From the late 19th to the early 20th century, Vienna emerged as one of the world's foremost cultural hubs alongside Paris, London, and Berlin. This period saw the rise of significant literary movements such as Viennese Modernism and Jugendstil, which influenced art, architecture, and literature. Key figures like Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Karl Kraus were central to these developments, often producing their works in the vibrant environment of Viennese coffeehouses.

This presentation posits that these coffeehouses functioned as crucial institutions in fostering intellectual achievements. Serving as meeting points for artists and thinkers, they facilitated exchange and collaboration, leading to the creation of a microculture where distinct cultural artifacts could emerge. Evidence of this dynamic is found in accounts of regular patronage by notable individuals across different establishments.

In our presentation in Paris, we will use bimodal analyses of texts on the culture of coffee houses and their regular customers to examine how these establishments contributed to artistic, cultural, and scientific progress. At first glance, the subject may not seem to have any particular practical significance, but the cultural heritage cultivated in these spaces has an undeniable intellectual and economic value. This is reflected in the high market prices for works of art from this era and their importance for tourism.

Moreover, similar institutions worldwide—like New York's Hotel Chelsea—demonstrate the potential global applicability of these findings. By understanding the intrinsic value generated through personal interactions at such cultural intersections, we can derive insights beneficial for contemporary cultural promotion initiatives.

We examine the relational and cultural dynamics of transnational ensembles engaged in collective deliberations about the future through a network and textual analysis of public interest scenario projects since the 1990s. As cultural technologies for exploring multiple plausible futures, scenario methods have been used to facilitate discussions on entrenched public problems, including the future of democracy, armed conflict, urbanization, energy use, migration, food security, and climate change. Scenario projects include diverse stakeholders from multiple sectors and regions, fostering varied perspectives on futures, with certain actors participating in multiple projects. We argue that this generates a dual relation between networks and futures: scenario projects construct futures by means of relations, and relations by means of futures. Drawing from an original database of 238 scenario projects worldwide from 1990-2017, we present a bipartite network mapping of shared organizational participation in scenario projects across three time periods. We trace the historical emergence and global expansion of diverse coalitions of initiators, facilitators, funders, and partners (including consultancies, research organizations, governments, corporations, multilateral organizations, social movements, and civil society groups). We then consider how these coalitions coalesce around problem areas and proposed interventions through a computational text analysis of scenario project reports. We use word embeddings to explore how particular narrative operators (e.g., “participation,” “governance,” “sustainability” or “growth”) are associated with discursive stances toward capitalism and democracy. Finally, we combine the network and computational analyses to determine to what extent scenario projects that share organizations also share discursive stances in their imagined futures. We argue that these global relational dynamics have a “field-building” effect, shaping relationships in an emerging foresight field, while also contributing to the ambivalence about capitalism and democracy embedded in transnational foresight work.

Side-directed behavior (a term coined by primatologist Frans De Waal), or SDB, refers to an action undertaken by an actor ostensibly towards one alter, but more significantly directed semiotically towards a third party (McLean and Song 2023). A male chimpanzee ritually embraces all the females in the troop, to challenge the dominance of another male. A student bullies a schoolmate, but more to gain status with the cool kids than to express animosity towards the victim. An email between colleagues includes a cc to the department manager—arguably the alter of primary concern, despite not being explicitly addressed. A patron supplies a favor to another man’s client, chiefly as a signal of respect to his peer patron. The world of politics is replete with strategic behavior such as diverse forms of virtue signaling that involve performing for audiences, often with the goal of forming alliances—although the extent to which those audiences cum allies are explicitly designated and/or delineated is variable and often unclear. One important consequence for social network analysis is that transactions within networks need not constitute the most significant relationships being sought. Understanding the network ‘of primary concern,’ for both participants and analysts alike, becomes an interpretive process. Acknowledging that such subtle behavior is widespread can seriously complicate the coding and interpretation of network data.

Unfortunately, SDB can happen so pervasively, so subtly—for example, the alter may or may not be aware (or be made aware) of ‘what is actually going on’—and at such a variety of scales (among individuals, among organizational units, among nations) that measuring it precisely and assessing its importance in network tie formation can be very difficult. Actors may possess varying amounts of skill in denying that their actions had any ulterior motive. Yet understanding how to practice SDB, as well as how to interpret it, is highly consequential for skilled social actors, especially in ‘caged’ social settings.

We are designing an online, vignette-based experiment to explore certain important dimensions of SDB within small group/small network settings. Notably, we vary the social distance between actors in a triad, and vary the positive, neutral, or negative valency of the framing of alters or relationships within triads, to see how those variations affect observers’ assessments of the salience of the side-directed element of the behavior. We hope to have some preliminary results in time for the conference, but minimally we can discuss the research design and project aspirations. Our overall goal is to examine systematically some of the cultural, and specifically semiotic, processes that underlie network tie formation.

References:

McLean, Paul D. and Eunkyung Song. 2023. “Theorizing Side-directed Behavior.” Pp. 96-117 in Interpretive Sociology and the Semiotic Imagination, edited by Andrea Cossu and Jorge Fontdevila. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Sociological scholarship on taste in cultural items has largely relied on explanations associated with class or genre distinctions, including work on consumption across those boundaries. However, scholarship on popular culture and taste has found increasing cross-class and cross-genre consumption, suggesting that current conceptualizations of taste are insufficient in light of rapidly growing popular culture milieu, increased connectedness through social media, and the shifting demands on popular culture. Capitalizing on advances in computational sociology, I test core cultural theories about taste, class, and genre, using a network of young adult books connected to each other by cooccurrence on recommendation lists on a popular literary social media site. Using data on books on lists of recommendation on literary social media platform GoodReads.com, I construct a projected unipartite network of over 150,000 books connected by cooccurrence on 3,000 lists. In addition to webscraped metadata for the books, I rely on data from 12 literary awards, user-selected micro-genres and algorithmically clustered macro-genres, and viral popularity. I use exponential random growth models (ERGM) to test the role of class, genre, and viral popularity in predicting connections among books. Leveraging ERGM's ability to use endogenous variables, I then consider that taste is not directly measurable using book characteristics and take a more fully relational approach to testing the formation taste. Using networks allows me to analyze the role of the network structure, as taste may be unaffiliated with class, genre, or popularity and may, instead, be an unmeasurable relational process.

The aim of this presentation is to describe the disruptions to personal networks caused by the Covid-19 lockdowns (limitation of face-to-face encounters, development of online relationships, lost and degraded ties, interpersonal conflicts...), and their short- and longer-term effects on cultural practices since the early 2020s.

Numerous studies have analyzed the relationship between social networks and cultural participation. On the one hand, social interactions are powerful drivers of cultural choices and participation to leisure activities (Upright, 2004); and on the other, outings and cultural and sporting activities, particularly outside the home, are in turn determinants of sociability (Lizardo, 2006; Benediktsson, 2012). But these studies were carried out in “ordinary” times, and do not allow us to hypothesize on the impact of a major health crisis that affects both personal relationships and the use of free time. Secondly, they are all based on cross-sectional data, which makes it more difficult to analyze causal relationships between networks and cultural practices.

In this presentation, we therefore draw on data from several ongoing French longitudinal surveys (Mama 2022, N = 2,300; Vico 2020-2025, N = 16,224 in wave 1), to determine the extent to which disruptions to personal networks have accelerated a movement towards privatization, individualization and a retreat into the home of free-time uses, without fundamentally changing the social anchoring of cultural practices and preferences, nor reducing social inequalities in access to cultural goods.