Discourse and Hierarchy in the Arts

Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Dan Sperber, Bernhard Stiegler, and Norman Fairclough, among others, this book combines sociology, discourse analysis and philosophy to shed light on how we come to believe in the greatness of others.

Using results from field analysis of cultural organisations and qualitative text and corpus linguistic analysis of cultural organisations’ online discourse, the book develops a novel theory of the relationship between field, capital, and habitus on the one hand, and discourse, genres, and statements on the other. In doing so, it highlights how discourse contributes to the maintenance and transformation of hierarchies, beliefs, and attitudes within distinct groups of practice across European fields of art and music. Outlining key field theory and discourse analysis concepts, Discourse and Hierarchy in Cultural Fields addresses a noted research gap between cultural sociology and discourse analysis and enhances the capacity of discourse analysis to attend to social structures.