Measuring Culture
Social scientists seek to develop systematic ways to understand how people make meaning and how the meanings they make shape them and the world in which they live. But how do we measure such processes?
Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts
An in-depth look at how democratic values have widened the American arts scene, even as it remains elite and cosmopolitan.
Banding Together: How Communities create genres in popular music
Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches? Banding Together explores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music.
Arts Research
One of my long-standing interests concerns patterns of organizational and individual success in the arts. In addition to my investigations within music, I pursue these questions within a broader ecology of visual and performing arts organizations, in the U.S. and abroad.
Music Research
Most of my research from 2003-2013 focused on the sociological dynamics of music. I have proposed a sociological theory of genre, and argued in favor of its value, over and above musicological notions of genre. I work within a sub-field focused on organizational and institutional features of the creation of culture, or, the production of culture. A third sub-set of my work focuses on the dynamics of authenticity within music communities. Finally, my Ph.D. research focused on rap music.