Abstract
This paper celebrates Ron Eyerman’s contribution to the sociology of the arts. Through a discussion of selected publications, I highlight the key arguments and the themes running through this strand of his work to show how he both pointed beyond production perspectives and secured a central place for art and music in the strong program of cultural sociology. I also revisit his call for a meaningful sociology of the arts, not only to reflect on how this has influenced my own research agenda, but also to take stock of the current state of the field and gauge how much progress has been made in responding to his challenge to take meaning seriously.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Oxford English Dictionary.
References
Alexander, J.C. 2004. Cultural pragmatics: Social performance between ritual and strategy. Sociological Theory 22: 527–573.
Alexander, J.C., and P. Smith. 2003. The strong program in cultural sociology: Elements of a structural hermeneutics. The meanings of social life: A cultural sociology, 11–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Alexander, V.D., and A.E. Bowler. 2018. Scandal and the work of art: The nude in an aesthetically inflected sociology of the arts. Cultural Sociology 12: 325–342.
Beisel, N. 1993. Morals versus art: Censorship, the politics of interpretation, and the Victorian nude. American Sociological Review 58: 145–162.
Born, G. 2010. The social and the aesthetic: For a post-Bourdieuian theory of cultural production. Cultural Sociology 4: 171–208.
Bourdieu, P. 1996. The rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary field. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Crane, D. 1987. The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940-1985. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
de la Fuente, E. 2007. The `New Sociology of Art’: Putting art back into social science approaches to the arts. Cultural Sociology 1: 409–425.
Dickens, C. 2003. [1837-1839]) Oliver Twist, or, the parish boy’s progress. London: Penguin.
Domínguez, Rubio F. 2014. Preserving the unpreservable: Docile and unruly objects at MoMA. Theory and Society 43: 617–645.
Eyerman, R. 2006. Toward a Meaningful Sociology of the Arts. In Myth, meaning, and performance: Toward a new cultural sociology of the arts, ed. R. Eyerman and L. McCormick, 13–34. Boulder: Paradigm Press.
Eyerman, R., and S. Barretta. 1996. From the 30s to the 60s: The folk music revival in the United States. Theory and Society 25: 501–543.
Eyerman, R., and A. Jamison. 1991. Social movements: A cognitive approach. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Eyerman, R., and A. Jamison. 1995. Social movements and cultural transformation: Popular music in the 1960s. Media, Culture and Society 17: 449–468.
Eyerman, R., and A. Jamison. 1998. Music and social movements: Mobilizing traditions in the twentieth century. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Eyerman, R., and O. Löfgren. 1995. Romancing the road: Road movies and images of mobility. Theory, Culture & Society 12: 53–79.
Eyerman, R., and M. Ring. 1998. Towards a new sociology of art worlds: Bringing meaning back in. Acta Sociologica 41: 277–283.
Gerber, A. 2017. The work of art: Value in creative careers. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Griswold, W., G. Mangione, and T.E. McDonnell. 2013. Objects, words, and bodies in space: Bringing materiality into cultural analysis. Qualitative Sociology 36: 343–364.
Hennion, A. 2015. The passion for music: A sociology of mediation. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
Hesmondhalgh, D. 2013. Why music matters. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Kerouac, J. 1958. On the road. London: A. Deutsch.
Kobyshcha, V. 2018. How does an aesthetic object happen? Emergence, disappearance, multiplicity. Cultural Sociology 12: 478–498.
Marshall, L. 2011. The sociology of popular music, interdisciplinarity and aesthetic autonomy. The British Journal of Sociology 62: 154–174.
McCormick, L. 2015a. Performing civility: International competitions in classical music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCormick, L. 2015b. Performance perspectives. In The Routledge reader in the sociology of music, ed. John Shepherd and Kyle Devine, 117–125. London: Routledge.
McCormick, L. 2012. Music sociology in a new key. In The Oxford handbook of cultural sociology, ed. J.C. Alexander, Ronald Jacobs, and Philip Smith, 722–742. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Prior, N. 2011. Critique and renewal in the sociology of music: Bourdieu and beyond. Cultural Sociology 5: 121–138.
Rose-Greenland, F. 2016. Color perception in sociology: Materiality and authenticity at the gods in color show. Sociological Theory 34: 81–105.
Smith, P. 2012. Becoming iconic: The cases of Woodstock and Bayreuth. In Iconic power: Materiality and meaning in social life, ed. J.C. Alexander, D. Bartmanski, and B. Giesen, 171–184. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Steinbeck, J. 1973. [1939]) The grapes of wrath. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Strandvad, S.M. 2011. Materializing ideas: A socio-material perspective on the organizing of cultural production. European Journal of Cultural Studies 14: 283–297.
Strandvad, S.M. 2012. Attached by the product: A socio-material direction in the sociology of art. Cultural Sociology 6: 163–176.
Wallis, M. 2001. [1990]) Route 66: The mother road. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
Witkin, R.W. 1995. Art and social structure. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Witkin, R.W. 1997. Constructing a sociology for an icon of aesthetic modernity: Olympia revisited. Sociological Theory 15: 101–125.
Zelizer, V.A. 2000. The Purchase of Intimacy. Law & Social Inquiry 25: 817–848.
Zelizer, V.A. 2005. The purchase of intimacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
McCormick, L. Moving beyond production: Ron Eyerman and the cultural sociology of the arts. Am J Cult Sociol 7, 247–259 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00072-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00072-z