Sociology

http://soc.sagepub.com/ Can You Dig It?: Some Reflections on the Sociological Problems Associated with Being Uncool
David Beer Sociology 2009 43: 1151 DOI: 10.1177/0038038509345699 The online version of this article can be found at: http://soc.sagepub.com/content/43/6/1151

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

British Sociological Association

Additional services and information for Sociology can be found at: Email Alerts: http://soc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://soc.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://soc.sagepub.com/content/43/6/1151.refs.html
Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

>> Version of Record - Dec 9, 2009 What is This?

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

Sociology
Copyright The Author(s) 2009, Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav BSA Publications Ltd Volume 43(6): 11511162 DOI: 10.1177/0038038509345699

Research Note

Can You Dig It?: Some Reflections on the Sociological Problems Associated with Being Uncool
I

David Beer
University of York

A B S T R AC T

Coolness is an elusive concept. This research note seeks to understand its place in the life of the sociologist. Reflecting on the recent experiences of the author, this piece focuses on the problems of studying music cultures where the interested researcher has become uncool. It begins by tracking this problem, with particular regard to the problems of identifying and studying the very aspects of culture that the researcher wishes to investigate, before suggesting how we might react where we think our uncoolness is a problem in our research. The note concludes with a discussion of the implications of these issues for sociology more generally.
K E Y WO R DS

changing lifecourse / changing mediascapes / cool / cultural sociology / future of sociology / hipness / music culture

Introduction

oolness is an elusive concept. The nature of this elusiveness has been captured in an episode of the popular and long-running cartoon series The Simpsons. In the particular episode in question the Simpsons are depicted in the family car travelling home from Homers appearance as a freak show at a large music festival. The topic of coolness comes up in their conversation. Homer and Marge, the parents, spend the journey attempting to find out from Bart and Lisa, their children, why they are perceived as being uncool and, in response, how they might try to make themselves more cool. This includes a futile discussion of the transformative potentials of a number of tactics for gaining more cool, which inlcude being so square or lame that you are

1151
Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

1152

Sociology Volume 43

Number 6

December 2009

perceived as hip, deliberately not wanting to be cool, not trying to be cool, and not asking or wishing to be told how cool you are. Despite Marge and Homers efforts to work out the answer to the question how the hell do you be cool?, Bart has already reached the somewhat inevitable conclusion that his parents are, as he puts it, powerfully uncool1. Here we see at play the slipperiness of coolness as it acts to demarcate and divide the family. Such decisions or judgments about what constitutes cool are, as you would expect, entirely undemocratic and divisive see for instance Huqs (2006) discussion of cool and ethnicity or Martinos (1999) accounts of cool boys and masculinity in a school. In this instance, this notes concern with coolness has resulted from a desire on the part of the researcher to capture the problems I have been facing in my attempts to keep up with contemporary music culture for the purpose of sociological analysis. This is something I have been finding increasingly difficult to do and has caused some substantive difficulties for me in my work. The objects with which we occupy and exercise our sociological imagination are of course determined by the things we encounter. As Mills (1959) famously claimed, we can only conduct sociology at the points where the social intersects with our own biographies. We can imagine that this can be applied in a historical sense, in that our perspectives are rooted in and informed by a particular socio-historical context, and can also be applied on a more personal basis, in that our own life trajectories limit the parts of the social with which we might make contact. In the case of the latter, it is possible to think about how our biographical journeys as researchers mean that different periods of our lives facilitate differing critical distances from our objects of study. In very general terms, what I have found is that the things I had previously been encountering as a matter of course have changed, this critical distance between the researcher and the object of study has become exaggerated and applying a sociological imagination to the things I want to study has become a significant problem. My changing lifecourse and a set of transformations in the cultural sphere in which I was working seemed to have been responsible for this. The aim of this exploratory research note is to describe and engage with this problem and to begin to open up how this might have implications for the individual researcher and, more generally, for the discipline of sociology. It is also hoped that, although this note is informed by my research on the sociology of music cultures, it might well strike a chord with other sociologists who have experienced their own drifting away or loss of touch from their object of study at various stages of their careers.

Losing Touch
It is worth beginning by briefly describing my experiences in a little more detail. When putting together a recent research plan I realized I was struggling to identify

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

Can you dig it? Beer

1153

things to focus on. What I found was that I had reached a point where despite my interest I had come to know very little about popular music. I could not name a single song in the top ten, I had little idea of the types of music people were listening to, of music movements that were going on, of the way people found out about the music they were listening to, and so on. Nor did I have any sense of who to ask about these things. I had lost touch. My reaction was to try to correct this problem by finding ways of informing myself. I was unsure though where to start or where I might go for this information. I had recently written on music and emergent online cultures, but this work, I felt, was missing something (Beer, 2008). It was missing a sense of what was happening in the music cultures themselves and what was happening more generally in terms of music movements, scenes and trends. Part of the problem undoubtedly related to a series of transformations to the mediascape that had occurred over the previous four or five years. Websites like Myspace, Facebook, Last.fm and Youtube had clearly become the places where music culture was happening, and where the new relations, connections and movements of music cultures were unfolding (along with other less mainstream sites). We might then position the researcher in the context of what has been described as cultural speed-up (Gane, 2006; Tomlinson, 2007). If we accept that this rhetoric of speed is supported by a material change in the cultural environment then it is inevitable that it will become more difficult for us to keep up. This could well be an experience shared by other researchers as we consider the range of cultural spheres that are now being implicated by developments in the web (Beer, 2008) and in mobile and locational technologies (see e.g. Crang and Graham, 2007). My problems in dealing with the new mediascape had been exacerbated by my inability to return to the sources that had previously kept me up to date with what was going on. Many of the sources I had relied on in the past had been decommissioned, become irrelevant, had declined as significant parts of music cultures or were no longer a part of my own lifestyle.2 So not only were my old sources, for various reasons, no longer something to which I could return to inform myself, I was also faced with a radically changing mediascape. As a result of these emergent changes in the nature of media, what I was faced with was a stream of music and images often with no commentary or narrative (see for instance the innumerable band profiles on sites like MySpace, the vast quantity of videos on Youtube, and the continual videos found on free-to-view music channels like TMF and The Hits). This experience would suggest that it is not solely a transformation in media that is the issue, but that this has been supplemented by a contemporaneous transformation in the nature of music and popular culture. This experience resonates with academic commentaries on the fragmentation of music cultures and the end of coherent and identifiable music movements (Bennett, 1999; Bennett et al., 2006: 2; Muggleton and Weinzierl, 2003). Keeping up with music cultures is, of course, more difficult where we find protean, unstable and splintering formations and movements.3 These external changes apart, we cannot ignore the influence of age as a factor in my loss of touch (although it is clearly not the only factor). We have to consider that getting older and staying cool may not be compatible (particular in

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

1154

Sociology Volume 43

Number 6

December 2009

the eyes of the young). Cool culture is not necessarily synonymous with youth culture, and they should not be automatically conflated, but we can imagine the researcher interested in trying to track cool things, or trying to be down with the kidz, being perceived and stigmatized as the sufferer of a deeply uncool midlife crisis (Hepworth and Featherstone, 1998) a perception that is likely to isolate them from satisfactory engagement. We can apply here Hepworth and Featherstones work on middle age to the aging body of the researcher, with the researchers body impacting directly on their craft as a sociologist.4 However, the problems associated with uncoolness are not just about access or the acceptance of the researcher by the researched. They are not just about what prospective research subjects think of us; it is also about our ability to locate, see and analyse. In this context of a changing lifecourse, a transforming mediascape and the apparent fragmentation and changeability of contemporary music cultures, the feeling I was getting was that I had somehow become detached from my object of study. What seemed to be happening was that my lifecourse was drifting in one direction, following experiences of aging, parenthood and the like, whilst the accelerating and fragmenting mediascape was affording the rapid movement of music cultures, my object of study, in a range of different directions. The result was that an apparently insurmountable critical distance had been established between myself and the things I wanted to study. My uncoolness had become embodied in this distanciation. There was no rosebud moment; the disconnection had been gradual and unnoticeable. We might ask then, if the sociologist, or even sociology, is uncool, what are we missing? And, in the first instance, how might we respond?

Coping with Uncoolness?

Being uncool then, as elusive and multidimensional as it might be, is about having the sense of being on the outside whilst not being entirely sure what you are on the outside of or why you are positioned there. An obvious response is to attempt to develop a sensitivity to particular cultural movements. This response though is limited in scope by the fact that uncool researchers are often unable to encounter or even actively locate these movements. As we have seen, trying to gain cool, the obvious solution to the problem, in itself precludes an individual from gaining cool. If we return to the excerpt that opened this piece, Homer and Marges aspiration to be cool would seem to be one of the barriers amongst many preventing them from actually achieving coolness. Here we can turn to point 19 on the WikiHow5 entry on how to be cool which instructs the reader: Dont try to be cool do it without anyone noticing. Or, to put it in more sociological terms, nothing depletes capital more than the sight of someone trying too hard (Thornton, 1995: 12). In the case of Sarah Thorntons study of night clubbers in the 1990s, this over-trying manifests itself in the inexperienced clubbers who reveal their lack of inside knowledge by over-dressing or confusing

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

Can you dig it? Beer

1155

coolness with an exaggerated cold blank stare (Thornton, 1995: 12; for similar conclusions on the relationality and exclusivity of cool we could also turn back here to Becker, 1963 or Simmel, 1997). Given this apparent futility, rather than resisting we could consider instead how to cope with being uncool.6 Embracing uncoolness might well be productive in leading us towards new insights into what might actually be mainstream culture (including the middle of the road, the classical, the dad rock, and so on). In his recent work on taste communities Mike Savage (2006) has identified that a focus on pop music can create misconceptions of what is actually mainstream culture. This would suggest that one viable solution would be to go with the flow and change the object of study to suit the changing lifecourse of the researcher. This would be to stop prioritizing the cooler parts of culture and to adapt to a study of the uncool. Embracing the uncool has its proponents. Phillip Tagg (2000), drawing a similar conclusion to Savage, has argued that we should not just be focusing on what is cool at the expense of overlooking the often very popular uncool. The conclusion here would be that there is more to culture than what is cool, but it would still be to admit that cool things are happening of which we have no knowledge. The danger here is that the unknown cool forms a black box within the sphere of popular culture which we are left unable to illuminate, predominantly because we dont know what might be in it or where we might go to find out. Embracing uncool is to neglect completely the black boxed cool. I imagine a likely response on reading this note will be to suggest that being an uncool outsider provides critical objective distance and the opportunity for new insight, but this would be to imagine that the objective outsider is actually able to make the initial connections required to bring the phenomenon into their sociological gaze. Another option would be to follow Andrew Goodwins (1997) suggestion that we treat the student as expert on matters of pop or cool. We can rely on our students then to inform us of what is happening, a kind of coolness by proxy approach. The result is that we might encounter some of the things that might be cool. This would be to accept the more general elevation of the authority of experience in knowledge creating, which might bring its own analytical concerns around what this could mean for the development of more critical takes on (popular) culture (see Frith and Savage, 1993: 11213). Clearly though a problem with this approach is that we would be limited in our encounters to the things that the students themselves come across and that they are willing to tell us about (a lot would depend here on how cool our students are). The same could be said of staying informed through our children or grandchildren. We have to consider how being uncool, and the perception of the researcher and the discipline, might affect the things that subjects reveal to us both informally and within more formal research processes. It may not even be necessary for us to actually pursue such insights through our students or by actively encouraging people to talk about their experiences; we might also return to media sources to consider further how they might provide information on various cultural spheres. We can consider here in particular

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

1156

Sociology Volume 43

Number 6

December 2009

Zygmunt Baumans recent work on what he describes as a confessional society (2007: 3). In this work Bauman describes how the perceived obligation for those wishing to be socially accepted is to reveal significant amounts of personal and sensitive details about their everyday lives through a range of new user-generated web applications (such as MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, and the like). In this confessional society information about what is happening in music culture, or in other cultural spheres, is out there in the public domain to be accessed and drawn upon. Using such web applications will, however, undoubtedly have some serious drawbacks in terms of the types of data we might obtain, what we can use it for, and the types of people/things it might miss. As well as the problems of finding practical ways of using the complex data to be found in these spaces, it is also worth considering that, as these web applications become increasingly popular and as people like us (that is sociologists and other academics) join up, they will quickly become uncool and out of vogue. The result will be that these sites will then come to miss the type of things that we are hoping to capture. I have been trying to use such applications to research music cultures for the last couple of years and I have the distinct impression that although my uncool seems to go largely unnoticed in these spaces I am still missing something on both a small scale and in terms of broader cultural movements. This missing something we might think of as the unknown, a blind spot within the social spectrum that the uncool sociologist cannot see. With these issues in mind, any response to uncoolness might need to position itself within wider debates in the discipline and to work with theoretical and empirical strategies that are appropriate for our times (Savage and Burrows, 2009). The sectors of the social that regard the sociologist as uncool, or that the sociologist is too uncool to have encountered, are likely to form a part of the sociological unknown. Coolness may thus be developed as a sociological concept that is useful even where we are unsure what exactly it means or what it might represent. This is because, in the capacity in which I have used it here, it captures a sense of the unknown or even the unknowable. To apply the now famous categorizations used by Donald Rumsfeld, cool is a concept concerned with how we might understand and deal with known unknowns and unknown unknowns (see Zizek, 2004).7 Coolness taken in this sense may be approached using the increasingly influential complexity theory (Urry, 2003). Indeed, the coolness I have described here would appear to fit with what Thrift (2005: 52) describes as an impulse to be anti-reductionist that marks out complexity approaches. It is also appropriate to think in terms of the complex and unforeseen emergence of cool, developing and evolving in unpredictable ways and from unpredictable places (see Urry, 2003). Cool is formed and instantiated within a plethora of social relations and connections, informed by vast and untraceable information sources, developed through unseen socialization and knowledge accumulation (e.g. Thornton, 1995). Developing coolness as a concept that might be applied more broadly to understanding contemporary social ordering and divisions (and thus to understand its impact on the sociologist and sociology) could well rely on its development as

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

Can you dig it? Beer

1157

a concept in the complexity canon the aim of which would be to expand and track the known unknowns and to understand coolness within the context of its messy and non-linear emergence/causality and within the multiplicity of chaotic social relations within which it is instantiated. It might be here that its complex forms of emergence and affect could be developed without the type of reductionist approach that would go against the unknowability and changeability that it could be used to negotiate and understand. Even the term cool has its own complex and uncertain etymological history dating back to at least 1933 and enjoying particular popularity in the youth slang of the 1940s and 1950s before re-emerging toward the end of the 20th century (see Ayto, 1999). In working up a complexity approach to cool it is likely that we will come to find that we are not only dealing with the analytical unknown, but that we are also dealing with the analytical unknowable, the things that we as sociologists cannot know about the things that we cannot see, that are out of analytical reach, that we do not even know exist. The unknowable will be the things we are just too uncool to spot or connect with. We can imagine that where we are able to catch on, as Simmel (1997) pointed out in relation to fashion, what is cool could well suddenly change (in response to our unwanted attention). Indeed, the presence of sociologists is more than likely to have the effect of eroding coolness.

Concluding Thoughts
My hope is that this note will strike a chord with others working in cultural sociology and perhaps those working in other areas of sociology where their lack of cool might have caused them difficulty (those involved in the sociology of youth, media, crime, sport, fashion and childhood spring to mind, but I am sure there are others). The problems I have tried to engage with here are not just concerned with the perpetual issues of gaining access to particular groups for the purpose of ethnographic insight, although this is clearly an effect of uncoolness. Rather, what I have tried to explore here is a concern with even being able to notice or come across these things in the first place. This is not then just a note about my sense of discomfort and inability to blend in at gigs or similar social gatherings; it is about the difficulty of encountering and locating objects of study around which to exercise a sociological imagination (whether this is caused by my own drifting away, the acceleration of culture or the splintering of music cultures and mediascapes). The sociological problems associated with uncoolness, caused by personal life changes and the social context, are about the difficulties of small scale insight and large scale inference. The broader problem is that I do not think Im alone in my uncoolness and detachment (although, there are, of course, a number of sociologists who are far cooler than me). I suspect that these are experiences that other researchers will be familiar with and which are implicitly shaping our research and our discipline. What we have to consider here is that sociology as a discipline is

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

1158

Sociology Volume 43

Number 6

December 2009

uncool (perhaps, as Savage and Burrows, 2009, have recently argued, this is a consequence of sociology describing social change but not reacting to it). We might even go further to say that sociology has lost its cool. Where sociology might once have been thought of as in touch, edgy and cool with the rise of the cultural turn in the 1960s and 1970s in particular we now seem out of touch, comfortable and safe. This should be a worry. We frequently see the work of the cultural turn in the social sciences criticized for its lack of political drive and its general inability to produce insights that are applicable beyond the artefact (Eagleton, 2003; Lash, 2007; Nash, 2001; Rojek and Turner, 2000; Thrift, 1997; Webster, 2006). It would seem that it is also entirely possible that sociology may also now be missing large parts of the cultural sphere that it is unable to identify or observe. In other words, beyond these criticisms, we may even now be missing the things that were the intended analytical targets of the regenerated discipline following the transformations of the 1960s onwards. This note tells the story of an analytical concern on the part of a researcher, but what it suggests, what it begins to uncover, is a much broader issue in the discipline. It points toward a dividing principle, that of coolness, that we as sociologists know very little about and which is acting upon us to shape our research. Before we can begin to encounter and deal with the problem, sociologists need first to acknowledge that, in most cases at least, we, like Homer and Marge, are powerfully uncool. Or, as Mills put it, we cannot very well state any problem until we know whose problem it is. (1959: 76). We have seen recently how sociology is being challenged by the context in which it is operating (Savage and Burrows, 2007). In this context we cannot be complacent about the future of the discipline or about its ongoing and sustainable recruitment of students (a discipline that keeps some semblance of cool will almost certainly be more appealing and competitive in the marketplace). This is quite apart from the fact that we could well be missing from our shared analyses things of sociological importance. We are faced with the problem of finding ways of staying relevant and exciting, being revelationary, being attractive, staying on top of the social as it is now and of finding common ground on which to relate with our students or the wider public (the problems I found in constructing a syllabus for a module on popular culture made clear to me that my own reference points were quite different to those of my students). Uncoolness, to pick up on one recent debate in this journal, might then problematize the formulation of an effective public sociology (Holmwood and Scott, 2007). The underlying issue is our ability to see and access what is cool. We need to begin by thinking through or finding ways of accumulating knowledge that will allow us to ask, if we are uncool what are we missing? Becoming cool might seem futile for both the researcher and the discipline, but I dont think we can afford to be fatalistic. Following the rise of the discipline with the expansion of the higher education system around a half-century ago (and the 50th anniversary of the publication of Mills definitive work), sociology might be experiencing its own mid-life

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

Can you dig it? Beer

1159

crisis of sorts, searching for an identity, attempting to reconstruct or find itself, reflecting on its own direction or lack of it, and so on. Whether we are dealing with our own uncoolness or the uncoolness of the discipline, our efforts should not be spent on the more than likely fruitless act of trying to make ourselves into cool sociologists. Rather, this effort should be diverted toward approaches and strategies that might enable us to open up the cultural black boxes, the sectors of the social milieu, that are obscured from us by our uncoolness (the ability to (re)connect with students and the wider public can then follow). I suggest that the sociological problems associated with being uncool now need to be acknowledged and negotiated as we look to regenerate the discipline in the face of what looks likely to be a coming period of change.

Notes
1 This makes reference to The Simpsons episode HomerPalooza (1996). I had this dialogue in mind as an opening for this piece for some time. I was then quite surprised to find during my research that the authors of the Wikipedia entry on cool (aesthetic) had independently had the same idea of using this to define cool (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_%28aesthetic%29). This is actually illustrative of the point I make in this article. I had hoped to include the full dialogue from this scene within this article but unfortunately I was unable to do so. The reader might find it useful to refer to the full transcript through the afformentioned web resource or to watch the episode. These included Top of the Pops, Saturday morning childrens TV, the NME, festival and gig attendance, music radio, music magazines, frequent visits to music stores, and the like. If the observations of these writers are correct, then we can imagine that the classic work of the cultural turn such as that carried out by Hebdige (1979) might now be far more problematic. For more on aging and music fandom see Andy Bennett (2006) on punks and Laura Vroomen (2004) on Kate Bush. WikiHow is the online user-generated how-to manual that you can edit. See http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Cool. We could be more precise here and think of cool as being the embodiment of particular forms of mundane knowledge that are framed and made accessible by a myriad of social factors. Clearly there are a number of writers we could turn to at this point to develop a more structured and substantive conceptualization of cool. These would include Howard Beckers (1963) musicians and squares, Thorntons (1995) subcultural capital, Simmels (1997) work on fashion, Goffman (1959) on the presentation of self, Bourdieu (1984) on taste and cultural capital. For the purposes of scope and length of this note I have been selective and suggestive. The intention here is to highlight the associated issues rather than construct a complete conceptualization of cool. To give a brief example of the kinds of problems I have been facing, I overheard a comment on BBC Threes music programme Sounds, which made mention of a website that hosts statistics about music downloads. This site is apparently

4 5 6

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

1160

Sociology Volume 43

Number 6

December 2009

updated every six hours with real-time information. This seemed like an important development. However, I missed the web address of the site. I have since been searching on Google using various combinations of words to try to locate the site, possibly to use it for data or to write something about its presence. So far I have been unable to find it. This website might be an example of a known unknown!

Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Roger Burrows, Emma Uprichard, Hannah Gilbert, Martin Hand, Colin Campbell, Steve Watson, Daryl Martin and Nick Prior for their useful comments on earlier versions of this piece.

References
Ayto, J. (1999) Twentieth Century Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity. Becker, H.S. (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. London: Free Press. Beer, D. (2008) Making Friends with Jarvis Cocker: Music Culture in the Context of Web 2.0, Cultural Sociology 2(2): 22241. Bennett, A. (1999) Subcultures or Neo-tribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Music Taste, Sociology 33(3): 599617. Bennett, A. (2006) Punks Not Dead: The Continuing Significance of Punk Rock for an Older Generation of Fans, Sociology 40(2): 21935. Bennett, A., B. Shank and J. Toynbee (2006) Introduction, in A. Bennett, B. Shank and J. Toynbee (eds) The Popular Music Studies Reader, pp. 17. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Crang, M. and S. Graham (2007) Sentient Cities: Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space, Information, Communication & Society 10(6): 789817. Eagleton, T. (2003) After Theory. London: Penguin. Frith, S. and J. Savage (1993) Pearls and Swine: The Intellectuals and the Mass Media, New Left Review 198 (MarchApril): 10716. Gane, N. (2006) Speed Up or Slow Down? Social Theory in the Information Age, Information, Communication & Society 9(1): 2038. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goodwin, A. (1997) On Being a Professor of Pop, Popular Music and Society 21, URL (consulted April 2008): http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2822/is_n1_v21/ ai_20633215 Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hepworth, M. and M. Featherstone (1998) The Male Menopause: Lay Accounts and the Cultural Reconstruction of Midlife, in S. Nettleton and J. Watson (eds) The Body in Everyday Life, pp. 275300. London: Routledge. Holmwood, J. and S. Scott (eds) (2007) Special Issue on Sociology and its Public Faces, Sociology 41(5): 779975.

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

Can you dig it? Beer Huq, R. (2006) Asian Kool? Bhangra and beyond, in A. Bennett, B. Shank and J. Toynbee (eds) The Popular Music Studies Reader, pp. 2017. London: Routledge. Lash, S. (2007) Power after Hegemony: Cultural Studies in Mutation, Theory, Culture & Society 24(3): 5578. Martino, W. (1999) Cool Boys, Party Animals, Squids and Poofters: Interrogating the Dynamics and Politics of Adolescent Masculinities in School, British Journal of Sociology of Education 20(2): 23963. Mills, C.W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Muggleton, D. and R. Weinzierl (2003) What Is Post-subcultural Studies Anyway?, in D. Muggleton and R. Weinzierl (eds) The Post-Subcultures Reader, pp. 323. Oxford: Berg. Nash, K. (2001) The Cultural Turn in Social Theory: Towards a Theory of Cultural Politics, Sociology 35(1): 7792. Rojek, C. and B. Turner (2000) Decorative Sociology: Towards a Critique of the Cultural Turn, The Sociological Review 48(4): 62948. Savage, M. (2006) The Musical Field, Cultural Trends 15(2/3): 15974. Savage, M. and R. Burrows (2007) The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology, Sociology 41(5): 885900. Savage, M. and R. Burrows (2009) Some Further Reflections on the Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology, Sociology 43(4): 76272. Simmel, G. (1997) The Philosophy of Fashion, in D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (eds) Simmel on Culture. London: Sage. Tagg, P. (2000) High and Low, Cool and Uncool, Music and Knowledge: Conceptual Falsifications and the Study of Popular Music, Keynote speech, IASPM UK conference, Guildford, July, URL (consulted April 2008): http:// www.tagg.org/articles/sofia2000.html Thornton, S. (1995) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity. Thrift, N. (1997) The Rise of Soft Capitalism, Cultural Values 1(1): 2957. Thrift, N. (2005) Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage. Tomlinson, J. (2007) The Culture of Speed. London: Sage. Urry, J. (2003) Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity. Vroomen, L. (2004) Kate Bush: Teen Pop and Older Female Fans, in A. Bennett and R.A. Peterson (eds) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual, pp. 23853. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Webster, F. (2006) Making Sense of the Information Age: Sociology and Cultural Studies, Information, Communication & Society 8(4): 43958. Zizek, S. (2004) Iraqs False Promises, Foreign Policy 140(January/February): 439.

1161

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013

1162

Sociology Volume 43

Number 6

December 2009

David Beer
Is Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of York. He has research interests in the areas of music and popular culture, social informatics and social and cultural theory. His publications include New Media: The Key Concepts (Berg, 2008), co-authored with Nick Gane. Address: Department of Sociology, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK. E-mail: db150@york.ac.uk

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at Universit di Torino on September 3, 2013