Paul Widdop

Social network analysis is increasingly recognised as a useful way to explore music scenes. In this article we examine the individuals who were the cultural workforce that comprised the ‘Britpop’ music scene of the 1990s. The focus of our analysis is homophily and heterophily to determine whether the clusters of friendships and working relationships of those who were ‘best connected’ in the scene were patterned by original social class position. We find that Britpop’s ‘whole network’ is heterophilic but that its ‘sub-networks’ are more likely to be social class homophilic. The sub-networks that remain heterophilic are likely to be united by other common experiences that brought individuals in the network to the same social spaces. We suggest that our findings on Britpop might be generalised to the composition of other music scenes, cultural workforces and aggregations of young people. Our study differs from research on, first, British ‘indie music’ and social class which focuses upon the construction, representation and performance of social location rather than the relationships it might shape and second, the pioneering social network analyses of music scenes which currently lack explicit emphasis on social class.

This research offers a unique opportunity to revisit the omnivore hypothesis under a unified method of cross-national analysis. To accomplish this, we interpret omnivourism as a special case of cultural eclecticism (Ollivier, 2008; Ollivier, Gauthier and Truong, 2009). Our methodological approach incorporates the simultaneous analysis of locally produced and globally known musical genres. Its objective is to verify whether cultural omnivourism is a widespread phenomenon, and to determine to what extent any conclusions can be generalised across countries with different social structures and different levels of cultural openness. To truly understand the scope of the omnivourism hypothesis, we argue that it is essential to perform a cross-national comparison to test the hypothesis within a range of social, political and cultural contexts, and a reflection of different historical and cultural repertoires (Lamont, 1992).

Today how individuals interact with various cultural items is not perfectly consistent with theoretical frameworks of influential scholars on cultural consumption, such as Bourdieu (1984), Gans (1999), and Peterson and Simkus (1992). One such variation is in the ever increasing variety of technological modes to acquire and listen to music (Pinch and Bijsterveld, 2004). However, as a consequence of digital divides (van Dijk, 2006), technological items may not be distributed equally among social groups. At present, the value of status-making through a preference for different genres of music extends itself to different forms of consumption and ways of experiencing music. We are yet to fully understand the power these practices have on generating status. This article is therefore motivated by the need to integrate within quantitative frameworks of taste and cultural consumption, an analysis of individuals’ technological engagement. These two dimensions, integrated as components of musical practices, enhance our understanding of cultural boundaries across different social groups. The objective is to bridge a gap detected in the literature, addressing the following questions: Are technological modes to listen to music related to musical tastes?

It is widely accepted that a shift has occurred in the cultural consumption patterns of those higher in the social strata. Where tastes were based around rules of exclusion, they are now based on openness to a variety of cultures, both esoteric and popular. What is less understood is how an individual’s social networks affect their cultural tastes. Using social survey data on cultural participation, we find that musical consumption is mediated and construed through networks, and these networks play a much more significant role in cultural behaviour than current theoretical frameworks
suggest.

This chapter demonstrates the possibilities of social network analysis for the study of jazz worlds. Jazz discographies and directories offer immense opportunities for primary data collection and subsequent analysis, for example with regard to the analysis of communities within the wider network and their association with distinct styles, the position of female jazz musicians, and the incorporation of temporal and spatial data. Drawing on network data extracted from John Chilton's directory of British jazz musicians, we examine the structure of the British jazz network, in particular the value of different indicators illustrating the position of bandleaders and sidemen. We calculate a number of measures of centrality before examining the relationships between musicians and bands as a bipartite network. We then examine the drivers of success among British jazz musicians as measured by the esteem provided by Melody Maker’s readers for its End of Year Readers’ Polls Awards. Results are suggestive of ‘optimal marginality’ – the more successful were less likely to be highly central, and more likely to have links with a diverse group of musicians. We hope that scholars of jazz studies will adopt (and where appropriate, interrogate) these methods tactically to advance the field using mixed methods approaches. In this way, detailed understanding of forms, identity and meaning can combine with selective use of technical analysis to provide a fuller account of jazz worlds in Britain.

The presence of heterogeneity in treatment effects can create problems for researchers employing a narrow experimental pool in their research. In particular it is often questioned whether the results of a particular experiment can be extrapolated outside the specific location of the study. In this article, we use a population-based field experiment in order to test the extent to which treatment effects for impersonal mobilisation techniques (direct mail and telephone) are sensitive to where they are carried out (geography) and the context of the election in which they were conducted. We find that on the whole it does not much matter where an experiment is conducted: the treatment effects are to all intents and purposes geographically uniform. This has important implications for the external validity of get-out-the-vote field studies more generally, especially where single locations are used. However, there is one important exception to this: experiments carried out in high turnout locations at high salience elections may show larger effects than those carried out in low turnout areas.

This article outlines a partnership between an academic institute and a third sector organisation attached to a professional football club in the United Kingdom. The partnership concerns a sport for development intervention. The purpose of the article is to outline the development of applied monitoring and evaluation and the application of intervention mapping for an intervention to tackle anti-social behaviour through a football-based social inclusion project for children and young people. This case supports the development of third sector-university partnerships and the use of intervention mapping to meet shared objectives in relation to articulating the impact of interventions to funders and for research outputs.

This book draws upon a relational sociological paradigm to explore the processes of collective action in football fandom across Europe and the UK. Through a range of case studies, the authors address pertinent themes in football fandom, including anti-discrimination, ‘home,’ ticketing, name changes, ‘ownership,’ and broader leftist politics. Each of these case studies engages with the theoretical framework of cultural relational sociology, highlighting the different social and cultural changes English and European football has undergone, often over a very short period of time