Vocational occupations are attractive not so much for their material rewards as for the prestige and self-fulfillment they confer. They require a strong personal commitment, which can be subjectively experienced in terms of passion and selflessness. The choice of a career in the cultural sector provides a good example of this. What are the terms of this calling? What predisposes individuals to answer it? What are the meanings of such a choice? To answer these questions, this book focuses on would-be cultural managers. By identifying their social patterns, by revealing the resources,...

Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of...

This book maps contemporary film criticism as a cultural institution. At the beginning of the 21^st century film criticism was talked about as an institution in crisis. The decline of print journalism, a series of lay-offs of prominent American critics, and the rise of "amateur" reviewing online, spurred a conversation about the decline, even death, of film criticism. The book first examines this recent crisis discourse and then compares it against historical precedents stretching back to the early 20^th century. It finds that "crisis" has always been a leitmotif...

The past decades have witnessed a surge of sociological interest in the body. From the focal point of aesthetic investment, political regulation and moral anxiety, to a means of redefining traditional conceptions of agency and identity, the body has been cast in a wide variety of sociological roles. However, there is one topic that proves conspicuously absent from this burgeoning literature on the body, namely its role in the everyday (re)production of class-boundaries.

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Distinctions in the Flesh "aims to fill that void by showing that the way individuals perceive, use and manage...

Is another future possible? So called late modernity is marked by the escalating rise in and proliferation of uncertainties and unforeseen events brought about by the interplay between and patterning of social natural, techno scientific and political-economic developments. The future has indeed become problematic. The question of how heterogeneous actors engage futures, what intellectual and practical strategies they put into play and what the implications of such strategies are, have become key concerns of recent social and cultural research addressing a diverse range of fields of...

Why do critics and celebrants of globalization concur that international trade and finance represent an inexorable globe-bestriding force with a single logic? The Known Economy shows that both camps rest on the same ideas about how the world is scaled. Two centuries ago romantic and rationalist theorists concurred that the world was divided into discrete nations, moving at different rates toward a -modernity- split between love and money. Though differing over whether this history is tragedy or triumph, they united in projecting an empty -international- space in which a...

In recent years, cultural work has engaged the interest of scholars from a broad range of social science and humanities disciplines. The debate in this 'turn to cultural work' has largely been based around evaluating its advantages and disadvantages: its freedoms and its constraints, its informal but precarious nature, the inequalities within its global workforce, and the blurring of work-life boundaries leading to 'self-exploitation'.

While academic critics have persuasively challenged more optimistic accounts of 'converged' worlds of creative production, the critical...

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste. It brings curators together with sociologists and art theorists and artists with design historians, art historians and cultural historians, with the common aim of developing rigorous and relevant ways to approach the practice of taste. The contributors to this book engage with the practice of taste as this relates to encounters with art, engagements with cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life in national and transnational contexts. While taking account of...