Shyon Baumann

Democracy versus Distinction: A Study of Omnivorousness in Gourmet Food Writing1

The American culinary field has experienced a broadening in recent decades. While French food retains high status, gourmet food can now come from a broad range of cuisines. This change mirrors a broadening in other cultural fields labeled “omnivorousness” within the sociology of culture. The authors take gourmet food writing as a case study to understand the rationales underlying omnivorousness. Their findings, based on qualitative and quantitative data, reveal two frames used to valorize a limited number of foods: authenticity and exoticism. These frames resolve a tension between an inclusionary ideology of democratic cultural consumption on the one hand, and an exclusionary ideology of taste and distinction on the other. This article advances our understanding of how cultural consumption sustains status distinctions in the face of eroding boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow culture.

Caring About Food Doing Gender in the Foodie Kitchen

This article draws on interviews with “foodies”—people with a passion for eating and learning about food—to explore questions of gender and foodie culture. The analysis suggests that while this culture is by no means gender-neutral, foodies are enacting gender in ways that warrant closer inspection. This article puts forward new empirical findings about gender and food and employs the concept of “doing gender” to explore how masculinities and femininities are negotiated in foodie culture. Our focus on doing gender generates two insights into gender and food work. First, we find that doing gender has different implications for men and women within foodie culture. Alongside evidence that foodies are contesting particular gendered relations within the food world, we explore how broader gender inequities persist. Second, we contend that opportunities for doing gender in foodie culture cannot be considered apart from class privilege.

The Instability of Androgynous Names: The Symbolic Maintenance of Gender Boundaries

By definition, androgynous names do not serve as gender markers. Two radically different expectations about their growth are plausible: on the one hand, the rise of the feminist movement, which militates against gender distinctions, would suggest androgynous names increasing in recent decades. On the other hand, cross-cultural research indicates that first names designate gender more frequently than any other characteristic of a child or its family, suggesting a minimal increase. Examining data for all white births in Illinois in every year from 1916 through 1989 produces paradoxical results. Overall use of androgynous names is barely increasing; however, the disposition to use androgynous names has increased among parents of daughters. Analysis of the accidental ways in which androgynous names develop, their special characteristics, and their asymmetric growth patterns, leads to viewing the androgynous process as collective behavior that can be fruitfully examined through the perspective of the Schelling residential segregation model. The minimal increase in androgyny reflects a gender contamination effect that may be operating in a variety of other domains as well.

Understanding the food preferences of people of low socioeconomic status

Scholars have long studied consumer taste dynamics within class-stratified contexts, but relatively little attention has been paid to the taste preferences of low-socioeconomic-status groups. We analyze interview data from 254 individuals from 105 families across Canada to explore the cultural repertoires that guide low-socioeconomic-status consumer tastes in food. Empirically, we ask which foods respondents prefer, and for what reasons, across socioeconomic status groups. Analytically, we argue that low-socioeconomic-status respondents demonstrate aesthetic preferences that operate according to four cultural repertoires that are distinctly different from that of high-socioeconomic-status omnivorous cultural consumption. Our respondents display tastes for foods from corporate brands, familiar “ethnic” foods, and foods perceived as healthy. While low-socioeconomic-status taste preferences in food are shaped by quotidian economic constraints – what Bourdieu called “tastes of necessity” – we show how cultural repertoires guiding low-socioeconomic-status tastes relate to both material circumstances and broader socio-temporal contexts. Our findings advance debates about the nature of low-socioeconomic-status food ideals by illuminating their underlying meanings and justifications and contribute to scholarly understanding of low-socioeconomic-status consumption.

The Digital Difference: Media Technology and the Theory of Communication EffectsThe Digital Difference: Media Technology and the Theory of Communication Effects, by NeumanW. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 369 pp.

government—not families or individuals— making key decisions in where children went to school or even how much schooling they received. Now that the state has backed away from providing many social services, individuals and families may have more of a say in what happens in children’s lives. At the same time, however, there are growing gaps between the haves and the have-nots in China today, and children of poorer regions, those from rural areas, and children in ethnic minority groups are some of those that have lost out in China’s push for modernity. Education, seen by many as the best ticket to a higher socio-economic standing, is effectively blocked for these children. Reading about the experience of children in China will raise familiar questions for many; children, after all, are the future of the country. Whose responsibility is it to ensure that children thrive? is it the society’s? the parents’? During the era of collective social responsibility—when children and others were under the eye of the state, in both positive and negative ways—the Chinese state claimed children as the country’s future and undertook much of the responsibility of caring for them. With the move toward privatization, children are more and more seen as belonging to their parents, or even as autonomous, self-contained members of society. In such a situation, children and their families must fend for themselves in finding resources that will allow children to thrive. Children in China is a very good overview of the contemporary (and recent past) situation of kids growing up in a fast-changing society. It is accessible enough for an upper-level undergraduate class but covers a range of topics and research that will also appeal to graduate students and others who need a solid and interesting overview of this important segment of Chinese society. The Digital Difference: Media Technology and the Theory of Communication Effects, by W. Russell Neuman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 369 pp.

49.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780674504936.

49.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780674504936.

Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation

research. She considers the role of Belarusian state and local institutions such as newspapers and community health clinics as well as powerful international institutions such as the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency. In the account that Kuchinskaya weaves together, all of these actors and organizations are actively shaping the discourses and material practices of invisibility production and the ignorance that is the ultimate consequence of this (dis)articulation. Another product is irony, given that the study of invisibility requires a watchful eye and an expansive field of vision. In my estimation, the book compares very favorably with two key texts in the small but growing literature in social studies of ignorance—Robert Proctor’s Cancer Wars (1995) and Matthias Gross’ more recent Ignorance and Surprise (2010). It is worth considering how data and analysis are related in these three books. For the historian Proctor, gaining access to old tobacco industry documents relating to what experts within the industry knew about the health effects of smoking was difficult, but once he had it, the story wrote itself: the villains all wear black hats and ignorance production follows from now-familiar corporate tactics of obfuscation, deceit, and denial. The sociologist Gross studied efforts by ecologists and environmental groups to remediate and restore contaminated industrial lands. His data were easier to come by because no one hid it from him. But because each set of decisions in the restoration process brought to light new elements of the unknown, the analytical path that Gross had to carve through the data was less certain and required more creative work to unravel. Kuchinskaya inherits both sets of challenges: Like Proctor, she faces the problem of getting access to difficult data and, like Gross, she must wrestle continuously with empirical ambiguity. In my estimation, she meets both challenges and in so doing sets a new bar for this genre of investigation. My three complaints about the book are fairly minor. I don’t understand the ordering of chapters, which bounce from topic to topic in ways that do not seem to straightforwardly support the developing argument. I am also less excited by Kuchinskaya’s theoretical framework, which is almost entirely dependent on two concepts mentioned earlier (alignment and infrastructure) and would be strengthened by a more forceful engagement with a broader set of sociological ideas relating to institutional power, resources, collective action, and inequality. And, having finished the book, I was left wondering what we learn about invisibility production beyond the Belarusian experience with Chernobyl. While the implications of this study would seem broadly applicable, the book offers little guidance for drawing a more general set of lessons about the politics of knowledge. I list these concerns to encourage critical conversation, not to dissuade readers of this review from assigning this book in their graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate courses. This is another way to help people see the invisible. And who doesn’t enjoy a good ghost story every now and then? This one haunts and inspires.

Democracy vs. Distinction in Omnivorous Food Culture. Clarifications, Elaborations, and a Response to Therese Andrews

This article adds to current sociological debates on cultural taste and social distinction. I particularly discuss the use of cultural capital as an analytical tool for capturing and explaining aspects of distinction within contemporary gourmet food culture, and explore the possibility of whether a different conceptualization of social distinction is more fruitful for understanding some of the patterns that are uncovered. I argue, more generally, that all social gaps in cultural taste cannot be taken as indicators of unequal distribution of power in society, as some Bourdieu-inspired scholars, tend to do.

The Culture of Cultural Markets

Can cultural sociology and organizational sociology make a good couple? Can they bring out the best in each other? Can they grow together, so that each one reaches their full potential? Each member of this couple has its flaws. Cultural sociology, with its insistence on examining the meaning of everything, can sometimes talk in circles, reflecting back on its own subjectivity, so that others wonder if we are really getting anywhere. Organizational sociology can be so darn rational, single-mindedly pursuing goals without stepping back to consider what it all means. Should these two really be together? It is not all that original to say, but it turns out that sometimes flaws can

Critics, Ratings, and Society: The Sociology of Reviews By Grant Blank Rowan & Littlefield. 2007. 245 pages.

In other words, it doesn’t really matter, in practice, which type of exclusion is the most harmful. Instead, researchers should focus on how elites use various kinds of boundaries in practical ways to consolidate and protect their power and keep various groups of people oppressed. All of these boundaries are discursively available, though some may be more accessible at one time or the other. Those in power do not debate which one is more “real” than another in practicing discrimination, and we as activists should not either. Wray’s best articulated arguments in this regard are made in two places. First, in the book’s introduction, Wray lays out his theory, and here, the discussion of “symbolic and social boundaries” and the introduction of his concept of “stigmatypes” are particularly invaluable. Second, in the final chapter of the book Wray clearly demonstrates the benefits of a “boundary work” perspective; although as a minor criticism I think in this chapter the distinctions he makes between a theoretical and a methodological caveat (142) are unnecessary. The two concepts are too tightly interwoven to allow for the clear distinction Wray seems to be proposing. As stated earlier, one rarely has the pleasure of reading a scholarly book that is equally entertaining and informative. Often, when an author fills a volume with a wealth of information on a given topic, as does Wray, the material becomes very dry. Reading such a book is almost like eating one’s vegetables – we know we should do it, and we’ll be better for having done so, but we aren’t likely to enjoy the experience, and may in fact wish we could consume some literary “candy” instead. I’ll be the first to (somewhat sheepishly) admit that often the fiction books I want to read call to me, competing with the academic books I’m “supposed” to be reading. This did not happen as I read Not Quite White, and for that, I am grateful to the author.