Methodological issues in national-comparative research on cultural tastes : the case of cultural capital in the UK and Finland

Drawing on two projects which develop the methodological model of Bourdieu’s Distinction in the UK and Finland, this paper explores the issues raised by the use of multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and mixed methods in comparative work on cultural tastes. By identifying the problems in the construction of two comparable yet nationally relevant research instruments, the paper considers the importance of the similarities and differences in the meaning of items in different national spaces for Bourdieu-inspired comparative analysis. The paper also reports on the evident similarities between the two constructed spaces and draws on the dialogue between quantitative and qualitative methods enabled by MCA in examining what different positions in social space appear to mean in these countries country. It concludes by suggesting that, whilst Bourdieu’s model provides a robust set of methods for exploring relations between taste and class within nations, used appropriately, it can also provide particular insight to the comparison between national fields

Universality of preference behaviors in online music-listener bipartite networks: A Big Data analysis

We investigate the formation of musical preferences of millions of users of the NetEase Cloud Music (NCM), one of the largest online music platforms in China. We combine the methods from complex networks theory and information sciences within the context of Big Data analysis to unveil statistical patterns and community structures underlying the formation and evolution of musical preference behaviors. Our analyses address the decay patterns of music influence, users' sensitivity to music, age and gender differences, and their relationship to regional economic indicators. Employing community detection in user-music bipartite networks, we identified eight major cultural communities in the population of NCM users. Female users exhibited higher within-group variability in preference behavior than males, with a major transition occurring around the age of 25. Moreveor, the musical tastes and the preference diversity measures of women were also more strongly associated with economic factors. However, in spite of the highly variable popularity of music tracks and the identified cultural and demographic differences, we observed that the evolution of musical preferences over time followed a power-law-like decaying function, and that NCM listeners showed the highest sensitivity to music released in their adolescence, peaking at the age of 13. Our findings suggest the existence of universal properties in the formation of musical tastes but also their culture-specific relationship to demographic factors, with wide-ranging implications for community detection and recommendation system design in online music platforms.Comment: 23 pages, 15 Figures, 4 Table

The Europeanisation of Everyday Life: Cross-Border Practices and Transnational Identifications among EU and Third-Country Citizens - Final Report

This report presents the findings of a three-year research project titled The Europeanisation of Everyday Life: Cross-Border Practices and Transnational Identities among EU and Third-Country Citizens (EUCROSS) funded by the European Commission as part of the 7th Framework Programme. Between 2011 and 2014, the project has carried out an extensive collection of sociological data in six EU member states: Denmark, Germany, Italy, Romania, Spain, and the UK. These data have two main sources. First, a large-scale, systematic and independent CATI survey (the EUCROSS survey) of 8500 interviews to nationals of these six countries and immigrants from Romania and Turkey. Second, a set of follow-up in-depth face-to-face interviews with 160 respondents (the EUMEAN survey). These datasets advance existing studies on sociological Europeanisation by going beyond conventional data, such as Eurobarometer, and by taking its findings deep into a detailed breakdown of the changing everyday life and social practices of Europeans. Moreover, the project extends the realm of research on the internationalisation of European societies that has mostly been charted in social theoretical speculation rather than empirically established findings. At a very general level, we address the theme of the sociological foundations of European integration. We tackle an argument that resonates strongly in the public discourse but is also echoed in much social science on the subject: namely, that European integration is ‘an elite process’ (Haller 2008). This argument has two strands. The first one, less problematic, holds that the EU (and its former institutional incarnations from the 1950s onwards) has been designed and advanced by a very small slice of the European population. By itself this should not be surprising: all new political regimes tend to be elite creations (Higley and Burton 2006). However, the second strand is much more contentious, even dangerous, and affects the chances of future European unity. It maintains that ‘Europe’ has become part of the life of the upper classes and a privileged segment of those classes who most directly benefit from European integration, while the rest of the populace is increasingly alienated from it. ‘Elites and citizens live in different worlds’, insists Haller (2008) – and only elites have a Europe-wide horizon. With some nuances, Fligstein reaches a similar conclusion in his book Euroclash (2008) – the EU population is split between a minority of Europeanized citizens and a majority of non-Europeanized ones, with national middle classes wavering in between. The EUCROSS project sets out to test this argument: that is, discover more about the degree of ‘horizontal Europeanisation’ (Mau and Verwiebe 2010) of EU citizens, as well as an indicative sample of third country nationals, the Turkish. The project assumes that cross-border practices of all kinds, both physical and virtual, are the crucial aspect of the Europe in the making. Their spread or not across social categories – classes, cohorts, gender and nationalities – defines the degree of ‘social exclusivity’, so to speak, of sociological Europeanness. If low, the elite argument holds; if not, it doesn’t. As committed empirical scholars, members of the EUCROSS team (from six different research institutions across Europe), endeavour to test to what extent such a cleavage divides Europeans in their everyday life. The project focuses on practices (i.e., behaviour) but does not downplay the relevance of subjective dimensions of Europeanisation – a European ‘identification’ or, in a broader meaning preferred by EUCROSS researchers, ‘sense of belonging’ (Savage et al. 2005), as well as values, whether national or cosmopolitan. Indeed, broadly speaking, we expect that cross-border practices do indeed diffuse a sense of transnational belonging, in line with the ‘transactional thesis’ put forward initially by Karl Deutsch (Deutsch et al. 1957). But, again, this is submitted to empirical testing. Moreover, European belonging is unpacked into three different facets: a sense of cultural-territorial belonging to ‘Europe’, support and participation to the political project embodied by the EU, and solidarity with fellow Europeans

Social network market: Storytelling on a web 2.0 original literature site

This article looks at a Chinese Web 2.0 original literature site, Qidian, in order to show the coevolution of market and non-market initiatives. The analytic framework of social network markets (Potts et al., 2008) is employed to analyse the motivations of publishing original literature works online and to understand the support mechanisms of the site, which encourage readers’ willingness to pay for user-generated content. The co-existence of socio-cultural and commercial economies and their impact on the successful business model of the site are illustrated in this case. This article extends the concept of social network markets by proposing the existence of a ripple effect of social network markets through convergence between PC and mobile internet, traditional and internet publishing, and between publishing and other cultural industries. It also examines the side effects of social network markets, and the role of market and non-market strategies in addressing the issues

Problems of Cultural Integration in Transition Societies – Case Study of Bulgaria

The paper studies the opportunities of integrating minorities with the rest of the population, turning them into an indivisible part of the society. To realize better this integration many conditions are needed including change in the social attitude to minorities, a rise in their standard of living, overcoming the prejudices existing in society toward them, etc. Creating new jobs and proper investment in the regions populated with minorities would facilitate their cultural integration as the first step in this process. Its efficient realization depends strongly on social capital generated in these communities as a precondition for formal and informal associating with the rest of population. Social capital is expected to play the role of feedback, which would steer the adequacy of the process of integration. Its study is of paramount importance to reveal the mechanism of integration of minorities with the rest of society. The results of the quantitative and qualitativ analysis based on collected primary data are presented for detailed study of the mechanisms of social capital and the way the minorities could be integrated. Among the measures, which could help to cope with the situation are: rise in the access to education, increasing opportunities to find a suitable job, more adequate participation in the political and economic life of the country, etc. In conclusion recommendations are formulated to change the policy toward minorities and to improve the overall economic conditions allowing better social realization and integration.cultural integration, gypsy minority, social capital study

Listener Modeling and Context-aware Music Recommendation Based on Country Archetypes

Music preferences are strongly shaped by the cultural and socio-economic background of the listener, which is reflected, to a considerable extent, in country-specific music listening profiles. Previous work has already identified several country-specific differences in the popularity distribution of music artists listened to. In particular, what constitutes the "music mainstream" strongly varies between countries. To complement and extend these results, the article at hand delivers the following major contributions: First, using state-of-the-art unsupervised learning techniques, we identify and thoroughly investigate (1) country profiles of music preferences on the fine-grained level of music tracks (in contrast to earlier work that relied on music preferences on the artist level) and (2) country archetypes that subsume countries sharing similar patterns of listening preferences. Second, we formulate four user models that leverage the user's country information on music preferences. Among others, we propose a user modeling approach to describe a music listener as a vector of similarities over the identified country clusters or archetypes. Third, we propose a context-aware music recommendation system that leverages implicit user feedback, where context is defined via the four user models. More precisely, it is a multi-layer generative model based on a variational autoencoder, in which contextual features can influence recommendations through a gating mechanism. Fourth, we thoroughly evaluate the proposed recommendation system and user models on a real-world corpus of more than one billion listening records of users around the world (out of which we use 369 million in our experiments) and show its merits vis-a-vis state-of-the-art algorithms that do not exploit this type of context information.Comment: 30 pages, 3 tables, 12 figure

A Cross-Country Investigation of User Connection Patterns in Online Social Networks

Given the global expansion, the borderless nature, and the social impact of social media, this paper provides an examination of users’ connection patterns in online social networks, more specifically the users’ cross-country connection patterns. We study three highly different social media platforms, Facebook, Last.fm, and 500px, and approach two main research questions: First, we set out to answer which countries’ social media users are mainly connected with users within their own country; and which countries are characterized by a wide spectrum of cross-country (transnational) user connections. In doing so, we also identify the “attractor” countries, being characterized by alluring a large portion of users from other countries to connect to users in the respective attractor country. Second, we compare the results between the three social media platforms under investigation and analyze and discuss differences in the cross-country connection patterns. Third, we investigate whether countries’ attractor values are correlated with cultural features (according to Hofstede). Our results contribute to understanding the complex social ties between people and how they are reflected in connection behavior on social media

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Culture is digital: Cultural participation, diversity and the digital divide

Digital media are seen as important instruments of increasing participation and diversity in arts and culture. To examine whether this view is justified, this article draws on two bodies of research that have hitherto remained disconnected: research on cultural participation, and research on the digital divide. Building on these insights, the article examines the Taking Part Survey data on digital media and cultural participation in the UK between 2005/06 and 2015/16, focusing on museums and galleries. While the results confirm that digital media provide an important means of engaging new audiences, they also show that the engagement with museums and galleries both on- and off-line remains deeply unequal. Most worryingly, the gaps between the haves and the have nots are even wider on-line than in the case of physical visits. Rather than helping increase the diversity of audiences, online access seems to reproduce, if not enlarge, existing inequalities