Victoria D. Alexander

Triangulation and integration: processes, claims and implications

Researchers who advocate the use of multiple methods often write interchangeably about ‘integrating’, ‘combining’ and ‘mixing’ methods, sometimes eliding these descriptors with ‘triangulation’, which itself encompasses several meanings. In this article we argue that such an elision is problematic since it obscures the difference between (a) the processes by which methods (or data) are brought into relationship with each other (combined, integrated, mixed) and (b) the claims made for the epistemological status of the resulting knowledge. Drawing on the literature for examples, we set out different rationales for using more than one method, then we develop a definition of integration of methods as a specific kind of relationship among methods. We also discuss different places in the research process where integration can occur: for instance, data from different sources can be integrated in the analysis stage, or findings from different sources at the point of theorizing.

From philanthropy to funding: The effects of corporate and public support on American art museums

Abstract This paper demonstrates that both museums and museum exhibitions change as museums become increasingly supported by institutional funders rather than individual philanthropists. Museums become more attuned to audiences, exhibits, and educational programs. Exhibitions themselves change, but not due to direct pressure by funders. Rather, funders sponsor more of the exhibitions that suit their goals, thereby changing the overall mix of exhibitions. Notably, there has been a broadening effect on museums as corporations and government sponsor exhibition formats that appeal to large audiences, and as corporations sponsor popular exhibitions. Such changes have led to increased conflict within museums. Ironically, the source of the conflict — the increase in numbers of new institutional funders — has also given the most disgruntled group — curators — more leverage to do their jobs. The research relies on interviews, archival data from 30 museums, and analysis of more than 4,000 exhibitions from 15 large American art museums from 1960 to 1986.

A Delicate Balance: Museums and the Market‐place

‘Museums must succumb to the inevitable, in moving towards a more businesslike model for their operations and revenue, without losing sight of conservation and connoisseurship.’ So concludes Victor...

Views of the Neighbourhood: A Photo-Elicitation Study of the Built Environment

Drawing on a participant-centred, photo-elicitation study of the built environment in three neighbourhoods, I discuss how people see their neighbourhoods, both in the visual and aesthetic sense, and also how they view (metaphorically) their local surroundings. Participants took part in photo-elicitation interviews and, previously, in standard (verbal-only) semi-structured interviews. Results suggest that people care about their neighbourhoods and value local amenities, attractive houses, public art, and trees, greenery and open spaces. They are concerned about such mundane issues as litter and poorly kept properties, which they find unattractive. Pictures of narrow alleyways and deserted areas were prevalent in connection with fear and vulnerability. I suggest that as participants construct their views of the built environment, they situate their actual neighbourhoods against idealised ‘imagined’ neighbourhoods, and both the actual surroundings and the idealised construction play into their views of their own place. In addition, it is clear that when participants are asked to take photographs of their neighbourhoods, they think visually. Consequently, participants enact their responses differently in visual research than they do in verbal-only research.

Art and the Twenty-First Century Gift: Corporate Philanthropy and Government Funding in the Cultural Sector

Marcel Mausss work on the archaic gift contributes to understandings of corporate and government support of arts organisations, or ‘institutional funding’. His approach allows us to see institutional funding as a gift that is embedded in a system of exchange wherein gifts come with a variety of obligations, and self-interest and disinterestedness are inseparable. The institutional gift operates through money and contracts; nevertheless, it entails obligations to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. This system of obligations has been joined, in the contemporary institutional gift, by another obligation: the obligation to ask. Institutional funding of the arts has acquired additional twenty-first-century elements. The article elaborates these, using the UK as an example. It also argues that the ambivalence felt by some members of the arts world about institutional funding stems, in large part, from the obligations inherent in the gift. The recent imposition of the neo-liberal model into the arts is an intrinsic part of the exchange between institutional funders and arts organisations. Given that Mausss work is strongly anti-liberal and anti-utilitarian, it is ironic that his ideas should prove so useful for understanding a form of twenty-first-century gift in which neo-liberalism plays such a crucial role.

Reflections on the Challenge of Markets in National, International, and Transnational Art Worlds

Revisiting the major themes that emerge in the chapters of Art and the Challenge of Markets, Volume 1, this chapter considers the challenges of marketization and globalization from two principal perspectives. First, although Western nations have clearly been influenced by market-based or neoliberal models of governance and funding for the arts, there is significant variation in the ways in which the shift toward the managerialist cultural policies has been implemented in different nations. Second, the chapter discusses the theme of globalized and transnational art worlds as considered in the chapters in the volume. Globalization in the realm of art is complex and highly contingent in terms of both the forms and hierarchies of art and the relation between transnational flows and national cultural politics.

Enterprise Culture and the Arts: Neoliberal Values and British Art Institutions

Neoliberal discourse has spread from the economic realm into all parts of society. This chapter discusses the current situation of neoliberal discourses and their effects on the arts, focusing on the United Kingdom. It also examines the historical development of British cultural policy, highlighting trends toward the marketization of the arts, increasing government intervention, and a growing emphasis on managerialism. The analysis shows that British arts organizations have been deeply affected by state and corporate interests. The chapter draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who describes the field of cultural production as containing two poles that are autonomous or heteronomous. By tracing British cultural policy as it came to favor enterprise culture, the chapter demonstrates an increasing loss of autonomy in the arts.

Digital Traces of Distinction? Popular Orientation and User-Engagement with Status Hierarchies in TripAdvisor Reviews of Cultural Organizations

Cultural organizations are categorized by cultural products (high or popular culture) and by organizational form (nonprofit or commercial). In sociology, these classifications are understood predominantly through a Bourdieusian lens, which links cultural consumption to habitus and a class-based struggle for distinction. However, people’s engagement with institutionalized cultural classifications may be expressed differently on the Internet, where a culture of hierarchy-free equality is (sometimes) idealized. Using digital trace data from a representative sample of 280 user-generated reviews of four London cultural organizations, we find that reviewers are concerned with practical issues over cultural content, displaying a popular orientation to cultural consumption (an “audience-focus” or an “embodied” approach). A very small minority of reviewers claim status honor on a variety of bases, including symbolic mastery of traditional cultural capital. Overall, we find an online space in the cultural sphere in which cultural hierarchies are not relevant.

Scandal and the Work of Art: The Nude in an Aesthetically Inflected Sociology of the Arts

American sociologists working in the production perspective have produced a rich body of work on systems of aesthetic-cultural production, distribution, and consumption, but they have paid relatively little attention to the work of art. Aligning with new sociological work that takes the work of art seriously, this article contributes to an aesthetically inflected sociology of the arts: research that includes the work of art as an integral part of the analysis. Substantively, we examine a 19th-century scandal surrounding paintings of nudes. We show that the work of art constitutes crucial evidence for understanding arts scandals. Artworks are connected with social and aesthetic issues by means of their pictorial elements, which are viewed by a public through historically situated ‘period eyes’. Each of these elements is needed to spark an arts controversy, and all must be studied in order to understand them.

A brave look at disadvantage, black youth, and culture: Patterson and Fosse's The Cultural Matrix

ABSTRACT This article provides a review of The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, edited by Orlando Patterson with Ethan Fosse (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2015, cloth, £33.95, ISBN: 978-0-674-72875-2). In the collection, Patterson and Fosse bring together theoretical and empirical work that focuses on culture and disadvantage in the African-American community. This book is important. It is packed with fresh insights and excellent scholarship, and it grasps thorny issues: the role of culture in the persistence of disadvantage and the features of culture that ameliorate disadvantage or that allow people to resist, reduce, or manage its concomitants, such as neighbourhood violence. The books authors offer careful, nuanced treatments of these topics, while always showing a profound respect for the disadvantaged subjects of the research. However, in bringing together concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘poverty’, the book is also likely to spark debate.