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Imagined futures, once a vital topic of theoretical inquiry within the sociology of culture, have been sidelined in recent decades. Rational choice models cannot explain the seemingly irrational optimism of youth aspirations, pointing to the need to explore other alternatives. This article incorporates insights from pragmatist theory and cognitive sociology to examine the relationship between imagined futures and present actions and experiences in rural Malawi, where future optimism appears particularly unfounded. Drawing from in-depth interviews and archival sources documenting ideological campaigns promoting schooling, the author shows that four elements are understood to jointly produce educational success: ambitious career goals, sustained effort, unflagging optimism, and resistance to temptation. Aspirations should be interpreted not as rational calculations, but instead as assertions of a virtuous identity, claims to be \"one who aspires.\"

A burgeoning literature spanning sociologies of culture and social network methods has for the past several decades sought to explicate the relationships between culture and connectivity. A number of promising recent moves toward integration are worthy of review, comparison, critique, and synthesis. Network thinking provides powerful techniques for specifying cultural concepts ranging from narrative networks to classification systems, tastes, and cultural repertoires. At the same time, we see theoretical advances by sociologists of culture as providing a corrective to network analysis as it is often portrayed, as a mere collection of methods. Cultural thinking complements and sets a new agenda for moving beyond predominant forms of structural analysis that ignore action, agency, and intersubjective meaning. The notion of \"cultural holes\" that we use to organize our review points both to the cultural contingency of network structure and to the increasingly permeable boundary between studies of culture and research on social networks.

Using a quasi-experimental research design, this study examines the effect of terrorist events on the perception of immigrants across 65 regions in nine European countries. It first elaborates a theoretical argument that explains the effect of events and points to economic conditions, the size of the immigrant population, and personal contact as mediating factors. This argument is evaluated using the fact that the terror attack in Bali on October 12, 2002, occurred during the fieldwork period of the European Social Survey. The findings from this natural experiment reveal considerable cross-national and regional variation in the effect of the event and its temporal duration. The analysis on the regional level supports the argument about contextual variations in the response to the event and a second analysis based on the 2004 Madrid bombing confirms the study's conclusions. Implications of the findings for societal responses to terror attacks, the literature on attitudes toward immigrants, and survey research are discussed. Adapted from the source document.

This article presents a new model of culture in action. Although most sociologists who study culture emphasize its role in post hoc sense making, sociologists of religion and social psychologists tend to focus on the role beliefs play in motivation. The dual-process model integrates justificatory and motivational approaches by distinguishing between \"discursive\" and \"practical\" modes of culture and cognition. The author uses panel data from the National Study of Youth and Religion to illustrate the model's usefulness. Consistent with its predictions, he finds that though respondents cannot articulate clear principles of moral judgment, their choice from a list of moral-cultural scripts strongly predicts later behavior.

The rise in subprime lending and the ensuing wave of foreclosures was partly a result of market forces that have been well-identified in the literature, but it was also a highly racialized process. We argue that residential segregation created a unique niche of minority clients who were differentially marketed risky subprime loans that were in great demand for use in mortgage-backed securities that could be sold on secondary markets. We test this argument by regressing foreclosure actions in the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas on measures of black, Hispanic, and Asian segregation while controlling for a variety of housing market conditions, including average creditworthiness, the extent of coverage under the Community Reinvestment Act, the degree of zoning regulation, and the overall rate of subprime lending. We find that black residential dissimilarity and spatial isolation are powerful predictors of foreclosures across U.S. metropolitan areas. To isolate subprime lending as the causal mechanism through which segregation influences foreclosures, we estimate a two-stage least squares model that confirms the causal effect of black segregation on the number and rate of foreclosures across metropolitan areas. We thus conclude that segregation was an important contributing cause of the foreclosure crisis, along with overbuilding, risky lending practices, lax regulation, and the bursting of the housing price bubble.

Building on recent research emphasizing how legitimacy depends on consensus among audiences about candidates' characteristics and activities, we examine the relationship between cultural producers' (candidates) position in the social structure and the consecration of their creative work by relevant audiences. We argue that the outcome of this process of evaluation in any cultural field, whether in art or science, is a function of (1) candidates' embeddedness within the field, and (2) the type of audience—that is, peers versus critics—evaluating candidates' work. Specifically, we hypothesize that peers are more likely to favor candidates who are highly embedded in the field, whereas critics will not show such favoritism. We find support for these hypotheses in the context of the Hollywood motion picture industry.

How do we attribute a monetary value to intangible things? This article offers a general sociological approach to this question, using the economic value of nature as a paradigmatic case, and oil spills litigations in France and the United States as real world empirical illustrations. It suggests that a full-blown sociology of economic valuation must solve three problems: the \"why,\" which refers to the general place of money as a metric for worth; the \"how,\" which refers to the specific techniques and arguments laymen and experts deploy to elicit monetary translations; and the \"then what\" or the feedback loop from monetary values to social practices and representations. Adapted from the source document.

Crash test: can ecological theory save the markets? In a Perspective review, Andrew Haldane, executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, and ecologist Robert May look at the nature of risk that led to the recent global crisis in the international banking system. Utilizing tools more often used to analyse ecological food webs and the spread of infectious diseases, they conclude that there are lessons to be learned from the exercise that could inform future public policy decisions. In the run-up to the recent financial crisis, an increasingly elaborate set of financial instruments emerged, intended to optimize returns to individual institutions with seemingly minimal risk. Essentially no attention was given to their possible effects on the stability of the system as a whole. Drawing analogies with the dynamics of ecological food webs and with networks within which infectious diseases spread, we explore the interplay between complexity and stability in deliberately simplified models of financial networks. We suggest some policy lessons that can be drawn from such models, with the explicit aim of minimizing systemic risk.

What do sociologists mean when they describe culture as founded on \"shared understandings\"? Sharing an understanding does not necessarily imply having the same opinions but rather agreeing on the structures of relevance and opposition that make symbols and actions meaningful. Because meaning is contextual, different people might interpret the same reality in different ways. Yet standard quantitative sociological methods are not designed to take such heterogeneity into account. In this article, I introduce a new method -- relational class analysis -- that uses attitudinal data to identify groups of individuals that share distinctive ways of understanding the same domain of social activity. To demonstrate its utility I use it to reexamine the cultural omnivore thesis. I find that Americans' understandings of the social symbolism of musical taste are shaped by three competing logics of cultural distinction, in a manner that complicates contemporary sociological accounts of artistic taste. Adapted from the source document.

Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful than average, suggesting that \"the best\" alternatives are qualitatively different from \"the rest\"; yet experts routinely fail to predict which products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by creating an artificial \"music market\" in which 14,341 participants downloaded previously unknown songs either with or without knowledge of previous participants' choices. Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible.