The structure of the South Korean developmental regime and its transformation – statist mobilization and authoritarian integration in the anticommunist regimentation

Through the lens of consumption at Chinese Starbucks, this paper examines the lifestyle and attitudes of parts of the mainland Chinese urban middle class, especially of the so-called xiaozi. Based on interviews with and guestbook entries by customers I analyze how the foreign brand and the multitude of meanings associated with it are consumed. I argue that consumption may be viewed as a particular search for authenticity that enables consumers to construct their self-images in the context of the vast changes occurring in contemporary China. A foreign brand promises to be especially valuable as it promises the authenticity of an ‘other’ on which one's own desires may be projected.     

Music and Middle-Class Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Leipzig and Birmingham

ABSTRACT

This article concerns the making of bourgeois cultural identity by way of analysing and comparing the ethos and organization of Leipzig's Gewandhaus and Birmingham's Triennial Festival during the nineteenth century. Whilst the origins of Leipzig's music culture are placed firmly within the emergent tradition of Kantian and Romantic idealism and the eighteenth-century revival of classicism which informed the cultural and educational ethos of the German Bürgertum, the beginnings of Birmingham's music culture are placed within the context of British empiricism. Both are then substantiated through an empirical analysis of concert repertoires, journals, newspapers and attitudes towards conductors and artists.     

Discourse of cultural identity in Indonesia during the 1997-1998 monetary crisis

Abstract

‘Asian Pop’ cultural products, which include a wide range of media artifacts such as film, music, television drama, comic books, magazines, websites and fashion, have emerged as a popular choice for youth in Asia in recent times. These cultural artifacts feature prominently in the lives of urban youth in major metropolitan centers throughout Asia. This paper examines how Thai youths have become consumers of Korean pop (K‐pop), following the trend of neighboring countries. The popularization of Japanese pop (J‐pop), Taiwanese‐pop and more recently, K‐pop, is welcomed by the Cultural Industry as a sign of expanding borders and as a major step towards expanding its Asian market. On the one hand, growing consumption and mainstreaming of Asian pop might become problematic due to the notion of cultural ‘McDonaldization’/standardization, in the future. On the other hand, perhaps nationalism and national ties will manage to overrule this projected standardization. This paper explores the Thai youth’s consumption of K‐pop in the process of cultural appropriation vis‐à‐vis their ‘national’ cultural formation in changing socio‐cultural contexts.     

From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896. By Stuart Hanson/The British Musical Film. By John Mundy.

ABSTRACT

This article explores the political, economic, media and social reactions to the Sex Pistols' Anarchy Tour of December 1976. A critical reading of the sociological concept of ‘moral panic’ is used to examine the ways in which responses to the Sex Pistols were related to the notion of post-war decline, immorality, delinquent youth and the changing nature of the British working class. The responses to the Anarchy Tour constitute a further episode in the cycle of ‘moral panics' that emerged in British society in connection with the development of youth culture, juvenile delinquency and popular music. The exploration that follows posits the view that although ‘moral panic’ is useful for understanding particular aspects of popular music, it also conceals the complexity of the differing responses of political/social groups to the appearance of such phenomena. The article also forms a critique of recent revisionist characterizations of Britain in the 1970s. The ‘moral panic’ surrounding the Sex Pistols was in part ‘socially constructed’ by the media, yet reactions by trade unionists, students, feminists and socialists show that concerns about British society in 1976 were not confined to religious pressure groups, conservative media commentators and political elites.     

Inside the ‘blackboard jungle’

Abstract

The 1950s saw a wave of depictions of threatening male working-class adolescents in English novels, films and cartoons. However, these texts must be contextualised not only as part of the well-documented 1950s moral panic about youth but in relation to the popularized psychological concepts of the ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ child and the increasing implementation of progressive educational ideas that artificially limited working-class pupils’ horizons. This makes this period not only another reiteration of the perennial moral panics about the rising generation that Geoffrey Pearson has documented, but an emergence of a new way of conceptualizing youth.     

Baby-Boomers to ‘Beanstalkers’

ABSTRACT

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the British teenager was presented as a symbol of generational rebellion in the popular press, social investigations, and much political debate. We draw on oral histories, newspapers and the archives of prominent social surveys to question this presentation. By examining how working-class teenagers and their parents experienced and remembered the post-war years, we identify a disjuncture between the literature on moral panic and the widespread evidence of intergenerational cooperation between parents and children. Many working-class parents, enjoying newfound economic security, felt able to encourage their children to enjoy more adventurous lives.     

“Doing” cultural studies: Chua Beng Huat on popular culture

Focusing on the relationship between Chua Beng Huat’s sociological thinking before the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project and his more recent famous works on consumption and popular culture, this essay seeks to understand how he has produced a methodology and a mode of authority that is effective for the context he inhabits in Singapore as well as resonant for scholars working elsewhere. After discussing his interest in large rather than ‘cult’ popular cultures, his emphasis on the detail of government processes as well as popular practices, his economically-grounded concept of consumption and his materialist approach to texts, I read his work on ‘nostalgia for the kampung’ as modelling an Inter-Asian way of doing Cultural Studies that helps us ask questions and develop concepts for our own local contexts.     

The emerging (national) popular music culture in China

ABSTRACT

Before the emergence of the modern sense of popular music in China, the uses of music in that country have been instrumental in serving political purposes for the state. The modern form of popular music began to enter China through Hong Kong and Taiwan – the two very political locales in which we could observe China’s political economy through the reception of their music in mainland China. How the Chinese authorities coped with the production, distribution and consumption of this ‘foreign’ popular music, is reflective of the swing of the pendulum between relaxation and control, and hence the changing ideologies of the state. Based on the cultural and institutional analysis on a few classical Chinese popular singers since the mid‐1980s, this paper illustrates such a transformation. The paper argues that the Chinese authorities have evolved from a dictatorial authority, which chose to control popular music by means of direct bans and censorship, to an active agent, through various strategies, managing and producing a kind of popular music that can be conducive to, and be resonant with, the national ideologies.     

The Salisbury Annual Musical Festival 1770–1800

ABSTRACT

By analysing the factors that precipitated the decline of what had been a flourishing provincial institution, the Salisbury music festival, this article captures late eighteenth-century provincial culture at a stage of transition from a society dominated by aristocratic patronage to an increasingly commercial society. It argues that the displacement of gentlemen amateurs from the heart of Salisbury's musical culture and their replacement by professional musicians and concert managers brought about a change in attitudes to music in the city. Ultimately, these modernizing influences of commercialization and professionalization proved detrimental to the grand occasion of the Salisbury musical festival, prioritizing alternative concert forms and a commercial, rather than civic, attitude to music.     

‘The Most Respectable Looking of Revolutionaries’

Abstract

New political histories of late nineteenth-century British political culture have closely analysed the role of language and rhetoric in popular politics. The focus on the content of political messages has meant that the ways such messages were communicated has often been overlooked, as have the varied forms of political communication in the period. This article follows on from recent work that has sought to examine the place of material and visual culture in popular politics in the period. In particular, it focuses on the links between dress, class and politics. It suggests that visual, along with material, forms of political communication remained important and that they illuminate the political culture of the period.     

Influence of Cultural Orientations on Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) in Social Media

This study explores how horizontal/vertical individualism and collectivism (HVIC) orientations influence electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) (i.e., opinion leadership and opinion seeking) in social media. Online survey panel data through Amazon MTurk were collected from American social media users to address the research purpose. The results, using the structural equation modeling, show that the paths from horizontal individualism to opinion leadership, vertical individualism to opinion leadership and opinion seeking, horizontal collectivism to opinion leadership, and vertical collectivism to opinion leadership and opinion seeking were significant. This study provides theoretical and managerial implications regarding the influence of HVIC orientations on eWOM in social media.     

Middle-Class Fathers,Sons and Military Service in England, 1914–1918

The figure of the hyper-patriotic middle-class father, happy to sacrifice his sons to the war, while remaining snug at home, was a recurrent feature of post-First World War literature. This article places this view of wartime fatherhood under scrutiny, suggesting that middle-class fathers with sons of military age rarely behaved as straightforward enforcers of the state’s call to arms. Alongside expressions of vocal pride in sons who conformed to the manly ideal by volunteering, there were resistance, silence and fear, while support for sons who sought to avoid enlistment was a good deal more evident than any determination that sons should do their ‘bit’ at all costs.     

‘The Supposed Paradise of Pen and Ink’: Self-education and Social Mobility in the London Public Library (1880–1930)

ABSTRACT

Borrowing from prosopography, collective biography, sociology and genealogy, this article describes the ‘bookish’ workplace experiences of 90 chief and deputy public librarians to revisit debates around the upwardly mobile metropolitan lower middle class in the long nineteenth century. It finds that the border between the manual and white-collar classes was more easily (and enduringly) breached than previously supposed. It also suggests that those moving from the former group to the latter retained elements of their ‘working class’ origins and character across the late-Victorian period. These discoveries complicate historical assessments of the lower middles, but support sociological surveys that propose more fluid and open class borders from the mid-nineteenth century.     

Chained to the grassroots: the music industries and DCMS

The paper analyses the implicit assumptions made by three key DCMS reports about how successful music products are made. I show how the reports divide the music sector into small and large producers, handing responsibility for innovation to small producers and expecting that large producers will exploit these innovations efficiently. I argue that this approach risks ignoring the realities of music production and contradicts the findings contained in the reports themselves. I conclude that a romantic idea of successful products developing from small producers may not only misrepresent and misunderstand small producers in the music industries but constrain them.