Popular Culture (Sociology)

Introduction

Popular culture is the set of practices, beliefs, and objects that embody the most broadly shared meanings of a social system. It includes media objects, entertainment and leisure, fashion and trends, and linguistic conventions, among other things. Popular culture is usually associated with either mass culture or folk culture, and differentiated from high culture and various institutional cultures (political culture, educational culture, legal culture, etc.). The association of popular culture with mass culture leads to a focus on the position of popular culture within a capitalist mode of economic production. Through this economic lens, popular culture is seen as a set of commodities produced through capitalistic processes driven by a profit motive and sold to consumers. In contrast, the association of popular culture with folk culture leads to a focus on subcultures such as youth cultures or ethnic cultures. Through this subculture lens, popular culture is seen as a set of practices by artists or other kinds of culture makers that result in performances and objects that are received and interpreted by audiences, both within and beyond the subcultural group. Holistic approaches examine the ways that popular culture begins as the collective creation of a subculture and is then appropriated by the market system. Key issues in the sociological analysis of popular culture include the representation of specific groups and themes in the content of cultural objects or practices, the role of cultural production as a form of social reproduction, and the extent to which audiences exercise agency in determining the meanings of the culture that they consume.

General Overviews

Classical sociologists spoke generally to the concept of culture and culture’s role in shaping human social life, but without distinguishing the specific form of popular culture. The Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools, discussed in Classic Works, fostered interdisciplinary analyses of popular culture that include a number of sociological perspectives. The general overviews listed in this section offer broad social and sociological analyses of popular culture. Storey 2015 has used cultural studies to open new lenses for the study of popular culture, and this book is now in its seventh edition. Grazian 2010 and Kidd 2014 are both written as introductory texts for the sociology of popular culture, but they also serve well as field guides for scholars studying popular culture. Similarly, Holtzman 2000 and Danesi 2012 provide an introduction to the study of media and popular culture from the perspectives of communications and anthropology, respectively. Gaines 1998 is a study of youth music cultures in the 1980s, while Gaines 2003 is a memoir of writing a sociological analysis while also participating in the rock and roll culture of New York City in the 1980s. Gamson 1994 provides a detailed history of the celebrity concept in American culture. Lopes 2009 provides a broad historical account of the development of the comic book industry.

Danesi, Marcel. 2012. Popular culture: Introductory perspectives. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
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Anthropologist Danesi presents a broad introduction to the study of popular culture organized around specific media formats such as radio, television, film, and music.
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Gaines, Donna. 1998. Teenage wasteland: Suburbia’s dead end kids. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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This ethnographic analysis of rock youth subculture began as a Village Voice article about a suicide pact among four teens in suburban New Jersey.
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Gaines, Donna. 2003. A misfit’s manifesto: The spiritual journey of a rock & roll heart. New York: Villard.
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Gaines presents a unique memoir about becoming a sociologist, studying your subculture, and participating in the rock culture of 1980s New York.
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Gamson, Joshua. 1994. Claims to fame: Celebrity in contemporary America. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Gamson unpacks the concept of celebrity in American popular culture using both historical and sociological lenses. He then takes the concept to the audiences to unpack the varied ways that audiences respond to or utilize celebrity fetishes.
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Grazian, David. 2010. Mix it up: Popular culture, mass media, and society. New York: Norton.
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This widely used introductory text to the study of popular culture emphasizes foundational theories and concepts from sociology.
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Holtzman, Linda. 2000. Media messages: What film, television, and popular music teach us about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Armonk, NY: Sharpe.
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Holtzman presents a series of studies about representations in popular culture, focusing on race, class, gender, and sexuality.
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Kidd, Dustin. 2014. Pop culture freaks: Identity, mass media, and society. Boulder, CO: Westview.
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This book focuses on issues of identity in the labor force, representations, and audience for commercial popular culture.
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Lopes, Paul. 2009. Demanding respect: The evolution of the American comic book. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press.
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Lopes examines the origins of the comic book and its evolution across the 20th century. He focuses on how comics moved from the margins of nerd culture to the center of American popular culture.
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Storey, John. 2015. Cultural theory and popular culture: An introduction. 7th ed. New York: Routledge.
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Storey’s texts on popular culture have helped move the study of popular culture into the classrooms of colleges and universities. This book applies a range of social and literary theories to the analysis of popular culture objects as texts.
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Classic Works

The works in this section should really be identified as both classic works and theoretical developments, as the works that have stood the test of time are influential because of their contributions to the theoretical understanding of the role of popular culture in modern society. Several of the selections are associated with the Frankfurt School of social thought, which has its origins in the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University Frankfurt. Benjamin 1968 constitutes a similar project for the field of visual art, focusing on the impact of photographic technologies. Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 introduced the concept of the culture industry and critiqued the ways that it has transformed the relationship between art and society. Lowenthal 1984 examines the ways that social changes are reflected in literary changes. The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies also has a strong influence on this list. Hall 1973 offers a system for interpreting symbolic representations in popular culture and their role in mediating the relationship between audiences and political power. Williams 2002 is meditation on the relationship between cultural objects and everyday life. The author’s work on television, Williams 2003 (but first published in 1974), helped to establish the field of television studies. Gans 1999, originally published in 1974, provides the earliest serious sociological analysis of popular culture and its relationship to hierarchies of taste. Goffman 1979, famous for his dramaturgical approach to social relationships, presented an early and now-classis study of gender representations in advertisements. Watt 2001 offers an explanation of the social conditions behind the unique cultural form of the novel.

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, essays and reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt, 217–251. New York: Schocken.
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Does photographing a work of art change its character or our relationship to it? Benjamin theorizes that a work of art has a special aura that is lost through photographic reproduction.
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Gans, Herbert J. 1999. High culture & popular culture: An analysis and evaluation of taste. Rev. ed. New York: Basic Books.
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Gans examines the strong but imperfect relationships between class hierarchies and a hierarchy of taste cultures, raising important question about the presumed value of high culture and valuelessness of popular culture.
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Goffman, Erving. 1979. Gender advertisements. New York: Harper & Row.
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A sociological comparison of the ways that men and women are presented in mass-market print advertisements and television commercials, emphasizing the reproduction of stereotypical gender roles.
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Hall, Stuart. 1973. Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Birmingham, UK: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
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Hall presents a linguistic theory of how cultural content functions as a medium for the communication of social roles and power hierarchies. His work was of central influence for the Birmingham school of cultural studies.
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Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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This book is foundational for understanding the school known as critical theory. It presents a macrolevel theory of social domination. It includes an influential essay on the culture industry that examines the role of the media and entertainment in that domination.
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Lowenthal, Leo. 1984. Literature and mass culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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Lowenthal was a sociologist and a member of the Frankfurt School who immigrated to the United States. This book examines uses changes in literary content over time as a lens for understanding changes in culture and the growth of a modern mass culture.
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Watt, Ian. 2001. The rise of the novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Univ. Press.
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The novel is one of the oldest and most popular forms of popular culture. Watt explores how the growth of the middle class, changes in the economy, and expanding social roles for women drove the emergence of this cultural form.
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Williams, Raymond. 2002. Culture is ordinary. In The every day life reader. Edited by Ben Highmore, 91–100. London: Routledge.
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As the title indicates, Williams emphasizes the everyday character of culture, over and above formulations that treat culture as special or prescriptive.
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Williams, Raymond. 2003. Television: Technology and cultural form. 3d ed. London: Routledge.
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The introductory text to the cultural analysis of television invites readers to think beyond individual episodes of individual shows in order to grasp the very idea of television, always broadcasting and always inviting, as a cultural force unto itself.
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Edited Collections

The collections in this section are excellent resources that provide a range of perspectives on popular culture. Although dated, During 1993 and Grossberg, et al. 1992 are large collections of major works of cultural studies, including a few sociologists, that have made a significant impact on the scholarship of popular culture. Ryan 2008 provides an updated collection of texts that overlaps with those earlier anthologies while also providing a wide range of new perspectives. Mukerji and Schudson 1991 presents a mixture of sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies in a collection of examinations of popular culture. Vannini and Waskul 2015 assembles a group of essays on popular culture as a set of lived practices such as watching television, shopping, exercising, and putting on makeup.

During, Simon, ed. 1993. The cultural studies reader. London: Routledge.
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A rich collection of influential works in cultural studies and related fields from across the second half of the 20th century.
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Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds. 1992. Cultural studies. New York: Routledge.
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A collection of papers and discussions from the 1990 conference Cultural Studies Now and in the Future, held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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Mukerji, Chandra, and Michael Schudson. 1991. Rethinking popular culture: Contemporary perspectives in cultural studies. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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This volume brings together some of the most influential perspectives on popular culture from across disciplines and serves as a field guide to basic issues such as text, production, and audience.
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Ryan, Michael. 2008. Cultural studies: An anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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A collection of over eighty influential selections spanning several decades of work in the field of cultural studies.
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Vannini, Phillip, and Dennis D. Waskul, eds. 2015. Popular culture as everyday life. New York: Routledge.
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This is a collection of original essays organized around the “doing” of popular culture, with titles like “Sharing Selfies,” “Playing Music,” and “Having Sex.”
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Journals

Examinations of popular culture can be found in the whole spectrum of sociology journals and journals in related areas of social science, including specialty journals that focus on overlapping concepts like gender, theory, or deviance. The journals listed in this section are those that specialize in the study of popular culture or the media. American Journal of Cultural Sociology and Cultural Sociology both advance new empirical analyses within that field, often including a range of studies of music, television, and film. Journal of Popular Culture and Popular Culture Studies Journal both focus on interdisciplinary analyses that lean toward cultural studies from the humanities but also include a number of sociological perspectives. Communication Review and Popular Communication both focus on the fields of media studies and communications, but also with some inclusion of sociology. Poetics and Media, Culture & Society, though interdisciplinary, offer the most consistent sociological examinations of popular culture and the media.

American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
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Founded in 2013 and published by the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, the journal emphasizes the cultural turn in American sociology and frequently publishes work on popular culture.
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Communication Review.
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Published since 1995, this journal emphasizes three themes in communication and media studies: communication and culture, communication as a social force, and new media.
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Cultural Sociology.
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First published in 2007, Cultural Sociology advances the fields of cultural sociology and the sociology of culture, fields that at times overlap, and occasionally compete.
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Journal of Popular Culture.
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The official journal of the Popular Culture Association, this journal has published since 1967.
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Media, Culture & Society.
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First published in 1979, this journal presents interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical analyses of media culture.
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Poetics.
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This journal presents the most methodologically sophisticated social science on media and the arts, and it has been publishing since 1971.
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Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture.
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This journal publishes articles from a range of disciplines but primarily from communications. It was first published in 2003.
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Popular Culture Studies Journal.
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This is the journal of the Midwest Popular Culture Association, and it launched in 2013.
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Theoretical Perspectives

Some theoretical contributions can be found across all of the items in this article. The works in this section are either primarily theoretical or have made a theoretical contribution that has been especially influential. Bourdieu’s work is not a direct examination of popular culture per se, but his theories of cultural reproduction and concepts like habitus and cultural capital provide important lenses for understanding the role of popular culture in the maintenance of class inequalities (Bourdieu 1984 and Bourdieu 1990). Peterson 1992 introduces the notion that high-status consumers are omnivores who consume a wide range of cultural genres, whereas low-status consumers are more likely univores with narrow cultural tastes. Bryson 1996 introduces the concept of multicultural capital to make sense of how taste hierarchies function in the context of the United States. Corse and Westervelt 2002 uses the concept of literary valorization—which can be broadened to the more general cultural valorization—to explain the symbolic process of moving an author into a literary canon. DiMaggio 1977 provides an organizational and market-driven explanation for the rise of commercial culture and its dominance over folk cultures. Griswold 1994 introduces the concept of the cultural diamond. Kidd 2007 examines the social functions of commercial culture. Abercrombie, et al. 1980 examines the concept of “dominant ideology” at various points in human history, including the contemporary role of the media as a means of transmission of dominant ideas. Swidler 1986 introduces the concept of the toolkit for understanding how culture is activated in social action. Schudson 1989 presents a five-dimensional framework for explaining the social potency of a cultural object or practice.

Abercrombie, Nicholas, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner. 1980. The dominant ideology thesis. London: George Allen & Unwin.
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This is an interesting treatise on the dominant ideology concept. Although the authors argued that there is no unified dominant culture in the early 21st century, because the ruling class is too fractured by corporate and other interests, they do identify the modern media as an excellent mechanism of transmission for dominant ideas.
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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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In Distinction, Bourdieu further develops his concepts of habitus and cultural capital and uses them to develop a theory of taste and its relationship to social stratification.
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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The logic of practice. Stanford, CA: Polity.
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Originally published in 1980, this work presents a clear statement of many of Bourdieu’s theoretical contributions, particularly the concept of habitus. The book is not explicitly about popular culture as such, but is important for any analysis of any formulation of culture, including folk and commercial culture.
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Bryson, Bethany. 1996. “Anything but heavy metal”: Symbolic exclusion and musical dislikes. American Sociological Review 61.5: 884–899.
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Bryson uses data from the 1993 General Social Survey, which included a culture module with a question about musical preferences. She used the bottom end of the scale, musical dislikes, to examine how people draw symbolic boundaries even when they seem generally open to listening to a wide range of music.
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Corse, Sarah M., and Saundra Davis Westervelt. 2002. Gender and literary valorization: The awakening of a canonical novel. Sociological Perspectives 45:139–161.
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When it was originally released, Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening was largely panned by critics but over time the novel has made its way into the American literary canon. The authors identify the process of literary valorization, shepherded in this case by feminist literary analyses, that help to renegotiate the canonical position of a novel.
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DiMaggio, Paul. 1977. Market structure, the creative process, and popular culture: Toward an organizational reinterpretation of mass-culture theory. Journal of Popular Culture 11.2: 436–452.
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DiMaggio argues that the shift from folk culture to commercial culture reflects more of a market process, the growth of the culture industries, than a broad change in society. His work serves as a critique of the mass-culture arguments of the 1970s.
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Griswold, Wendy. 1994. Cultures and societies in a changing world. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge.
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Griswold presents the cultural diamond as a method for examining the relationship between cultural objects, or texts, and the social world from which they emerge, by looking at the connection points of cultural creation and audience reception.
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Kidd, Dustin. 2007. Harry Potter and the functions of popular culture. Journal of Popular Culture 40:70–90.
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The article draws from Durkheim’s functionalist theory of crime to develop a theory of the social functions of popular culture.
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Peterson, Richard A. 1992. Understanding audience segmentation: From elite and mass to univore and omnivore. Poetics 21.4: 243–258.
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Peterson has played an important role in developing theoretical tools for understanding American music culture, including the application of Bourdieu’s concepts to the American context.
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Schudson, Michael. 1989. How culture works: Perspectives from media studies on the efficacy of symbols. Theory and Society 18:153–180.
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This article identifies five key dynamics that help to explain the power of cultural objects: retrievability, rhetorical force, resonance, institutional retention, and resolution. Schudson discusses how each of these dimensions can be analyzed.
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Swidler, Ann. 1986. Culture in action: Symbols and strategies. American Sociological Review 51:273–286.
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Swidler argues that humans draw on cultural repertoires as they construct lines of social action. She refers to these repertoires as a toolkit of resources that humans draw from in both conscious and unconscious ways.
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Cultural Studies

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary paradigm that involves “readings” of nontraditional texts such as objects of popular culture. Hebdige 1979 examines the social functions of subculture participation. Bennett 2001 focuses on the role of music in the creation of youth subcultures. Ang 1985 finds variations in reasons for watching the television show Dallas. Gilroy 2002 presents a critical analysis of race relations and racial representations in British culture. Fiske 1992 introduces the method of “audiencing” as a way of studying how audiences actively interact with the programs they watch. Morley 1992 uses a method similar to audiencing in his study of how people interact with television in the context of their homes and families. Radway 1984 reveals that women who read romance novels interpret them in very different ways from the feminist academics. McRobbie 1994 examines the power of postmodernity to transform culture and identity. Sender 2012 uses an online survey of the audience for reality makeover shows to see how those shows result in corollary makeovers for the at-home audience. Cultural studies approaches are grouped together here although they also overlap with the other sections of this article.

Ang, Ien. 1985. Watching Dallas: Soap opera and the melodramatic imagination. London: Methuen.
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This work is best known for distinguishing between true fans, ironic watchers, and show haters. These three groups all constituted the audience for Dallas at the time of Ang’s study, which notably took place in the context of the Netherlands, and they likely constitute the audience for most shows and for many other forms of popular culture.
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Bennett, Andy. 2001. Cultures of popular music. Buckingham, UK: Open Univ. Press.
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Bennett examines the rise of various music cultures and their relationships to youth subcultures, including rock, heavy metal, punk, reggae, rap, bhangra rap, and dance music.
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Fiske, John. 1992. Audiencing: A cultural studies approach to watching television. Poetics 21:345–359.
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Fiske, a cultural studies scholar, presents audiencing as an alternative to positivist social science methods of studying audiences. He presents a case study of observing college students watch the show Married with Children to explore the social dynamics of television viewing.
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Gilroy, Paul. 2002. There ain’t no black in the Union Jack. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Originally published in 1987, this book meticulously unravels the changing currents of racial discourse in the United Kingdom in the late 20th century.
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Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The meaning of style. London: Routledge.
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Hebdige examines the ways that youth subcultures engage the issue of style as mechanism for constructing shared identity and expressing a critique of class conditions.
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McRobbie, Angela. 1994. Postmodernism and popular culture. London: Routledge.
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McRobbie presents a series of essays that explore how postmodernism is reshaping social identities and relationships, and explores the roles of key thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag.
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Morley, David. 1992. Television, audiences, and cultural studies. London and New York: Routledge.
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Trained in the Birmingham school of cultural studies, Morley provides a unique approach to audience studies by focusing on how families watch television in the home. This allows him to examine how a range of gender and family roles impact the audience experience.
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Radway, Janice A. 1984. Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
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Radway’s mixed humanities readings of the romance text with a social science of ethnography of romance readers. She insists on taking the readers seriously and asks questions about how and why these women embrace romance novels.
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Sender, Katherine. 2012. The makeover: Reality television and reflexive audiences. New York: New York Univ. Press.
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How do makeover reality shows impact their largely female audiences? Sender examines the ways that these shows foster or stifle reflexivity in their watchers. That reflexivity can lead to either a greater awareness of the role of the media, or a greater embrace of self-surveillance as a move toward a self-makeover.
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Representation Perspectives

Whose stories are told in popular culture and who gets to do the telling? Studies of cultural representation often use content analysis, in both qualitative and quantitative forms, to examine issues like stereotypes, misrepresentation, and invisibility. Dubin 1987 focuses on folk culture objects to examine black representations from across American history. Pescosolido, et al. 1997 examines variations in the number and type of black representations in children’s books across the 20th century. McCabe, et al. 2011 examines gender representations in children’s books across the 20th century. Emerson 2002 presents a descriptive analysis of black women’s roles in music videos, emphasizing a continuum from social reproduction to social transformation. Wallis 2011 studies gender roles in music videos, with a focus on the characterizations of sexuality. Capsuto 2000 examines representations of gays and lesbians on radio and television across the 20th century. Russo 1987 studies the surprisingly homophobic character of the American film industry, and its variations across the 20th century. Norden 1994 looks at the range of disability representations in film, with a focus on representations of the isolated disabled person.

Capsuto, Steven. 2000. Alternate channels: The uncensored story of gay and lesbian images on radio and television, 1930s to the present. New York: Ballantine.
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A compendium of gay and lesbian imagery from across the 20th century that reveals that there have been far more representations that most would think, although these representations are profoundly problematic.
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Dubin, Steven C. 1987. Symbolic slavery: Black representations in popular culture. Social Problems 34:122–140.
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Dubin studies a collection of folk art objects with black representations that embody symbolic violence against black Americans, including images like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Mose.
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Emerson, Rana A. 2002. “Where my girls at?”: Negotiating black womanhood in music videos. Gender and Society 16:115–135.
DOI: 10.1177/0891243202016001007Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Emerson explores the range of black women’s representations in music videos from one-dimensional stereotypes to images of empowerment and sisterhood.
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McCabe, Janice, Emily Fairchild, Liz Grauerholz, Bernice A. Pescosolido, and Daniel Tope. 2011. Gender in twentieth-century children’s books: Patterns of disparity in titles and central characters. Gender & Society 25:197–226.
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The authors demonstrate that male representations both as characters and in titles significantly outweigh female representations in children’s books across the 20th century. However, they do find some variation by time period, type of character, and book series.
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Norden, Martin F. 1994. The cinema of isolation: A history of physical disability in the movies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.
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This book examines a wealth of disability representations from across film industry, critiquing the role the frequent use of one-dimensional representations that show disabled characters living in profound isolation.
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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.
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These authors find that the children’s publishing industry moves away from black representations after periods of racial conflict. They also demonstrate the role that gatekeepers can play in bringing black representations and racial discourse to the foreground.
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Russo, Vito. 1987. The celluloid closet: Homosexuality in the movies, revised edition. New York: Harper & Row.
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Russo is a film historian and gay activist. This book is a thorough compendium of queer representations in film across the 20th century.
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Wallis, Cara. 2011. Performing gender: A content analysis of gender display in music videos. Sex Roles 64:160–172.
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Wallis compares how men and women perform their gender identities in music videos, finding that women are more likely to enact certain sexualized performances such as sucking on their fingers or giving sultry looks.
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Production Perspectives

The study of cultural production processes typically emphasizes the ways that industry practices contribute to social reproduction. Other approaches focus on how the industry mitigates risk and uncertainty. Gitlin 1983 provides a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse into the production of made-for-TV movies. Bielby and Bielby 1994 examines the uncertainty facing Hollywood television studios in the development of new programs. Gamson 1998 focuses on the production of daytime talk shows with an emphasis on how these shows permit an otherwise invisible representation of marginalized groups. Grindstaff 2002, like Gamson 1998, studies daytime talk shows, but her focus is on the manipulative practices of the producers. Lena 2012 looks at how genres are formed through the practices of music communities. Baumann 2007 details transformations within the film industry that have allowed it to lay claim to the category of art, giving it a more sacred and protected cultural position than “mere” entertainment. Similarly, Fine 1992 examines the role of taste hierarchies in the production of cuisine. Peterson and Berger 1975 highlights the tremendous power of the culture industry to dictate production, over and above that of consumers. Lopes 1992 offers a critique, revision, and update of Peterson and Berger 1975. Peterson 1997 challenges the concept of authenticity in country music, and in popular culture more broadly, showing that it is a careful construction of the industry.

Baumann, Shyon. 2007. Hollywood highbrow: From entertainment to art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Are films entertainment or art? Can they be both? Baumann looks at the careful boundary work performed by the film industry to generate an association with art over and against its typical association with the lower status category of entertainment.
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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 99.5: 1287–1313.
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Bielby and Bielby challenge the presumed complexity of television program development. Although executives use the phrases “all hits are flukes” to describe this complexity, these scholars are able to isolated a few variables that do help to predict which shows will get picked up.
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Fine, Gary Alan. 1992. The culture of production: Aesthetic choices and constraints in culinary work. American Journal of Sociology 97.5: 1268–1294.
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This work may sit at the boundaries of popular culture and high culture, given that it focuses largely on fine dining, but it does present a taste-based framework for understanding the aesthetic components of cooking within the restaurant industry.
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Gamson, Joshua. 1998. Freaks talk back: Tabloid talk shows and sexual nonconformity. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226280639.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Gamson celebrates daytime talk shows as spaces where queer people, young people, racial and ethnic minorities, and working-class people are able to share their voices and have some level of representation against a TV culture that otherwise renders them invisible.
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Gitlin, Todd. 1983. Inside prime time. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Gaining unprecedented access to the world of television production, Gitlin finds that producers face a tremendous level of uncertainty about what types of shows will succeed. He also documents the tortuous ways that scripts move from inception to production.
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Grindstaff, Laura. 2002. The money shot: Trash, class, and the making of TV talk shows. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226309088.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Grindstaff interned behind the scenes on daytime talk shows to investigate how producers manipulate the show to arrive at what they call the money shot, that over-the-top moment that makes the show so riveting.
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Lena, Jennifer. 2012. Banding together: How communities create genres in popular music. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Lena uses a sweeping range of case studies from both US music and across the world to explain the seemingly ephemeral process by which new music genres are created.
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Lopes, Paul. 1992. Innovation and diversity in the popular music industry: 1969–1990. American Sociological Review 57:56–71.
DOI: 10.2307/2096144Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An important update and expansion to Peterson and Berger 1975.
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Peterson, Richard A. 1997. Creating country music: Fabricating authenticity. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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At once a history of country music and a sociological analysis of the genre, this book argues that the concept of authenticity in country is not a true reflection of the rural South that is associated with the genre but rather a fabrication of the corporate culture behind the rise of country music.
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Peterson, Richard A., and David G. Berger. 1975. Cycles in symbol production: The case of popular music. American Sociological Review 40:158–173.
DOI: 10.2307/2094343Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article looks at cycles of trends in the music industry and shows that these cycles are driven by the interests of the corporations behind the industry rather than the desires of consumers.
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Labor Force Issues

Corollary to production studies are those analyses that focus on the labor force for the production of popular culture. Many of these labor force studies emphasize issues of inequality in the labor market. Bielby and Bielby 1996 highlights the ways that gender inequalities map onto the labor market experiences of writers in the film industry. Lauzen and Dozier 2006 explains how gender inequalities in off-screen careers in television create inequalities on-screen. Lincoln and Allen 2004 studies the impact of aging on the careers of men and women actors. Czerniawski 2015 uses a first-hand participant observation account of the modeling industry through the lens of plus-size fashion. Schmutz and Faupel 2010 uses a 2003 Rolling Stone magazine list of the top five hundred albums of all time to examine how men’s and women’s musical success is framed in very different ways. Schippers 2000 offers an intersectional take on the world of alternative rock music. Fine 1992 (cited under Production Perspectives) draws attention to the aesthetic component of all work through a case study of the restaurant industry.

Bielby, Denise D., and William T. Bielby. 1996. Women and men in film: Gender inequality among writers in a culture industry. Gender and Society 10:248–270.
DOI: 10.1177/089124396010003004Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Labor market gender inequalities are not absent from the culture industries; indeed they are more pronounced. Men benefit far more than women from the accumulation of professional experience across the course of their careers, and this gap is reflected in pay differentials.
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Czerniawski, Amanda M. 2015. Fashioning fat: Inside plus-size modeling. New York: New York Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9780814770399.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This critique of the fashion industry relies on participant observations. Czerniawski worked as a plus-size model for two years to gather this research on the ways that the fashion industry manipulates conceptions of women’s bodies.
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Lauzen, Martha M., and David M. Dozier. 2006. Genre matters: An examination of women working behind the scenes and on-screen portrayals in reality and scripted prime-time programming. Sex Roles 55:445–455.
DOI: 10.1007/s11199-006-9100-5Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Lauzen and Dozier find that the inclusion of women on the behind-the-scenes creative teams for television shows typically correlates to more women appearing on-screen, although they find a surprising inverse of this pattern with reality television.
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Lincoln, Anne E., and Michael Patrick Allen. 2004. Double jeopardy in Hollywood: Age and gender in the careers of film actors, 1926–1999. Sociological Forum 19:611–631.
DOI: 10.1007/s11206-004-0698-1Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Put simply, gender is bad for women actors in Hollywood and aging is worse. Being a woman already limits the career possibilities for women actors, and those possibilities diminish further as they age.
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Schippers, Mimi. 2000. The social organization of sexuality and gender in alternative hard rock: An analysis of intersectionality. Gender & Society 14:747–764.
DOI: 10.1177/089124300014006003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This work does not fall neatly into the production category because it is really about how participants in the alternative hard rock genre, including both musicians and fans, have created and struggle to maintain a culture that is progressive around issues of gender and sexuality.
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Schmutz, Vaughn, and Alison Faupel. 2010. Gender and cultural consecration in popular music. Social Forces 89:685–708.
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2010.0098Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Schmutz and Faupel examine the language used to present the biographies of the artists behind the Rolling Stone list of the top five hundred albums of all time. They find that women’s musical success is often explained with reference to their connections to influential men as their producers, collaborators, or lovers. By contrast, the stories of male musicians focus on their unique artistry and lone genius.
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Audience Perspectives

The primary contribution of audience studies, also known as reception studies, has been the acknowledgement that audiences have agency in determining the meaning of the cultural works they consume. Meaning is not simply the imprint of the producer on the cultural object; it is always under negotiation. Shively 1992 compares white and Native American interpretations of Western films to demonstrate that although both groups like the films, they like them for very different reasons. Binder 1993 reveals racial disparities behind the ways that rap and heavy metal have been covered in both media discussions and congressional hearings. Hughey 2010 studies reception through the lens of movie reviews for the film Freedom Writers. Long 2003 explores how women’s relationships to books are sometimes mediated by the social experience of the book club. Press 1991 finds interesting class divides in how women interact with the television shows they watch. Vila and Seman 2011 explores gender differences in how Argentinians interpret seemingly misogynistic lyrics in the music of cumbia villera. Cooper 2003 examines gender patterns in how straight audiences related to the gay and straight characters of the show Will & Grace. Linneman 2008 studies the show Will & Grace and examines how audiences respond to the ways that gay men are feminized on the show. Lembo 2000 offers an ethnographic analysis of how audiences engage television throughout the course of the day. Jenkins 2006 places the focus on fan cultures and the ways they use new technology to practice participatory culture.

Binder, Amy. 1993. Constructing racial rhetoric: Media depictions of harm in heavy metal and rap music. American Sociological Review 58:753–767.
DOI: 10.2307/2095949Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Both heavy metal and rap have been treated as a threat to American culture and American children. Binder unearths racial differences in the precise nature of that presumed threat through analysis of both media discourse and political discourse.
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Cooper, Evan. 2003. Decoding Will and Grace: Mass audience reception of a popular network situation comedy. Sociological Perspectives 46:513–533.
DOI: 10.1525/sop.2003.46.4.513Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Cooper is able to explore the impact of gender identity on straight men and women through an examination of how they interpret and relate to the gay themes of Will & Grace. Straight men show discomfort with the gay male characters in ways that lead them to understand the show in very different ways than their straight women counterparts.
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Hughey, Matthew W. 2010. The white savior film and reviewers’ reception. Symbolic Interaction 33:475–496.
DOI: 10.1525/si.2010.33.3.475Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A white savior film is one that features a group of downtrodden minorities, usually black or Hispanic, who are then saved when a white hero intervenes. The hero is often a teacher, coach, or adoptive parent. Hughey looks at the awkward ways that movie reviewers address this issue in the interpretation of such films.
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Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence cultures: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York Univ. Press.
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Jenkins directs readers’ attention to the issue of participation and the participatory culture that is being fostered by a blend of new technology and on-going practices by fans to engage the culture that consume and forge new meanings for it.
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Lembo, Ron. 2000. Thinking through television. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511489488Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Lembo directs students of television to focus on the particular ways that audiences engage with television, particularly in moments when the set is simply running in the background. He focuses on the role that television plays during the transitions between work and home.
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Linneman, Thomas J. 2008. How do you solve a problem like Will Truman? The feminization of gay masculinities on Will & Grace. Men & Masculinities 10:583–603.
DOI: 10.1177/1097184X06291918Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Feminizing gay male characters is a comedic technique, but it works because of the relationship of gender to power. If a male character is feminized, his power is diminished. Linneman identifies the ways that this feminization occurs in Will & Grace and then takes the findings to audience focus groups to see how different types of audiences will make sense of it.
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Long, Elizabeth. 2003. Book clubs: Women and the uses of reading in everyday life. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Long focuses on middle-class book clubs for women and looks at both the social function of these clubs and the ways the cubs themselves generate new relationships to both books and the other club members.
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Press, Andrea L. 1991. Women watching television: Gender, class, and generation in the American television experience. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
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This book is important first because of its focus on women as audiences and second because of its discovery that middle-class and working-class women interpret television in very different ways.
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Shively, JoEllen. 1992. Cowboys and Indians: Perceptions of Western films among American Indians and Anglos. American Sociological Review 57:725–734.
DOI: 10.2307/2096119Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Growing up on a reservation, Shively observed that both whites and Native Americans expressed an enjoyment in watching Westerns. For this study, she returned to a reservation and used a showing of the John Wayne film The Searchers as a way investigate this cross-racial interest in Westerns. Although whites see the films as historical and serious, Native Americans see them as fictional and humorous.
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Vila, Pablo, and Pablo Seman. 2011. Troubling gender: Youth and cumbia in Argentina’s music scene. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press.
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With contributions by Eloisa Martin and Maria Julia Carozzi. These scholars “trouble” assumptions about how content impacts the audience by examining the case of cumbia villera popular music in Argentina. Cumbia villera is distinguished both stylistically and by the lyrical content, which often includes sexually explicit lines that are demeaning to women. Vila and Seman find that although male listeners accept the lyrics without much critique, female listeners show an awareness of the misogynistic content and have complex ways of reinterpreting the music.
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Media Industry

A few key works provide an important overview of the media as a field. Unlike productions studies, which focus on creative processes within the media industries, these works focus instead on the dynamics across those industries that shape the context of cultural production, working within the political economy perspective. Herman and Chomsky 1988, McChesney 1999, and Bagdikian 2004 all explore the impact of having a small handful of corporations control the production of both news and entertainment media. Postman 1985 examines the impact of entertainment culture on public discourse and politics.

Bagdikian, Ben H. 2004. The new media monopoly: A completely revised and updated edition with seven new chapters. Boston: Beacon.
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Bagdikian wrote a precursor to this book, The Media Monopoly, in 1983. The New Media Monopoly is an updated version with a wealth of new content. Bagdikian is both a journalist and a scholar, and his primary concern is with the role that media consolidation has played in shifting American politics further toward the right.
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Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon.
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Herman and Chomsky call the media industry a propaganda machine. They look at how this propaganda model impacts the coverage of international news. They also challenge the idea that audiences are willing participants in the process by exposing the ways that corporate news actively shapes the ways audiences understand the very idea of news.
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McChesney, Robert. 1999. Rich media, poor democracy: Communication politics in dubious times. Champaign: Univ. of Illinois Press.
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The American media industry, including the news industry, is characterized by consolidation, vertical integration, and horizontal integration. McChesney explains how these processes have made sweeping changes in the culture industry across the 1980s and 1990s.
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Postman, Neil. 1985. Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Viking.
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Postman is very critical of the impact of entertainment culture on the political process and on American culture more broadly. His critiques predate social media but they also offer a useful lens for thinking about how the commercialization of culture has reduced important social practices to mere commodities.