We Were Never Cool:Investigating knowledge production and discourses of cool in the sociology of music

This article examines knowledge production in the sociology of music. Focusing on the idea of cool music, we interrogate the nature of music researchers' relationship with their object of research. While the qualification and connotation of cool is widespread in popular music, sociology has largely neglected to engage with it as an object of research. Instead, the sociological investigation of music audiences is divided between two opposed but co-constructed paradigms that ultimately do not account for how cool emerges as a qualifier and connotation, how it performs as a discourse on music, and to what effect. Using the example of aging music researchers as a departure point, we examine how the cool connotations of music function as a mode of discourse that legitimates particular knowledge, practice, and taste, demarcating insider/outsider status. We explore how music acquires social connotations such as "cool" and whether that alters music researchers' approaches to it. We argue that apart from the disclosure of inclinations, social characteristics, and relationships to the object of research (music scenes, preferences, fandom, and so on), the tradition of reflexive empirical perspectives in music sociology should incorporate further deconstruction of the transformative dimensions in the relations between music and researcher. Music, as a complex and dynamic object, thus, requires sociology to produce accounts that both encompass people's enjoyment and experience as well as its boundary-defining capacity.Full Tex

Studying young recipients of alcohol marketing : Two research paradigms and their possible consolidation

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The media and football supporters: a changing relationship

This article was published in the journal, Media, Culture & Society [SAGE © The Author] and the definitive version is available at: htpp://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443710393866The research presented in this article The development of ‘new’ media at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s has radically changed the relationship between the media and football supporters. Firstly, a growth in media sources created a very competitive media environment and, secondly, led to greater interaction between the media and its audience. Drawing on forty seven semi-structured interviews with media personnel and eight hundred and twenty seven questionnaires completed by supporters at four football clubs, this article assesses how fans consume the many media sources that now exist and the level of involvement for supporters in the media. The results indicated a balance of consumption between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media as well as highlighting the contrasting strategies each media source had put in place to involve supporters. The article concludes by suggesting that there remains a place for those media sources which involve their target audience