Million-dollar birthday parties, megayachts on the French Riviera, and $40,000 bottles of champagne. In today’s New Gilded Age, the world’s moneyed classes have taken conspicuous consumption to new extremes. In Very Important People, sociologist, author, and former fashion model Ashley Mears takes readers inside the exclusive global nightclub and party circuit—from New York City and the Hamptons to Miami and Saint-Tropez—to reveal the intricate economy of beauty, status, and money that lies behind these spectacular displays of wealth and leisure. Mears spent eighteen months in this world of “models and bottles” to write this captivating, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking narrative. She describes how clubs and restaurants pay promoters to recruit beautiful young women to their venues in order to attract men and get them to spend huge sums in the ritual of bottle service. These “girls” enhance the status of the men and enrich club owners, exchanging their bodily capital for as little as free drinks and a chance to party with men who are rich or aspire to be. Though they are priceless assets in the party circuit, these women are regarded as worthless as long-term relationship prospects, and their bodies are constantly assessed against men’s money. A story of extreme gender inequality in a seductive world, Very Important People unveils troubling realities behind moneyed leisure in an age of record economic disparity.

This book compares two challenges made to American public school curricula in the 1980s and 1990s. It identifies striking similarities between proponents of Afrocentrism and creationism, accounts for their differential outcomes, and draws important conclusions for the study of culture, organizations, and social movements. Amy Binder gives a brief history of both movements and then describes how their challenges played out in seven school districts. Despite their very different constituencies - inner-city African American cultural essentialists and predominately white suburban Christian conservatives - Afrocentrists and creationists had much in common. Both made similar arguments about oppression and their children's well-being, both faced skepticism from educators about their factual claims, and both mounted their challenges through bureaucratic channels. In each case, challenged school systems were ultimately able to minimize or reject challengers' demands, but the process varied by case and type of challenge. Binder finds that Afrocentrists were more successful in advancing their cause than were creationists because they appeared to offer a solution to the real problem of urban school failure, met with more administrative sympathy toward their complaints of historic exclusion, sought to alter lower-prestige curricula (history, not science), and faced opponents who lacked a legal remedy comparable to the rule of church-state separation invoked by creationism's opponents. Binder's analysis yields several lessons for social movements research, suggesting that researchers need to pay greater attention to how movements seek to influence bureaucratic decision making, often from within. It also demonstrates the benefits of examining discursive, structural, and institutional factors in concert.

Social scientists seek to develop systematic ways to understand how people make meaning and how the meanings they make shape them and the world in which they live. But how do we measure such processes? Measuring Culture is an essential point of entry for both those new to the field and those who are deeply immersed in the measurement of meaning. Written collectively by a team of leading qualitative and quantitative sociologists of culture, the book considers three common subjects of measurement—people, objects, and relationships—and then discusses how to pivot effectively between subjects and methods. Measuring Culture takes the reader on a tour of the state of the art in measuring meaning, from discussions of neuroscience to computational social science. It provides both the definitive introduction to the sociological literature on culture as well as a critical set of case studies for methods courses across the social sciences.

在1923—1953年这段乡村音乐发展史的重要时期，乡村音乐完成了自身的工业化进程，并将“本真性”确立为首要特征。彼得森透过艺术社会学的视角，深入剖析了“本真性”的建构本质，揭示出看似高于生活的艺术趣味，实际上也是通过广播、电影、巡演、展销会等日常途径，由普罗大众参与塑造的。 此外，书中还记录了乡村音乐的诸多重要人物及其活动：通过选秀活动红遍全国的约翰·卡森，专注走“视觉系”路线的吉米·罗杰斯，热衷于集体“角色扮演”的《大奥普里》团队，用生命在诠释“本真性”的汉克·威廉斯……他们身上呈现的，是那个时代自由不羁的开创精神。 ★ 独特的艺术社学会视角，透过行业机制审视音乐风格的社会成因 ★ 诸多重要人物粉墨登场，生动再现乡村音乐的“黄金时代” 【媒体评价】 [彼得森]重新赋予了乡村音乐趣味性、多样性和可能性，这是许多单纯的爱好者（和表演者）所错过的东西。就像巴克·欧文斯一样，彼得森很清楚，没有什么比“表演出自然而然”更难的冒险或挑战了。 ——肯·埃默森，《洛杉矶时报书评》 [彼得森]详细研究了这片迄今为止未被开垦的领域，这本颇具启发性的书关注的是乡村音乐的基质：它的本真性。 ——切特·弗利波，《布告板》 本书引人入胜地讲述了音乐工业实际上是如何创造并发展了乡村音乐，以及这种音乐体裁自此是如何进入一个不断自我更新的历程的。 ——吉姆·麦库尔，《国际乡村音乐》 《创造乡村音乐》是一部文化社学会的杰作，它的作者是令这个领域焕发新生的重要先驱。 ——保罗·迪马乔，普林斯顿大学

人们通常认为，爵士乐是一种即兴演奏的艺术。即便是两位素不相识的爵士乐手，只要一同登台，就能演奏出一连串和谐而美妙的音符。这些精彩绝伦的乐思，究竟是如何产生的？乐手们是怎样学会即兴演奏的？ 在保罗·F.伯利纳看来，爵士乐作为一种思考方式，其发展贯穿着艺术家的一生。艺术家不 仅受到早年音乐环境的影响，而且随后在更大范围的爵士乐社区内经历磨炼，培养独奏能力，以及在乐队中协作的能力，最终成就独一无二的即兴演奏技艺。本书采用民族音乐学的研究方法，历时超过15年，采访了逾50位知名乐手，广泛引用自20世纪20年代至今的诸多案例，且综合了乐谱分析，全面地再现了爵士乐富于变化的思考方式。本书是爵士乐研究的里程碑作品，曾获艾伦·梅里亚姆音乐学奖。