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READING LIST FOR THE
PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION IN
SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE

Department of Sociology
Emory University

* 2008 *

I. Programmatic Statements

DiMaggio, Paul. 1997. “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263-287.

Douglas, Mary. 1986. How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Eliasoph, Nina and Paul Lichterman. 2003. “Culture in Interaction.” American Journal of Sociology 108: 735-794.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” Pages 3-30 in The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

Marx, Karl. 1978. “The German Ideology: Part I.” Pages 146-200 in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker. Second edition. New York: W. W. Norton.

Sewell, William, Jr. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98: 1-29.

Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51: 273-286.

II. Culture and Inequality

A. Media domination and framing

Adorno, Theodor. 1975. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” New German Critique 6: 12-19.

Clayman, Steven E. and Ann Reisner. 1998. “Gatekeeping in Action: Editorial Conferences and Assessments of Newsworthiness.” American Sociological Review 63: 178-199.

Gamson, William A. and A. Modiglani. 1989. “Media Discourse and Public Opinion: A Constructionist Approach.” American Journal of Sociology 95: 1-37.

Gilliam, Franklin D., Jr. and Shanto Iyengar. 2000. “Prime Suspects: The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public.” American Journal of Political Science 44: 560-573.

Herman, Edward S. and Robert W. McChesney. 1997. The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism. Cassell.

McCarthy, John D., Clark McPhail, and Jackie Smith. 1996. “Media Bias in the Coverage of Washington, D.C. Demonstrations.” American Sociological Review 61: 478-499.

Myers, Daniel J. and Beth Schaeffer Caniglia. 2004. “All the Rioting That's Fit to Print: Selection Effects in National Newspaper Coverage of Civil Disorders, 1968-1969.” American Sociological Review 69: 519-543.

Roscigno, Vincent J. and William F. Danaher. 2001. “Media and Mobilization: The Case of Radio and Southern Textile Worker Insurgency, 1929 to 1934.” American Sociological Review 66: 21-48.

B. Cultural capital and beyond

Aschaffenburg, Karen and Ineke Maas. 1997. “Cultural and Educational Careers: The Dynamics of Social Reproduction.” American Sociological Review 62: 573-587.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chapters 1, 5, 6, and Conclusion.

Bryson, Bethany. 1996. “‘Anything But Heavy Metal’: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes.” American Sociological Review 61: 884-899.

Holt, Douglas B. 1997. “Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu's Theory of Tastes from Its Critics.” Poetics 25: 93-121.

Katz-Gerro, Tally. 2002. “Highbrow Cultural Consumption and Class Distinction in Italy, Israel, West Germany, Sweden, and the United States.” Social Forces 2002: 207-229.

Lareau, Annette. 2002. “Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families.” American Sociological Review 67: 747-76.

Lizardo, Omar. 2006. “How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal Networks.” American Sociological Review 71: 778-807.

van Eijck, Koen. 2001. “Social Differentiation in Musical Taste Patterns.” Social Forces 79:1163–85.

Zavisca, Jane. 2005. “The Status of Cultural Omnivorism: A Case Study of Reading in Russia.” Social Forces 84: 1233-1255.

III. Construction of Boundaries and Identity

DiMaggio, Paul. 1982. “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part I: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America.” Media, Culture, and Society 4: 33-50.

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Durkheim, Emile. 1965 (1915). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. New York: Free Press

Feagin, Joe R. 1991. “The Continuing Significance of Race: Antiblack Discrimination in Public Places.” American Sociological Review 56: 101-116.

Killian, Caitlin. 2003. “The Other Side of the Veil: North African Women in France Respond to the Headscarf Affair.” Gender and Society 17: 567-590.

Lacy, Karyn. 2004. “Black Spaces, Black Places: Strategic Assimilation and Identity Construction in Middle Class Suburbia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27: 908-930.

Lamont, Michèle. 2000. The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lamont, Michele and Virag Molnar. 2002. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual. Review of Sociology 28:167–95.

Weber, Max. 1946. “Class, Status, Party.” Pages 180-195 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.

IV. Social Change

Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.

Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper and Row.

Collins, Randall.1997. “Religious Economy and the Emergence of Capitalism in Japan.” American Sociological Review 62: 843-865.

Elias, Norbert. 1994. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. Translated by Edmund Jephcott Oxford: Blackwell. Pages vii-256.

Illouz, Eva. 2003. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kumar, Shanti. 2005. Gandhi Meets Primetime: Globalization and Nationalism in Indian Television. University of Illinois Press.

Lyotard, Jean Francois.1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Wagner-Pacifici, Robin and Barry Schwartz. 1991. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past.” American Journal of Sociology 97: 376-420.

Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

V. Religion: Secularization, Privatization, and Restructuring

A. Theoretical Perspectives and Debates

Bellah, Robert. 1970. Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. New York: Harper and Row. Chapters 2, 3, and 9.

Berger, Peter L. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Lechner, Frank. 1991. “The Case Against Secularization: A Rebuttal.” Social Forces 69: 1103-1119.

Lechner, Frank J. 2007. “Rational Choice and Religious Economies.” Pages 81-97 in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by James A. Beckford and N. Jay Demerath. London: Sage.

Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. 2000. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Warner, R. Steven. 1993. “Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the U.S.” American Journal of Sociology 98: 1044-1093.

Weber, Max. 1946. “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions.” Pages 323-359 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited and translated by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.

B. U.S. and Global Cases

Ammerman, Nancy. 1987. Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press.

Beyer, Peter. 2006. Religions in Global Society. London: Routledge. Chapters 1 through 3.

Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Finke, Roger, and Rodney Stark. 2005. The Churching of America: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. Revised edition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. 1993. Righteous Discontent: The Woman's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lechner, Frank J. 2005. “Religious Rejections of Globalization.” Pages 115-133 in Religion and Global Civil Society, edited by Mark Juergensmeyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levitt, Peggy. 2007. God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape. New York: Norton.

Martin, David. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell.

Roy, Olivier. 2004. Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. New York: Columbia University Press.

Smith, Christian. 2003. “Introduction: Rethinking the Secularization of American Public Life.” Pages 1-97 in The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Wuthnow, Robert. 1988. The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chapters 5 through 8.

VI. The Cultural Foundations of Economic and Political Activity

Biggart, Nicole Woolsey. 1989. Charismatic Capitalism: Direct Selling Organizations in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Blythe, Mark. 2002. Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press.

DiMaggio, Paul. 1994. “Culture and Economy.” Pages 27-57 in The Handbook of Economic Sociology, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg. Princeton, NJ and New York: Princeton University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation.

Dowd, Timothy J. 2003. “Structural Power and the Construction of Markets: The Case of Rhythm and Blues.” Comparative Social Research 21: 147-201.

Espeland, Wendy Nelson and Michael Sauder. 2007. “Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds.” American Journal of Sociology 113: 1-40.

Mezias, Stephen J. and Elizabeth Boyle. 2005. “Blind Trust: Market Control, Legal Environments, and the Dynamics of Competitive Intensity in the Early Film Industry, 1893-1920.” Administrative Science Quarterly 50: 1-34.

Simmel, Georg. 1990. The Philosophy of Money. Edited by David Frisby. Translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge. Chapter 4 and 6.

Peiss, Kathy. 1998. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Steinmetz, George. 1999. “Culture and the State.” In State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn, edited by George Steinmetz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Zelizer, Viviana. 1981. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.

A. Organization of Media and the Arts

Baker, Wayne and Robert Faulkner. 1991. “Role as Resource in the Hollywood Film Industry.” American Journal of Sociology 97: 279-309.

Bauman, Shyon. 2001. “Intellectualization and Art World Development: Film in the United States.” American Sociological Review 66: 404-426.

Becker, Howard. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

DeNora, Tia. 1991. “Musical Patronage and Social Change in Beethoven's Vienna.” American Journal of Sociology 97: 310-346.

Dowd, Timothy J. 2004. “Concentration and Diversity Revisited: Production Logics in the U.S. Mainstream Recording Market, 1940 to 1990.” Social Forces 82: 1411-1455.

Fine, Gary Alan. 1992. “The Culture of Production: Aesthetic Choices and Constraints in Culinary Work.” American Journal of Sociology 97: 1268-1294.

Havens, Timothy. 2006. Global Television Marketplace. British Film Institute.

Leblebici, Huseyin, Gerald R. Salancik, Anne Copay, and Tom King. 1991. “Institutional Change and the Transformation of Interorganizational Fields: An Organizational History of the U.S. Radio Broadcasting Industry.” Administrative Science Quarterly 36: 333-363.

Negus, Keith. 1999. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge.

Peterson, Richard A. and N. Anand. 2004. “The Production of Culture Perspective.” Annual Review of Sociology 30: 311-334.

B. Content and explanation

Bielby, William T. and Denise D. Bielby. 1994. “All Hits are Flukes: Institutionalized Decision-Making and the Rhetoric of Network Prime-Time Program Development.” American Journal of Sociology 99: 1287-1313.

Corse, Sarah M. 1995. “Nations and Novels: Cultural Politics and Literary Use.” Social Forces 73: 1279-1308.

Dowd, Timothy J., Kathleen Liddle, Kim Lupo, and Anne Borden. 2002. “Organizing the Musical Canon: The Repertoires of Major U.S. Symphony Orchestras, 1824 to 1969.” Poetics 30: 87-110.

Griswold, Wendy. 1981. “American Character and the American Novel.” American Journal of Sociology 86: 740-765.

Griswold, Wendy. 2000. Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Pescosolido, Bernice A., Elizabeth Grauerholz, and Melissa A. Milkie. 1997. “Culture and Conflict: The Portrayal of Blacks in U.S. Children's Picture Books through the Mid- and Late-Twentieth Century.” American Sociological Review 62: 443-464.

Rosenblum, Barbara. 1978. “Style as Social Process.” American Sociological Review 43: 422-438.

Watkins, S. Craig. 1998. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

C. Reception and consumption

Allen, Michael Patrick and Anne E Lincoln. 2004. “Critical Discourse and the Cultural Consecration of American Films.” Social Forces 82: 871-894.

DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Griswold, Wendy. 1987. “The Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies.” American Journal of Sociology 97: 1077-1117.

Hicks, Alexander and Velina Petrova. 2006. “Auteur Discourse and the Cultural Consecration of Films.” Poetics 34: 180-203.

Jhally, Sut and Justin Lewis. 1992. Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Kapsis, Robert E. 1992. Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Liebes, Tamar and Elihu Katz. 1994. The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas. Polity.

Long, Elizabeth. 2003. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Milkie, Melissa. 1999. “Social Comparisons, Reflected Appraisals, and Mass Media: The Impact of Pervasive Beauty Images on Black and White Girls’ Self-Concepts.” Social Psychology Quarterly 62: 190-210.

Press, Andrea L. 1994. “The Sociology of Cultural Reception: Notes Toward an Emerging Paradigm.” Pages 221-245 in The Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives, edited by Diana Crane. Oxford: Blackwell.

Shrum, Wesley. 1991. “Critics and Publics: Cultural Mediation and Popular Mediation in Highbrow and Popular Performing Arts.” American Journal of Sociology 97: 347-375.

Stamatov, Peter. 2002. “Interpretive Activism and the Political Uses of Verdi’s Operas in the 1840s.” American Sociological Review 67: 345-366.

VIII. Global Culture

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Chapter 2.

Boli, John and George M. Thomas. 1999. Constructing World Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Introduction, Chapter 1, and Conclusion.

Hannerz, Ulf. 1989. “Notes on The Global Ecumene.” Public Culture 1(2): 66-75.

Hannerz, Ulf. 1991. “Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures.” Pages 107-128 in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Macmillan.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1997. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Touchstone.

Lechner, Frank J. and John Boli. 2005. World Culture: Origins and Consequences. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Meyer, John W., John Boli, George M. Thomas, and Francisco O, Ramirez. 1997. “World Society and the Nation-State.” American Journal of Sociology 103: 144-181.

Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage.

Tomlinson, John. 1999. Globalization and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. 1991. Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.