Issues of quality, value, and merit are perpetually lively and contentious in scientific and academic work, and research on evaluation panels have shown that organizational constraints and the methods of evaluation used, whether well-motivated or adopted ad hoc, have enormous influence on outcomes. But while previous studies have highlighted the influence exerted by particular methods of evaluation or by social psychological factors, this study shows how in conditions of high uncertainty assessors’ speculative work allows them to project and establish consensus on indicators of quality. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a national science council, we focus especially on the challenges of evaluating speculative genres of academic writing. We look to evaluations of research proposals in the field of artistic research in order to highlight the ways that evaluators project and establish consensus on indicators of quality in relation to the uncertainties inherent in speculative scientific writing. We show how successful applications outline particular visions of the future, visions that can be accommodated within evaluators’ understanding of the discipline itself well enough that evaluators can suspend disbelief regarding the future outcomes of the proposed research. In doing so, we exploit the emergent and unsettled nature of artistic research as a discipline to highlight the impact of the future in evaluation processes: the function of panelists’ visions of their discipline at its best in the present, and their imaginaries of the discipline of the future.

This article examines the influence of entrepreneurialism on the self-conceptions and practices of contemporary artists, highlighting the interplay between traditional artistic values and emerging entrepreneurial norms. We explore the sociological processes through which precarious labor markets and entrepreneurial discourses have reshaped artistic subjectivities. Artists today navigate fragmented careers marked by overwork, uncertainty, and excessive self-promotion, while simultaneously reinterpreting ideals like autonomy, creativity, and authenticity through entrepreneurial lenses. We underscore the ambivalence artists experience in engagements with entrepreneurialism: some embracing it as a pathway to fulfillment, while others critique its alignment with market logics. By situating entrepreneurialism within broader cultural and structural contexts, we reveal the ways that it naturalizes precarious conditions and reinforces individual responsibility for success. Ultimately, this work calls for critical engagement with the entrepreneurial spirit that shapes modern art worlds and emphasizes the need to address structural inequalities in creative industries.

Artistic research—research carried out by artists, through artistic practice—displays the markers of a burgeoning academic discipline. Dominant perspectives on research cultures would therefore predict that practitioners’ boundary work would play a decisive role in the development of this field. But when binary understandings come up against multiplex meanings, when and how do binaries matter? Focusing on documentary evidence drawn from the Swedish artistic research field, I consider how evaluations and boundaries interact in this emerging research discipline by theorizing the relationship between commitments to boundary work and orientations to boundary objects. This analytical perspective offers specific insights into the definition of new artistic and academic fields, and how the research conducted within them is evaluated.

A growing literature illuminates the limits of claims made on the basis of sensory perception in scientized, rationalized, and bureaucratic contexts. How to understand exceptions to the rule – cases where claims based on sensory experience are taken at face value, even without corroborating evidence? Here, I focus on one such exception, in which citizen complaints about the smell of a small shantytown functioned successfully as both demands and justifications despite a lack of the kinds of instrumentally and technologically enabled corroboration that the literature would suggest are necessary to strengthen such claims. I show how complaints slotted neatly into a specific cultural structure, an olfactory cosmology in which ‘bad air’ that endangers health can be identified by smell and requires ongoing management and amelioration, and where adherence to hygienic norms is required for full moral citizenship. The case suggests ways that the apparent weaknesses of olfactory claims might allow them to be uniquely weaponized in social and political life, and shows how such claims can exploit shared norms, values, and meanings to enroll others in the demand for action.

Smell is typically considered the least of the senses, the lowest in a hierarchy privileging sight since the Enlightenment. The experience of olfaction is highly emotion-laden and tightly bound to memory and personal history, and Western smell vocabularies are notoriously poor: scentful experience seems poorly suited as a basis to enroll others in political projects, especially in contexts that privilege rational public debate. But smells can also spur us to immediate action. When do they prompt us to enroll others in that action, and how do we turn individual sensory experiences into convincing arguments? How does olfaction leave the realm of individual experience and generate consequential social change? This article shows how social processes of olfaction can be used to prompt social action. With an analysis of the complaints that legitimated the 2015 destruction of a shanty town in southern Sweden and a historical inquiry into the shared beliefs that allowed those complaints to make sense, I show how olfactory claims – claims based on personal experiences of smell – can leverage broadly shared norms, values, and meanings to demand social action. Despite the personal, emotional, and fleeting nature of olfactory experience (or perhaps thanks to those features, which disallow independent confirmation) it can easily be weaponized as a political tool. This article asks how individual sensory experience can have social impact, and shows how a fit between local olfactory cosmologies and the particular features of olfactory claims can allow them to be used to demand action.

Sociological research on teaching as a profession often assumes there exists a body of tasks and specialized knowledge that defines jurisdiction for professional authority. But an emphasis on knowledge displaces the complex issues faced by those teachers who identify – or are identified by others – as subject area experts. In this paper we use ethnographic observations and interviews to understand the professional project of art teachers in the United States. This data shows how the “in-between” nature of art teaching -- the teacher not quite an artist committed to their personal craft, nor a pedagogy-centered professional with well-defined objectives -- is a product of ongoing negotiations over the meaning of their work. When seen from relational perspective, in-betweenness is a practical outcome that at one point will color any professional project. In this sense, the troubled category of the art teacher helps illuminate central concerns in any study of teaching as a profession. Rather than deliver our own assessment of professionalization in the classroom, we use our data to illuminate three practical challenges faced by the art teacher. These include the negotiation of tasks that need doing, debates over the meaning and relevance of purity to the profession, and the maintenance of roles through an emergent understanding of expertise. As we develop in the discussion that follows, each dimension of an in-between profession requires an ongoing performance for multiple audiences.

Smell is typically considered the least of the senses, the lowest in a hierarchy privileging sight since the Enlightenment. The experience of olfaction is highly emotion-laden and tightly bound to memory and personal history, and Western smell vocabularies are notoriously poor: scentful experience seems poorly suited as a basis to enroll others in political projects, especially in contexts that privilege rational public debate. But smells can also spur us to immediate action. When do they prompt us to enroll others in that action, and how do we turn individual sensory experiences into convincing arguments? How does olfaction leave the realm of individual experience and generate consequential social change? This article shows how social processes of olfaction can be used to prompt social action. With an analysis of the complaints that legitimated the 2015 destruction of a shanty town in southern Sweden and a historical inquiry into the shared beliefs that allowed those complaints to make sense, I show how olfactory claims – claims based on personal experiences of smell – can leverage broadly shared norms, values, and meanings to demand social action. Despite the personal, emotional, and fleeting nature of olfactory experience (or perhaps thanks to those features, which disallow independent confirmation) it can easily be weaponized as a political tool. This article asks how individual sensory experience can have social impact, and shows how a fit between local olfactory cosmologies and the particular features of olfactory claims can allow them to be used to demand action.

Sociologicial analyses of artistic practice have long drawn on theoretical traditions grounded in binaries and dualisms. Such analytical strategies, exemplified here by field theoretical approaches, center art objects and their movements in and across markets, where binaristic visions of art worlds do offer significant leverage. But when the analyst moves away from markets for art objects and looks to artistic practices the binaristic lens provides, at best, a blurred image with meaningful blind spots. This article suggests an alternative vision of artistic practice —one based on gravity rather than polarity—that captures the ways individuals and their actions make sense in a specific universe of meaning without forcing them into fundamentally competitive and economistic relationships. It leverages findings enabled by a unique sampling strategy in a four year study of visual artists in the United States to illuminate some limitations of binary theoretical frameworks, and outlines a generative alternative to dualism that promotes new analytical and theoretical directions for sociological analyses of artists and artistic practice. This alternative model provides new leverage on four persistent issues in analyses of artistic work: cultural change in occupational fields; actors’ attempts to manage overlapping but incommensurate forms of recognition, reputation, attention, and success; the persistent hegemony of markets for objects in both vernacular and sociological understandings of artistic practice; and questions of visibility and legitimacy central to understanding boundary formation and boundary work in creative fields. The gravitational metaphor promotes a distict set of strategies for the study of artistic work as well as other nontraditional occupations.

What role do artists play in the valuation of their activities? Theoretical perspectives on art have assumed that such value is closely linked to the prices of art objects and have minimized the place of content providers in the creation and definition of value. Through analysis of the writings of American, Canadian, and Swedish artists from 1967 to 2015, we find that artists move discursively from an object-oriented market logic to a market logic based in the provision of services, promoting new ways of accounting for value as they do so. Our findings suggest new ways to look at extant literature: 1) dominant theories treat artists as either structurally or intentionally insulated from the pricing of their work, while we show how artists act to define the value of artistic practice; 2) we show how terminology may remain stable while underlying meanings and institutionalized strategies aimed toward the accomplishment of goals evolve, and argue for the analysis of discursive practices beyond the search for stability or change in the usage of key terms; and finally, 3) we argue that analysts should look beyond price when aiming to understand the valuation of artistic practice.

Situated in the juncture between professions literature and social scientific studies of worth and value, this article extends Zelizer’s work on social processes of valuation and Boltanski and Thevenot’s research on diverse orders of worth. Using interview, ethnographic, and archival data on visual artists, the author considers diverse accounts of the value of artistic practice and develops a model of social processes of disagreement about valuation in working life, processes of individual and collective revaluation of objects and practices about which there exists significant social agreement regarding value. The process consists of three stages: as traditional practices undergo an occupational turn, tensions between old and new orders of worth come to be expressed in conflicts over valuation; diverse accounts of value proliferate; and finally, some accounts – those that draw on contemporary visions of traditional practice – achieve widespread resonance and become widely shared meanings.

What role does arts education play in artistic activity and income? In light of the rise of university arts education and its effects, especially the changing role of teaching in artistic careers, this paper questions key assumptions of both winner-take-all and economic-world-reversed analyses of artistic careers. While almost all studies of remuneration in the creative arts find that income is highly skewed, these dominant perspectives take an object-oriented view of artistic life that neglects the vast majority of activities that underpin and compose contemporary arts practices. Looking at arts practices more holistically and using the changing status of art teaching as an exemplar of the expanded field of artistic practice, we document the challenges that the rise of arts education present to traditional analyses of artistic careers, income, and success.

Gerber, Alison. 2015. “Book Review: The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement under Uncertainty.” Organization Studies 36(8):1115–17.

Klett, Joseph and Alison Gerber. 2014. “The Meaning of Indeterminacy: Noise Music as Performance.” Cultural Sociology 8(3):275–90.

Gerber, Alison and Clayton Childress. 2017. “I Don’t Make Objects, I Make Projects: Selling Things and Selling Selves in Contemporary Artmaking.” Cultural Sociology 11(2):234–54.

Childress, Clayon and Alison Gerber. 2015. “The MFA in Creative Writing: The Uses of a ‘Useless’ Credential.” Professions and Professionalism 5(2).

Over half of today’s Masters of Fine Arts programs in creative writing in the United States were founded after the year 2000. Has the MFA-CW become a necessary credential for novelists? Relying on participant observation field research in the American literary field and interviews with authors, publishers, MFA graduates, and instructors, this work focuses on a paradox: Despite widespread agreement that the credential doesn’t “teach” enrollees to be a good writers or open up a pathway to a professional writing career, many involved in the literary field hold an MFA-CW. In this paper, we look at the uses of the MFA-CW, finding that although the degree serves little if any jurisdictional or closure-related functions it is made useful in a variety of ways: for students as a symbolic resource for artistic identity, for working writers as a source of income and community, and for editors in publishing houses as a signal for possible marketing and publicity potential. Keywords : Credentialism, Professions, Literature, Books, Publishing, MFA

In aesthetic terms, the category of 'sound' is often split in two: 'noise', which is chaotic, unfamiliar, and offensive; and 'music', which is harmonious, resonant, and divine. These opposing concepts are brought together in the phenomenon of Noise Music, but how do practitioners make sense of this apparent discordance? Analyses that treat recorded media as primary texts declare Noise Music to be a failure, as a genre without progress. These paint Noise as a polluted form in an antagonistic relationship with traditional music. But while critiques often point to indeterminate structure as indicative of the aesthetic project's limitations, we claim that indeterminacy itself becomes central to meaningful expression when the social context of Noise is considered. Through observational and interview data, we consider the contexts, audiences, and producers of contemporary American Noise Music. Synthesizing the performance theories of Hennion and Alexander, we demonstrate how indeterminacy situated in structured interaction allows for meaning-making and sustains a musical form based in claims to inclusion, access, and creative freedom. We show how interaction, not discourse, characterizes the central performance that constructs the meaning of Noise.

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