TY - JOUR A1 - Anheier, Helmut K. A1 - Gerhards, Jürgen A1 - Romo, Frank P. T1 - Forms of Capital and Social Structure in Cultural Fields: Examining Bourdieu's Social Topography JF - American Journal of Sociology N2 - This article tests one key assumption of Bourdieu's theory of culture fields: that actors are positioned in a "topography" of social relations according to their endowments of economic, social, and cultural capital. Blockmodeling procedures are used to analyze data on German writers and to indentify a social structure in which positions vary according to the types and amounts of capital accumulated. A strong split between elite and marginal writers dominates the social structure, and even the fundamental distinction between high and low culture is embedded in this bipartition. Significant differences in both cultural and social capital distinguish elite from nonelite positions; within this bipartition, pronounced differences in cultural capital separate high and low culture. Relative to cultural and social capital, economic capital plays a lesser role in understanding the social structure of cultural fields. KW - Economic capital KW - High culture KW - Writers KW - Social structures KW - Social capital KW - Literary criticism KW - Corporate culture KW - Cultural customs KW - Authors KW - Cultural groups Y1 - 1995 SN - 0002-9602 VL - 100 IS - 4 SP - 859 EP - 903 PB - University of Chicago Press CY - Chicago ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Anheier, Helmut K. A1 - Gerhards, Jürgen T1 - Literary Myths and Social Structure JF - Social Forces N2 - The lives of writers are subject to a variety of myths. This article shows that such cultural perceptions of writers bear a close affinity to the social structure of literature in modern societies. Two structural properties seem to encourage the proliferation of myths about writers: (1) the existence of a group of prominent writers who occupy unique social positions and form an amorphous elite and (2) the relation between the elite and the large group of lesser-known, peripheral writers. Elite amorphousness and high relational density among the elite and peripheral "groupness" and sparseness of literary relations among the periphery emerge as two major properties of the social structure. These counterintuitive properties are useful in understanding myth generation in literature; they allow for competing "views" of the social structure, views that seem to develop into contradictory myths of the modern writer. Data on several types of ties among writers were collected and analyzed with block model techniques. KW - Writers KW - Social structures KW - Poetry KW - Authors KW - Folk culture KW - High culture KW - Cultural customs KW - Social networking KW - Literary criticism KW - Prophets Y1 - 1991 U6 - https://doi.org/10.2307/2579476 VL - 69 IS - 3 SP - 811 EP - 830 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER -