Content area
Full Text
Questions of symbolic classification have been central to sociology since its earliest days, given the relevance of distinctions for both affiliation and conflict. Music and its genres are no exception, organizing people and songs within a system of symbolic classification. Numerous studies chronicle the history of specific genres of music, but none document recurrent processes of development and change across musics. In this article, we analyze 60 musics in the United States, delineating between 12 social, organizational, and symbolic attributes. We find four distinct genre types-Avant-garde, Scene-based, Industry-based, and Traditionalist. We also find that these genre types combine to form three distinct trajectories. Two-thirds originate in an Avant-garde genre, and the rest originate as a scene or, to our surprise, in an Industry-based genre. We conclude by discussing a number of questions raised by our findings, including the implications for understanding symbolic classification in fields other than music.
Since its advent as a discipline, sociology has generated systems of socioculturel clas- sification for a diverse set of phenomena, includ- ing forms of organization, religious belief, fashion, gender, sexuality, art, race, and societies at large, to name but a few. The sociological con- cern with systemic change is venerable yet, as DiMaggio (1987) notes, there is no theory of the dynamic change in classificatory schemes, although efforts have been made in domains such as nation building (Anderson 1983), social movements (Traugott 1995), name-giving prac- tices (Lieberson 2000), and French cuisine (Ferguson 2004). Analyses of such classificatory schemes, however, often relegate the cultural meanings of these categories to a secondary feature of the system. In contrast, the use of the concept of genre places cultural meaning at me forefront of any analysis of category construction and has potential and significant general utility across domains.
Genre is a conceptual tool most often used to classify varieties of cultural products, particularly in the fields of visual art, popular culture, video games, film, literature, and music. It describes a manner of expression that governs artists' work, their peer groups, and the audiences for their work (Becker 1982; Bourdieu 1993). In this article, we build on the theoretical and conceptual use of genre to better understand the dynamics of symbolic classification and change in order to identify recurrent sociocultural forms...