The hidden tastemakers: comedy scouts as cultural brokers at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Responsible for selecting which new artists are brought to the public attention, talent scouts carry considerable influence in framing performing arts fields. Yet their practices are hidden from public view, and how and why they select fledgling producers remains mostly unexplored in cultural sociology. This article aims to demystify the work of such gatekeepers by examining temporary comedy scouts operating at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Fringe is the world's biggest arts festival and a central tradefair for the British comedy field. Drawing on ethnographic observation and interviews with nine comedy scouts, I examine the positions they occupy in the comedy field and, in turn, how this positioning affects which comedians they propel. I then interrogate the brokerage enacted by scouts. Centrally, I argue that, while some broker between artists and management, all scouts are implicated in mediating between artists and audiences. In particular, they act to intensify comedy taste boundaries—making judgments based on assumptions about imagined audiences and directing more legitimate comedians to privileged audiences and vice versa. In this way, scouts act as hidden tastemakers, intensifying the scarcity of certain tastes and strengthening the ability of privileged audiences to use comedy in the claiming of cultural distinction

Climbing the velvet drainpipe: class background and career progression within the UK civil service

Although the theory of representative bureaucracy originates from concerns about the class composition of the public sector workforce, questions of class background have been notably absent in subsequent scholarship. In this article, I take advantage of new data on the class backgrounds of UK civil servants (N = 308, 566) to, first, explore descriptively how class shapes the composition of the civil service, both vertically in terms of occupational grade and horizontally in terms of department, location, and profession. I show that those from working-class backgrounds are not only under-represented in the Civil Service as a whole but also this skew is particularly acute in propulsive departments like the Treasury, locations like London and in the Senior Civil Service. This initial descriptive analysis then acts as the staging point for the central qualitative component of my analysis, drawing on 104 in-depth interviews across 4 case-study departments. Here, I identify three unwritten rules of career progression that tend to act as barriers for those from working-class backgrounds; access to accelerator jobs; organizational ambiguity in promotion processes; and sorting into operational (versus policy) tracks that have progression bottlenecks. This analysis highlights the need for more work on class representation, as well as underlining how representative bureaucracy may be impeded by patterns of horizontal as well as vertical segregation, particularly in work areas that have an outsized influence on policy design

Coal Gasification and Liquefaction

The current major processes being developed for coal gasification and liquefaction will be reviewed briefly. The Bureau of Mines Hydrane process for converting coal to pipeline quality gas directly by reaction with hydrogen will be discussed in more detail. The featured topic will be the Bureau\u27s Synthoil process which converts coal in one step into a low-sulfur, low-ash fuel oil. Coal suspended in recycled oil is propelled through a packed-bed reactor by rapid turbulent flow of hydrogen. A 1/2 TPD plant is in operation producing over 1 bbl of oil per day

Discovering Regularity in Point Clouds of Urban Scenes

Despite the apparent chaos of the urban environment, cities are actually replete with regularity. From the grid of streets laid out over the earth, to the lattice of windows thrown up into the sky, periodic regularity abounds in the urban scene. Just as salient, though less uniform, are the self-similar branching patterns of trees and vegetation that line streets and fill parks. We propose novel methods for discovering these regularities in 3D range scans acquired by a time-of-flight laser sensor. The applications of this regularity information are broad, and we present two original algorithms. The first exploits the efficiency of the Fourier transform for the real-time detection of periodicity in building facades. Periodic regularity is discovered online by doing a plane sweep across the scene and analyzing the frequency space of each column in the sweep. The simplicity and online nature of this algorithm allow it to be embedded in scanner hardware, making periodicity detection a built-in feature of future 3D cameras. We demonstrate the usefulness of periodicity in view registration, compression, segmentation, and facade reconstruction. The second algorithm leverages the hierarchical decomposition and locality in space of the wavelet transform to find stochastic parameters for procedural models that succinctly describe vegetation. These procedural models facilitate the generation of virtual worlds for architecture, gaming, and augmented reality. The self-similarity of vegetation can be inferred using multi-resolution analysis to discover the underlying branching patterns. We present a unified framework of these tools, enabling the modeling, transmission, and compression of high-resolution, accurate, and immersive 3D images

Comedy and distinction

The central aim of this thesis is to plug this conspicuous gap in the literature. In particular, it aims to examine the patterning of contemporary British comedy taste and understand how this relates to general patterns o f socio-cultural division and inequality. Drawing on a large-scale survey and in-depth interview s collected at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it argues that comedy now represents an emerging field for younger generations of the culturally privileged to activate their cultural capital resources. Using the innovative m ethodological instrument of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (M CA), it shows that such individuals carefully select and reject forms of British comedy, favouring the most legitimate ‘highbrow’ items and deliberately snubbing the most ‘low brow’. However, unlike most studies of cultural capital and taste, the thesis finds that field-specific ‘comic cultural capital’ is mobilised less through taste for certain ‘objects’ of comedy and more through the expression of rarefied and largely ‘disinterested’ styles o f comic appreciation. In short, it is the embodied currency of possessing a ‘good’ sense of humour, rather than certain objectified comedy preferences, that most distinguishes the privileged in the field of comedy.Such evidence of comedy taste functioning as cultural capital is significant because it challenges recent suggestions that the British are becoming increasingly culturally tolerant and omnivorous. Instead, in the case of comedy, this thesis finds that taste acts as a powerful marker of cultural and class identity. Eschewing the kind of openness described in other cultural areas, comedy audiences make a wide range of negative aesthetic, moral and political judgements on the basis of comedy taste, inferring that one’s sense of humour reveals deep-seated aspects of their personhood. Reflecting on this, the thesis argues that future analysis of popular cultural consumption must be willing to examine not just taste for specific items of culture, but also the accompanying styles of appreciation that frame consumption. It is here, in the specific way culture is consumed, that it is possible to discern how contemporary cultural forms are implicated in the redrawing of class boundaries and the pursuit of distinction.Comedy plays an increasingly central role in British cultural life. Defying the recent economic downturn, it has grow n into a booming multi-million pound industry, both on TV and on the live circuit. Despite this, sociology has traditionally afforded comedy little scholarly attention. Indeed, the art form has been largely omitted from large-scale sociological studies of British cultural production and consumption. Even in the most comprehensive assessment of British cultural tastes, Bennett et als (2009) highly significant 'Culture, Class, Distinction', comedy was either ignored or defined problematically as a ‘middlebrow’ television sub-genre

The “class ceiling”: tackling barriers to social mobility in UK television

A class pay gap prevents those who are upwardly mobile from accruing the very highest earnings in Britain’s higher professional and managerial occupations. Sam Friedman studied the UK television industry and found a serious lack of socio-economic diversity, prompting policy reform by Channel 4 and others