Railway modelling involves the reproduction, miniaturisation and mimesis - with various levels of accuracy and realism - of life scenes that are centred around the display and/or running of model trains. Railway modelling is a serious leisure activity inasmuch as it requires continuous engagement on the part of the hobbyists as well as the development of various skills. The scholarly literature on railway modelling has described it as serious leisure, which engages aspects of craft consumption, and which presents the potential for hobbyists to achieve successful ageing. The aim of this article is to conceptualise railway modelling as a serious leisure centred on the materiality of the models, which act as conduits for reinforcing particular normatives within the hobby. To do so, it draws on the concept of 'object-relation' to demonstrate how material things configure the relationships and modes of communication within the hobby. In deploying the method of qualitative content analysis as applied to a corpus of issues of a French railway magazine, this article seeks to show how materiality cements modes of communication and types of sociality within the hobby.

The field of cultural outings represents an area of practice that has been constantly expanding since the 1970s. Some outings, such as going to the cinema, are very common, while others, such as going to the opera or to a rap concert, are more circumscribed and differentiated. Based on quantitative data from the 2018 Cultural Practices in France survey and on a qualitative interview survey conducted in 2021-2022, this article explores the cultural and sociological structuring of cultural outings using multivariate analysis, and it seeks to analyse the motivations for cultural outings by using three concepts: ‘competence’, ‘concernedness’ and ‘attachment’.

Abstract The chapter critically discusses how the category of “music genre” is understood and theorized in the digital era. It first reviews the scholarly conceptualization of the category of music genre, particularly in the discipline of sociology, notably through an emphasis on the negotiation of genre conventions that constitute the category. It then situates genres categories in relation to, and opposition with, categories such as global pop and World Music. Drawing on this initial discussion, the chapter goes on to explore how the affordances of different digital technologies contribute to redefining the understanding and boundaries of music genres. The authors draw on particular examples of online music genres to highlight the increasing pace at which conventions evolve, as well as the discursive inputs of members of the genre communities.

Powerlifting, a competitive strength-based sport, offers a rich and compelling site for investigating the digital mediation of gendered subjectivities. The substantive implications of feminist knowledge as interventions in physical cultures are well documented. This article seeks to extend the onto-epistemological precepts of a Feminist New Materialist framework to further a generative analysis of women's physically active moving bodies. The digital lifting journeys of ten women and their physical-digital everyday experiences of becoming-strong comprise the sample with the intent of understanding something different about the micropolitics of self-world transformations entangled within moving-desiring practices. Hence, we argue in this article that the ephemerality of digital traces embedded within networked-based platforms such as Instagram have the potential to change the 'Face' of strength-based sport with significant implications for expanding the cultural imaginary of/for sportswomen more broadly.

The celebration of popular music can be an important mode of cultural expression and a source of pride for urban communities. This Element analyses the capacity for popular music heritage to enact cultural justice in the deindustrialising cities of Wollongong, Australia; Detroit, USA; and Birmingham, UK. The Element develops a critical approach to cultural justice for examining music and the city in a heritage context and outlines how the quest for cultural justice manifests in three key ways: collection, preservation and archiving; curation, storytelling and heritage interpretation; and mobilising communities for collective action.

Cette introduction au numéro spécial s’intéresse à la prolifération récente des discours sur la valeur de la musique. Si la question de la valeur sous-tend depuis longtemps nombre d’analyses sur la musique, ceux sur la supposée valeur déclinante de la musique s’inscrivent dans des perspectives contemporaines articulées à la numérisation et tendent à réduire la richesse d’un objet musique dorénavant largement démocratisé et investi subjectivement.

The established conceptual frameworks in the sociology of music largely name forms of social collective, albeit emphasising different characteristics. 'Scene' and 'neo-tribe' are the principal contemporary examples of this. In this article, we describe scene and neo-tribe as conceptual responses to what questions (What kind of sociality is this? What kind of cultural context is this?). We engage critically with scene and neo-tribe, and with the underlying logic of sociological explanation which posits and then answers what questions about social collectives as the best means of accounting for social practices around music. We do this to advocate sociological enquiry into music via how questions, suggesting that such questions have a specific sociological trajectory which presents underexplored opportunities for the sociology of popular music. To this end, we introduce and describe the concept of 'genre work', to investigate how musical development and social groups are co-constituted through the same social processes and dynamics. We argue that scene and neo-tribe tend to background the empirical processes (and the music) around which their respective research agendas are oriented. Genre work and similar approaches, in contrast, seek to document and analyse the discourses, interactional forms and mediated and co-present activities by which genres and the social groupings interested in them are mutually cohered.

This chapter investigates the underpinning trends that have developed in the distribution of recorded and live music since the start of the 21st century, and more precisely, in relation to the festivalisation of culture and of the platformisation of cultural production. In reviewing techno-cultural changes in the distribution of music, it argues that content is curated with the specific intent to redefine the spatial materialities within which music is diffused. This chapter thus draws on the concept of curation to discuss how music is further entrenched within logics of commercialisation, which associate it with brands and products, and which ultimately define the spatial experiences of music in relation to them. In focusing on the curation of listening practices, the chapter helps readers understand the context of music, mediatised experience, and the way in which the COVID pandemic is both a radical shock and a continuation of established patterns of music commodification.

Cultural taste and practices are ordinarily analysed through pre-established lists of generic categories that are provided to participants in quantitative surveys. The French inquiry on cultural practices conducted in 2018 offers the possibility to examine categories given by participants to an open question about the “type of music” liked by French people. The aim of this article is both methodological and analytical: First, this article operates a double categorisation, typological and generic, and second, it provides a reflection on the categories of music tastes. Although genre appears as the dominant category to express one’s taste, other categories, referring to “traditions”, “artists”, “use value”, as well as the absence of preferences are also observed. The article discusses what a declared preference for music via an open-ended question consists of, and how it differs from an expressed response about taste in a closed question.

Cultural categories such as ‘comedy’, ‘rock’, ‘painting’ and others – where generic categories prevail – are ordinary in social life and in sociological analyses. Yet, these are often considered as uncertain designations, even arbitrary and not common. If asked, individuals would be incapable to identify a cultural object, and ultimately in a common manner. The Cultural Practices, Media and Information Technologies (PMTI) inquiry, conducted in 2015 by the ELIPSS panel, offers, in the context of music, the empirical material to evaluate individuals’ capacity as well as the categorial and generic diversity to identify musical extracts. The identification inquiry enables us to defend a socio-cultural model of generic understanding that articulates competency, generic conventions and level of prototypicality of sound to categorise, which is underpinned by a determination by a socio-historic familiarity with the musical offer in its diversity.

Music Sociology critically evaluates current approaches to the study of music in sociology and presents a broad overview of how music is positioned and represented in existing sociological scholarship. It then goes on to offer a new framework for approaching the sociology of music, taking music itself as a starting point, and considering what music sociology can learn from related disciplines such as critical musicology, ethnomusicology, and cultural studies. As a central form of leisure, consumption, and cultural production, music has attracted significant attention from sociologists who seek to understand its deeper socio-cultural meaning. With case studies that address sound environments, consumption, media technologies, local scenes, music heritage, and ageing, the authors highlight the distinctive nature of musical experience, and show how sociology can illuminate it. Providing both a survey of existing perspectives the sociology of music, and a thought-provoking discussion of how the field can move forward, this concise and accessible book will be a vital reading for anyone teaching or studying music from a sociological standpoint.