Sociologie

Classical sociologists like Max Weber pointed out the relationship between processes of modernization and cultural discontents. In this article it is argued that such discontents where at the heart of the critique of the romantic counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s on “the system” – a cultural critique that has been appropriated over the last decades by the commercial culture industry and is nowadays informing many of its media products. This study addresses two popular genres – ‘fantasy’ and ‘conspiracy culture’ – as articulated in various novels, movies and computer games and analyses the exact ways in which they express and address cultural discontents in contemporary culture.

Although much has been written about the conception of ‘shareholder value’, its rise and spread have not been properly researched. In this article we use public sources such as the Wall Street Journal and the journal Institutional Investor to examine when and how the concept of shareholder value arose and spread in the United States. From an economic sociological perspective both the rise and spread of ‘shareholder value’ can be understood as a function of the changing power and dependency relations in which firms are embedded. The deep economic recession around 1980 led to a crisis in the prevailing management beliefs, offering newcomers the opportunity to promote alternative business models in which the shareholder value conception became dominant. The spokesmen of the new business model were originally wealthy outsiders, corporate raiders, who used the economic crisis to acquire shares in undervalued firms under the threat of restructuring and selling them, either in parts or as a whole. These controversial ‘hostile’ takeovers were accompanied by a sharp critique of established management, which would compromise shareholders’ interests, whereas maximizing shareholder value should be the only objective of managing firms. Under the Reagan administration, the lucrative operations of corporate raiders gradually became a more legitimate type of investor behaviour for public pension funds. These funds had few ties to the established management and they considered themselves disadvantaged because often only corporate raiders profited from the advertised takeovers, while other shareholders did not. The tensions between raiders and public pension funds led to the organization of public pension funds and the newly founded Council of Institutional Investors (1985) immediately became a leading player. Because managers found profitable ways to adapt to the new balance of power, the shareholder value ideology rapidly spread through the economic field with the result that from the mid-nineteen eighties onwards, the alliance between top managers and large shareholders around the creation of shareholder value became the dominant business strategy of North American firms.

Many researchers have observed a strong relationship between the level of education and the new political cleavage, which is often described as cultural. Longitudinal research in Flanders has however revealed that higher education as such hardly influences the position on the new cleavage. The strong relationship with the level of education is largely the result of selective access to higher education. This finding is related to the specific form of secondary education in Flanders, which is divided into tracks. Students in the different tracks differ both in their position on the new cleavage and in their chances of undertaking higher education.On the basis of a 2002 random sample of 1697 young people, aged 14 to 18, this paper analyses how the differences in attitudes between the pupils in the different tracks evolve in the course of secondary schooling, and how the effects of schooling and media use interact in creating those differences.

This article analyses the practices of Dutch literary editors involved in the acquisition of translation rights for English fiction. Combining neo-institutionalist and field theory we show how editors cope with three main problems in the acquisition of new books: excess of new titles; uncertainty over the nature and quality of new titles; and strong competition. They manage these challenges through decentralized organization, trust in their (transnational) network and their own expertise, and building symbolic capital through the catalogue. The catalogue, especially, is an important means of communication, and simultaneously a marker of status and identity, in the transnational literary arena. The focus on these catalogues, however, along with the constant reliance on information from others, leads to increasing isomorphism between national fields.

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