in 1976 and 1978 of collections entitled The Production of Culture, edited by Richard A. Peterson and Lewis A. Coser respectively, did scholars collectively recognize that these and other scattered studies illustrated elements of culture being shaped in the mundane processes of their production. The empirical studies were drawn from sites as diverse as science laboratories, artist communities, and country music radio stations. Some authors have found it convenient to understand the dynamics of production in terms of six constraints or facets which include law and regulation, technology, industrial (field) organization, organizational form, career dynamics, and markets. (See sections D. and E. below.)

B. The most recent summary statement of the perspective (from which the statement above is largely drawn) is:

C. Thirteen works that were very useful in the early formulation of one or all facets of the production perspective. Include:

  • Mills, C. Wright. 1951. White Collar: The American Middle Class. New York: Oxford University Press.

    • Highlights the vital causes of the shift from the entrepreneurial to the organizational (white collar) middle class and the ramifying consequences of the change.

  • Selznick, Phillip. 1952. The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics. New York: McGraw-Hill.

    • Shows how the structural form of organization affects its cultural effectiveness.

  • Stinchcombe, Arthur. 1959. “Bureaucratic and Craft Administration of Production.” Administrative Science Quarterly. 4:168-187.

    • Demonstrates that the structural organization of work determines the sorts of products that can be produced.

  • White, Lynn, Jr. 1962. Medieval Technology and Social Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    • Chronicles the central role of changing technology in effecting productive systems.

  • Jacques, Ellul. 1964. The Technological Society. New York: Knopf.

    • Lays out the many ways in which differences in techniques rather than ideology underlie changes in society and culture.

  • White, Harrison C. and Cynthia A. White. 1965. Canvases and Careers. New York: Wiley.

    • Shows the close link between the organizational forms of artistic forms and both careers and the art produced.

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. 1967. “Systems of Education and Systems of Thought.” International Social Science Journal 19:338-358.

    • Shows that knowledge does not depend on the ’spirit of the age’ but on the particular habitus learned in specialized ‘intellectual clans’.

  • Hirsch, Paul. 1972. “Processing Fads and Fashions.” American Journal of Sociology 77:639-659.

    • Demonstrates that changes in popular music can be understood by examining the structure of the music industry.

  • Molotch, Harvey and Marilyn Lester. 1974 “News as Purposive Behavior.” American Sociological Review 39: 101-112.

    • News people do not simply report the news, but they decide what events should be reported and how they should be framed.

  • Crane, Diana. 1976. “Reward Systems in Art, Science and Religion.” American Behavioral Scientist 19:719-734.

    • Shows that reward systems available to cultural workers shape the sorts of cultural products produced.

  • Peterson, Richard A. 1976. “The production of culture: a prolegomenon.” Pp. 7-22 in Richard A. Peterson, editor. The Production of Culture. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
  • Becker, Howard S. 1978. “Arts and Crafts.” American Journal of Sociology 83

    • Shows that the nature of cultural objects produced is a function of the expectations of the work environment in which they work.

  • Griswold, Wendy. 1981. “American Character and the American Novel.” American Journal of Sociology 86:740-65.

    • Humanists asserted that the many 19c American-authored novels about man-against-the-wilderness reflected an element of The American Character. In fact parlor romances were the most favored novels but the workings of copyright law account for the paucity of American writers of this genre.

D. The following are works that touch ALL six facets of the Production Perspective.

E. The following are works that use the Production of Culture paradigm though not all reference the perspective per se. Citations are grouped together by the facet which is of prime importance. A number deal with several other facets, so browse accordingly. The references cited below should be considered illustrative and not definitive or all inclusive. Please send suggestions for additions to: richard.a.peterson@vanderbilt.edu

Thanks to John Ryan, Paul DiMaggio, Shyon Baumann, N. Anand, Loic Wacquant and Gabriel Rossman who contributed suggestions for the list. Thanks also to Rossman for editing the list and adding the URLs. Baumann noted that “It’s tough to step back and identify when the PofC perspective is being used because it seems like a (the?) natural sociological stance today.”

LAW and REGULATION

TECHNOLOGY

FIELD (INDUSTRY) and ORGANIZATION

CAREERS

MARKET

1 comment August 26, 2009

SPPA 2008

| Gabriel |

The 2008 wave for the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts is now available at CPANDA. In the WSJ, Terry Teachout noticed one basic thing in the data, which is that nobody born since the Ford administration likes jazz. I’ve been waiting for this dataset for awhile because several years ago Pete Peterson and I noticed some weird differences between 92 to 02 (particularly as relates to the omnivore hypothesis) and we need a third data point to help us figure it out. Another cool thing about the dataset is that they now ask questions about literature by genre, which as seen in the literature based on SPPA music questions, is a good way to get at cultural capital type issues.

Anyway, one of the minor annoyances about SPPA is that it uses a convention of “1=Yes 2=No” whereas any native Stata speaker knows that this is an abomination and contrary to the divine rule that in all binary variables, 0 shall equal “no” and 1 shall equal “yes.” (For one thing, this makes it easier to sum the dummies into a count). As such I’ve written this code to fix these perverse variables. Just add it to the end of the do-file that CPANDA generates for you when you download the file.

*change all the yes/no vars to Stata convention where 0 is no and 1 is yes
*all variables that are similar to yes/no but slightly different (eg, PEDWWNTO) are left alone
*to avoid confusion by plugging into scripts that assume SPSS yes/no, rename these variables with suffix "r"
global yesnovars "PEX4A PEX4B PEX5 PEQ1A PEQ2A PEQ3A PEQ4A PEQ5A PEQ6A PEQ7A PEQ8AA PEQ9A PEQ10A PEQ10B PEQ11A PEQ12A PEQ13AA1 PEQ13AA2 PEQ13AA3 PEA1A PEA1B PEA2 PEA31 PEA32 PEA33 PEA34 PEA35 PEA36 PEA37 PEA38 PEA39 PEA310 PEA311 PEA41 PEA42 PEA43 PEA44 PEA45 PEA46 PEA47 PEA48 PEA49 PEA410 PEA411 PEA412 PEA413 PEA414 PEB1A PEB2A PEB3A PEB4A PEB5A PEB6 PEB7 PEB8 PEB9 PEB10 PEB11 PEB12 PEB13 PEB14 PEC2A PEC3A PEC4A PEC5A PEC6A PEC7A PEC8A PEC9A PEC10A PEC11A PEC12A PEC13A PEC14A PEC15A PEC15B PEC16A PEC16B PEC16C PEC17A PEC18A PEC19A PEC20A PEC21A PEC25A PEC26A PEC27A PED1A PED1C PED1D PED2A PED2C PED2D PED3A PED3C PED3D PED4A PED4C PED4D PED5A PED5C PED5D PED6A PED6C PED6D PED7A PED7C PED7D HETELAVL HETELHHD HUBUS PEABSPDO PEAFEVER PEAFNOW PEDW4WK PEDWAVL PEDWLKO PEDWLKWK PEDWWK PEERNCOV PEERNLAB PEERNRT PEERNUOT PEHRAVL PEJHWKO PELAYAVL PELAYFTO PELAYLK PELKAVL PEMJOT PENLFRET PESCHENR PUBUS1 PUBUS2OT PUDIS1 PUDIS2 PUHROFF1 PUHROT1 PUIODP1 PUIODP2 PUIODP3 PUJHDP1O PULAY6M PULAYDT "
sum $yesnovars
*check that range is (1,2)

lab def yesno 0 "N" 1 "Y"

foreach var in $yesnovars {
	recode `var' 2=0 1=1 .=.
	lab val `var' yesno
	ren `var' `var'r
}

1 comment August 18, 2009

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