Conference Agenda

An emerging scholarship has interrogated the changing nature of creative work under the influence of digital platforms; evaluating how “platformisation” may not only reshape how creative workers compete, but also how they cooperate for mutual benefit. Yet, this literature is generally Eurocentric, overlooking how the implications and dynamics of digital platforms may play out differently for creative workers in other contexts. This article investigates independent musicians in India; a country with a vast, influential, and distinctive music industry which is poorly understood in Global North scholarship. Through interviews with 41 Indian musicians and industry actors, it argues, firstly, that the dominance of film (especially Bollywood) music in India has constrained the infiltration of Western music platforms; secondly, that this dominance of Bollywood music has generated particular forms of self-exploitation, hyper-competition, and exclusion; and thirdly, that platforms have proven an opportunity- albeit ambivalent- for forms of cooperation among those excluded from opportunities in film music. The article makes two contributions to the sociological literature on creative work, and the role of platforms therein. It underlines the limits to platformisation when confronted with established and dominant institutions, where the latter continue to shape the experience of work and terms of the labour market; something not widely recognised in much of the discourse on the topic, especially in under-researched contexts in the Global South. It also sheds new light on the complex ways in which musicians respond to platforms, which in the Indian context both counteracted and reinforced hierarchical and hypercompetitive industry dynamics.

Mail or correspondence art is an experimental art performance in which invited and/or noninvited participants are asked to send small-scale works through the postal service. During the 1960s-70s, Fluxus, an avant-garde Neo-Dada artists' network, performed several mail art events. Mieko Shlomi, who performed nine mail art events from 1965 to 1975, was a key figure. The Milgram’s small-world experiments might have been scientific counterparts to these art events.

Mail art has sometimes been utilized to raise political awareness and protest oppressive governments, but too often, it was just for fun. Art forms vary from photo collages to visual poetry and artists’ stamps. During the last Japanese general election period, I performed a preliminary political mail art event involving college students who took my sociology class. The students (n=270) were asked to draw a mind map of political issues randomly assigned from a list of ten political problems. A participant was instructed to email and connect with any listed student within a week. In the process, a famous mail artist participated as a mediator of the experiment and intervened in the event. Pre- and post-experiment surveys were conducted to test the effects of mail art activities. Eighty-one of one hundred eighty chains were connected, and just two were completed. The maximum length of chains is eight, with an average of 2.3. Mail art participation has a slight positive effect on political awareness; however, it does not positively affect voting in the election.

This presentation examines the social embeddedness of cultural production through a two-mode network perspective. Building on the duality approach (Breiger, 1974; Basov, Breiger, Hellsten, 2020), it explores contemporary art production from a socio-semantic standpoint, analyzing how the relationships between artists, artworks, and galleries shape the structural properties of the field. Specifically, the study tests hypotheses drawn from three key bodies of literature: (1) research that attributes contemporary art production primarily to power dynamics linked to individual characteristics such as gender, class, and educational credentials; (2) studies emphasizing the role of institutional networks in providing artists with social connections, framing art production as a function of visibility capital; and (3) perspectives that highlight the immaterial and content-driven nature of contemporary art, downplaying the role of artists in favor of the autonomous influence of artistic ideas.

The dataset comprises 1,520 artists and their artworks, along with records of 22,789 galleries where these pieces were exhibited. It was compiled using archival documentation from Chile's Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage, specifically related to COVID-19 economic support policies in 2020. Artist-level variables include gender, public pronouncements, education, and sponsorship. To assess organizational dynamics between artists and galleries, an additional "visibility" variable was estimated following Lizardo’s approach to Two-Mode Relational Similarity (Lizardo, 2024).

Methodologically, the study constructs a two-mode network linking artists to art topics, employing Structural Topic Models (STM) to identify themes from the 1,520 artwork descriptions provided by the artists. Topic estimation incorporates prevalence-level variables to account for document-level conditions affecting artistic content, such as materiality, critical reception, and market valuation. Artists represent the social dimension of the network, while topics capture the semantic structure. To test the proposed hypotheses, Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) are applied to assess relational mechanisms that evaluate the impact of market dynamics on the emergence of new trends and genres in contemporary art.

The findings underscore the importance of a socio-semantic approach to cultural production and highlight the value of the duality framework and computational methods in the study of artistic forms.

This paper provides an in-depth ethnographic examination of the practice of sex work among the Kanjar community in the rural areas of India, through the lens of social networks and cultural capital. Historically, Kanjar women were traditional entertainers during their nomadic or semi-nomadic periods. This study specifically focuses on the contemporary involvement of unmarried Kanjar women in sex work and how their social networks shape and sustain this practice. The research traces the historical trajectory of the Kanjar community, highlighting their pre-colonial role as entertainers, their classification as a criminal tribe during the colonial era, and their post-independence transition to a settled and denotified tribe in India.

The study delves into the transformation of Kanjar women from traditional entertainers to modern-day sex workers, exploring how social networks facilitate the transmission and perpetuation of cultural capital associated with this occupation. It also examines the influence of technological advancements and media exposure on the practice of sex work among the Kanjars, emphasizing the role of social networks in adapting to these changes. The research reveals the emergence of new forms of entertainment occupations, such as dance bar girls and performers at parties in Middle Eastern countries. The paper concludes that the cultural sanction of the occupation, the right to property for unmarried women engaged in occupations related to traditional entertainment, and their autonomy in decision-making are reinforced by their social networks, providing these women with a sense of security. This ethnographic study focuses on the role of community networks in preserving and promoting the culture and traditions of the Kanjars by making necessary adaptations in their occupation. It challenges the prevailing assumptions of governmental and NGO policies, as well as popular media representations, which often erroneously presume a need for their rehabilitation.

We examine ratings of 642 occupations by a national online sample of U.S respondents in 2019 (Freeland et al. 2020). We analyze the respondents’ ratings of occupations on three dimensions of cultural meaning—evaluation (good versus bad), potency (powerful versus powerless), and activity (lively versus quiet). We take deviations of respondents’ individual ratings from population means, focusing on deviations from consensus rather than consensus itself. Drawing on Brieger's (1974) work on duality, we examine two projections of the initial rectangular matrix of correlated deviations. Our two projections represent (1) the cultural communities that people form when they differ from consensus in similar ways, and (2) the clusters of occupations that move in similar ways across those subcultures. Correlations among the residuals at the person level are indicators of shared subcultural differences from the mainstream—different ways of meaning-making about what is valuable and worthy about occupational work. At the occupation level, the structure represents schemas for which occupations share common elements and move together when those elements are evaluated differently. We use dyad models to investigate what metrics of occupation similarity predict similarity in deviations from consensus. We find that similarity in affective meaning (evaluation, potency and activity), material requirements, rewards, and work characteristics all predict clustering at the occupation level. Demographic composition of occupations is less important. We find that older respondents, White respondents, and higher income respondents tend to discriminate more between occupations on evaluation and potency. Respondents who are more similar in age have more similar patterns of deviations. However, occupation-level variables are in general much stronger predictors of residual structure than respondent-level variables.