Sharon Zukin

Entrepreneurial Labor among Cultural Producers: ''Cool'' Jobs in ''Hot'' Industries

This article compares the work of fashion models and “new media workers” (those who work in the relatively new medium of the Internet as dot-com workers) in order to highlight the processes of entrepreneurial labor in culture industries. Based on interviews and participant-observation in New York City, we trace how entrepreneurial labor becomes intertwined with work identities in cultural industries both on and off the job. While workers are drawn to the autonomy, creativity and excitement that jobs in these media industries can provide, they have also come to accept as normal the high risks associated with this work. Diffused through media images, this normalization of risk serves as a model for how workers in other industries should behave under flexible employment conditions. Using interview data from within the fashion media and the dot-com world, we discuss eight forces that give rise to the phenomenon of entrepreneurial labor: the cultural quality of cool, creativity, autonomy, self-investment, compulsory networking, portfolio evaluations, international competition, and foreshortened careers. We also provide a model of what constitutes the hierarchy of “good work” in cultural industries, and we conclude with implications of what entrepreneurial labor means for theories of work.

CONSUMING AUTHENTICITY: From outposts of difference to means of exclusion

Alternative consumption practices often lead to the creation of entrepreneurial spaces like restaurants and bars, and to the resurgence of farmers’ markets, offering urban consumers a safe and comfortable place to ‘perform’ difference from mainstream norms. These spaces fabricate an aura of authenticity based on the history of the area or the back story of their products, and capitalize on the tastes of their young, alternative clientele. This vision gradually attracts media attention and a broader consumer base, followed by larger stores and real estate developers, leading to hip neighborhoods with luxury housing, aka gentrification. Whether the specific discourse of consumption is based on distinction or inclusion, alternative consumers are not so innocent agents of change. Their desire for alternative foods, both gourmet and organic, and for ‘middle class’ shopping areas encourages a dynamic of urban redevelopment that displaces working-class and ethnic minority consumers.

New Retail Capital and Neighborhood Change: Boutiques and Gentrification in New York City

Since the 1970s, certain types of upscale restaurants, cafés, and stores have emerged as highly visible signs of gentrification in cities all over the world. Taking Harlem and Williamsburg as field sites, we explore the role of these new stores and services (“boutiques”) as agents of change in New York City through data on changing composition of retail and services, interviews with new store owners, and discursive analysis of print media. Since the 1990s, the share of boutiques, including those owned by small local chains, has dramatically increased, while the share of corporate capital (large chain stores) has increased somewhat, and the share of traditional local stores and services has greatly declined. the media, state, and quasi–public organizations all value boutiques, which they see as symbols and agents of revitalization. Meanwhile, new retail investors—many, in Harlem, from the new black middle class—are actively changing the social class and ethnic character of the neighborhoods. Despite owners’ responsiveness to community identity and racial solidarity, “boutiquing” calls attention to displacement of local retail stores and services on which long–term, lower class residents rely and to the states failure to take responsibility for their retention, especially in a time of economic crisis.

Space and Symbols in an Age of Decline

There are two schools of critical thought about the city’s built environment. One, identified with political economy, emphasizes investment shifts among different circuits of capital that transfer the ownership and uses of land from one social class to another. Its basic terms are land, labor and capital. The other school of thought, identified with a symbolic economy, focuses on representations of social groups and visual means of excluding or including them in public and private spaces. From this view, the endless negotiation of cultural meanings in built forms — in buildings, streets, parks, interiors — contributes to the construction of social identities. Few urban scholars at this point would defend using only one of these ways of looking at the city. The most productive analyses of cities in recent years are based on interpretations and interpenetrations of culture and power.

Bourdieu Off‐Broadway: Managing Distinction on a Shopping Block in the East Village

The economic and social vitality of East Ninth Street, in the East Village of Lower Manhattan, testifies to the areas long‐standing reputation for cutting‐edge culture and the streets astounding high density of unusual stores. Like a regional industrial district, the block between First and Second Avenues works as a specialized agglomeration of small producers, who are dependent on both supportive local suppliers and populations and customers from abroad, and who are linked in networks of mutually beneficial relations. This concentration succeeds not only because of the aesthetic distinction managed by store and building owners, but also because of the cultural diversity sought by a local yet cosmopolitan clientele, the material diversity of the old buildings, and the sociability of old and new residents. Far from destroying a community by commercial gentrification, East Ninth Street suggests that a retail concentration of designer stores may be a territory of innovation in the urban economy, producing both a marketable and a sociable neighborhood node.

After the World Trade Center : Rethinking New York City

Introduction 1. When Bad Things Happen to Good People 2. Our World Trade Center 3. Manhattan at War 4. Whose Downtown?!? 5. The First Wall Street Bomb 6. Cracks in the Edifice of the Empire State 7. Insecurity by Design 8. The Janus Face of Architectural Terrorism 9. Scales of Terror 10. Meditations on a Wounded Skyline and its Stratigraphies of Pain 11. The Odor of Publicity 12. Letter to a G-Man 13. From Jackson Heights to Nuestra America: 9/11 and Latino New York 14. What Kind of Planning After September 11? 15. Spaces of Reflection, Recovery and Resistance 16. A Time for Transportation Strategy 17. Enduring Innocence 18. The Center Cannot Hold 19. New York, New Deal. Index.

Critical and Moral Stances in Consumer Studies

Critical and Moral Stances in Consumer Studies A distinguished group of panelists – Juliet Schor, Don Slater, Sharon Zukin and Viviana Zelizer – convened at the first conference sponsored by the Consumer Studies Research Network, held at Barnard College in 2007, to discuss their views on the state of sociological consumer research. The panelists agreed to formalize in writing their thoughts in response to the one question that dominated the discussion, sparking considerable engagement with the audience. The event was organized by Dan Cook, Rutgers University, and J. Michael Ryan, University of Maryland.

From Affluence to Praxis

The Yugoslav social philosophers with whom Mihailo Marković and Svetozar Stojanović are most closely associated offer a “middle way” toward Marxist theory in which praxis, particularly through critical application of dialectical reasoning, has overcome the certainty of cant. In eschewing both Stalinism and Maoism for humanism, this approach has conformed, over the past two decades, to the apparent evolution of Yugoslav political practice. Indeed, for a brief time (1965–68), these Yugoslav philosophers seemed to enjoy the best of several possible situations: not only were they in general agreement with their government, but they were also sought — as guides to praxis—in other countries, including the United States.

What's Space Got to Do With It?

Herb Gans’s essay is a welcome call to sociologists to study space as a basic element of social relations. No longer to be considered just a backdrop for human actors, space has now been adopted as a legitimate focus of sociological concern. Gans accomplishes this with the wit and common sense, and the clarity of expression, for which he is known—the very hallmarks of the sociologist as a public intellectual.1 But the essay misses some of the points about the social nature of space that have so excited researchers’ imaginations across a variety of multidisciplinary fields. By concentrating on a narrow swath of literature from the sociological and policy-oriented mainstream, the essay fails to raise the larger issue of how and why spaces are constituted for critical social purposes—especially to assert the power of capitalists and the state and to form collective identities. For this reason, the essay ignores the most significant theoretical and empirical research on space of the past 30 years. And by sticking to the mainstream, it refuses to call into question the texture, meaning, and malleability of space—the qualities that geographers call “spatiality.”2 Let’s begin by questioning the assumption that there is such as thing as natural or “presocial” space. I can’t deny the reality of such geological and geographical formations as oceans, islands, or volcanoes, but—as environmental historians say about the idea of wilderness—as soon as humans notice it, space becomes social. Gans chooses to concentrate on use as the first moment of socializing space, but I think that sight, which involves both perception and cognition, and often also emotion, is the true origin of socialization: sight provides a space’s demarcation, meaning, and sense of beneficence or danger. Sight is not far removed, moreover, from questions of control. In the last few years, geographers have pointed out the underlying ideological purposes of maps, and visual historians have noted the similar functions of photography. To picture a space, in other words, is often to advance a strategy of bringing it under social control. Relying on the notion of use also begs the question of whose use comes first. We learn, again from environmental historians, that European Americans who explored this continent from the 17th through the 19th centuries refused to acknowledge the prior uses of land by Native American nations. The Native Americans’ carefully tended forests, from the Adirondacks to Yosemite, became the white man’s “wilderness.”3 Gans begins and ends by addressing architects. Throughout the essay, like most urban sociologists, he prefers to focus on the contemporary built environment. This emphasis on the familiar landscape distracts him from asking how and why it was built, which alternative scenarios have been eliminated, and how current designs sustain or challenge larger

The omnivore’s neighborhood? Online restaurant reviews, race, and gentrification

Social media users who post restaurant reviews on the website Yelp.com act as both prosumers or produsers and “discursive investors” in gentrification. Their unpaid online reviews create cultural and financial value for individual restaurants and also construct a positive or negative image of their locations that may lead to economic investment. Moreover, Yelp reviewers show marked preferences in terms of race. Examining 7046 Yelp reviews of restaurants in a predominantly White-gentrifying and a predominantly Black-gentrifying neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, shows far more reviewers draw attention to the urban locale when the majority of residents are Black. A framing analysis of 1056 reviews that mention the neighborhood indicates that most Yelp reviewers feel positive about the White neighborhood, where they consider the traditional Polish restaurants “authentic” and “cozy,” while they feel negative about the Black neighborhood, which they criticize for a dearth of dining options and an atmosphere of dirt and danger. This language represents “discursive redlining” in the digital public realm, with Yelp reviewers contributing to taste-driven processes of gentrification and racial change.