Nick Prior

University of Edinburgh, Sociology, head of department

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I'm a sociologist of culture with an interest in post 1980s developments in popular music, digital and media culture, contemporary art, cities and social theory.

I'm co-editor of a collection called Digital Sociology (Palgrave) with Kate Orton-Johnson and I'm currently completing a monograph on digital technology and music, Popular Music, Technology and Society (Sage).

Other work in the pipeline includes an exploration of the role of accidents and errors in musical fields, an examination of the voice and mediations of the voice in contemporary music and a long-standing engagement with the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.

I'm peer reviewer for the ESRC and the Carnegie Trust, I'm on the editorial board of the journal Cultural Sociology, and academic consultant for the interactive media company TheStoryMechanics. I'm also an electronic musician, gamer and fan of contemporary film. I am supervising 11 PhD students with really interesting topics, ranging from portraiture and digital sampling to les bandes dessinées and rock music in Taiwan.
Phone: 0131 650 3991
Address: Sociology
School of Social and Political Science
Chrystal Macmillan Building
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh
EH8 9LD

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Papers by Nick Prior

Editorial preface

Afterword: Mediating the Digital

Digital Sociology, 2013

The art of space in the space of art: Edinburgh and its Gallery, 1780-1860

Review: Scottish Art in the 20th CenturyDuncan Macmillan, Scottish Art in the 20th Century, Edinburgh: Mainstream, £20, hb, 1994, ISBN 1 8SI58 630 X, 192pp

Scottish Affairs, 1995

Editorial Statement: Tracing, Making and Locating Cultural Sociology

by Lisa McCormick and Nick Prior

In this statement, the new editorial team for Cultural Sociology considers the position and legac... more In this statement, the new editorial team for Cultural Sociology considers the position and legacy of the journal, offers their interpretation of the current state of the field, and reflects on what it means for the journal to serve as an ‘organ of self-consciousness’ (Inglis et al., 2007: 7) in cultural sociology today. We also identify some of the hot topics and critical conversations we would like to encourage in the journal, as well as our hopes for strengthening and widening the journal’s visibility.

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Postmodern Restructurings

A Companion to Museum Studies, 2006

... Real history no longer ... Whilst recent surveys of museum audiences have often confirmed B... more

From Pac-Man to Pop Music: Interactive Audio in Games and New Media. Edited by Karen Collins. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 207 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6211-2

Popular Music, 2010

Although the absence of intended references to hits by Vera Lynn and Nat 'King' Cole re... more Although the absence of intended references to hits by Vera Lynn and Nat 'King' Cole renders Hoggart's 1957 commentary generalised, this highlights the per-vasiveness of the trends critiqued and, usefully, obliges us to think of examples, including later songs. This is not difficult. ...

Edinburgh, Romanticism and the National Gallery of Scotland

Urban History, 1995

A frequently made claim is that art institutions are an integral component of any art world confi... more

Vocaloids, Virtuality and Vocality: The Case of Hatsune Miku

Art and Social Theory Sociology of the Arts: Exploring Fine and Popular Forms The Sociology of Art: A Reader

The Sociological Review, 2004

If, as Bourdieu noted, 'sociology and art do not make good bedfellows ' (in Tanner, 2003: 96), th... more If, as Bourdieu noted, 'sociology and art do not make good bedfellows ' (in Tanner, 2003: 96), the productive tension between them is at least revealing of the contours of each, and illuminating of the dilemmas facing sociology as it grapples to 'sociologise' its object. The appearance of three books in the field of the sociology of the arts is welcome testament to a renewed vigour with which sociology is accounting for relatively autonomous spheres of culture. And not before time, for art is also achieving unprecedented coverage throughout the culture industries, its figures and forms fanning out beyond the hallowed realms of the museum, the canon and the library, into mainstream consumer culture. In fact, one can't help observe the ironies of a small division of Charles Saatchi's über-collection going up in flames at a warehouse in East London as the demise of some of Britain's most inflated art is ceded by and abandoned to the fires of cultural entrepreneurialism -a fitting but inevitable circularity Baudrillard would undoubtedly liken to the ultimate art of disappearance in postmodern times. Whatever the reason for the current interest, students no longer have to rely exclusively on classics such as Becker's Art Worlds, Zolberg's Constructing a Sociology of the Arts, and Wolff's The Social Production of Art, to guide them through the field.

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Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Consumption: A Critical Assessment of Recent Developments

Sociology Compass, 2013

Musiques populaires en régime numérique

Réseaux, 2012

The rise of the new amateurs

Handbook of Cultural Sociology, 2014

Having One's Tate and Eating It: Transformations of the Museum in a Hypermodern Era

Art and its Publics, 2003

In the new terrain of hyperactive consumer culture, the museum is caught in a bind. It can't... more In the new terrain of hyperactive consumer culture, the museum is caught in a bind. It can't turn itself into a successful ``distraction machine''1 ± providing diversion in a world already saturated with entertainment ± without, it seems, threatening the aura of its grand traditions and the ...

Beyond Napster: Popular Music and the Normal Internet

The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music, 2015

A different field of vision: gentlemen and players in Edinburgh, 1826-1851

The Sociological Review, 2001

... are codified expressions of a location in a social space, immediately raising the role that c... more

A question of perception: Bourdieu, art and the postmodern

The British Journal of Sociology, 2005

Bourdieu and Darbel's classic study of European art museum audiences, The Love of Art (1991), rem... more Bourdieu and Darbel's classic study of European art museum audiences, The Love of Art (1991), remains one of the most influential academic studies of the social indices of art perception. Its findings were central to Bourdieu's on-going study of culture-mediated power relations, as found in the book Distinction , as well as social surveys of the behaviour of museum audiences across the world. Much in Bourdieu's account of art perception, however, has begun to appear dated and in need of supplementation. This paper will be a critical but sympathetic re-reading of Bourdieu's sociology of art perception in the light of recent criticisms of his approach. Whilst fine art and its institutions continue to function as sources of social identification and differentiation, this paper argues that the relationship between perception and stratification is somewhat looser than connoted in Bourdieu's work. Beyond the shift to a less rigid taxonomy of social formations, the immense expansion of the visual arts complex has opened up possibilities for the dissemination of art knowledge beyond the cultivated bourgeois. The erosion of boundaries between the aesthetic and the economic, between art and popular culture, are the result of processes of commodification that have placed museums alongside shopping malls within the realms of consumption and entertainment. New audiences have emerged from this mix with less dichotomized -that is, either cultivated or popular -ways of seeing culture that suggest a revision of Bourdieu's overly integrated account of class and cognition. An alternative, 'postmodern', approach to art perception is entertained, where an aesthetics of distinction is replaced by a culture of distraction, but this abstracts culture from any structural grounding. Capturing the shift to an accelerated cultural present, instead, requires a warping of Bourdieu's categories to account for broader patterns of culture and economy and the accentuation of modern visual culture.

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“It’s A Social Thing Not A Nature Thing”: Popular Music Practices in Reykjavík, Iceland

Over the last three decades, Iceland's reputation has been increasingly tied to the prominence of... more Over the last three decades, Iceland's reputation has been increasingly tied to the prominence of its popular music. Associated with an effervescent independent scene, the global success of the singer Björk and the post-rock band Sigur Rós, as well as what is billed as the “hippest long weekend on the annual music-festival calendar”, the country has been positioned as one of the world’s most vibrant cultural hotspots. Why Iceland “punches above its weight” musically, is a matter of debate. But one explanation with traction is the idea that the country’s music is deeply rooted in and inspired by its nature and landscapes. Based on interviews, fieldwork visits and documentary sources, this paper takes a different tack. Rather than begin with an assumption of Iceland’s natural exceptionalism, it chooses to build a more grounded picture of the activities of musicians and associated workers. It takes its cue from work in cultural sociology that examines the texture of material practices in the everyday lives of musicians and cultural workers. With particular reference to Reykjavík, the paper aims to show how the city’s spatial configuration favours the development of dense creative networks and attendant forms of knowledge, conflict, diversity and collaboration. It also assesses the integrative nature of music education on the island, the formation of a small but influential punk scene and the global marketing of the country’s music through an agile cluster of cultural agencies and intermediaries. Getting a sense of the city’s routine musical practices, it will be argued, opens an aperture on the location of place-based musics within prevailing social and economic conditions. This is where scene dynamics and the operation of everyday networks meet systemic constraints such as the commercial positions taken by national and trans-national agents in a context where particular forms of creativity are capitalized.

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The Rise of the New Amateurs: Popular Music, Digital Technology and the Fate of Cultural Production

This article takes its cue from work on “digital democracy”, web 2.0 participatory cultures and t... more This article takes its cue from work on “digital democracy”, web 2.0 participatory cultures and the self-sufficient amateur producer. It argues that we can identify a proliferation of digital culture built upon an increasingly decentralised system of cultural production in spaces like YouTube, Myspace and Flickr. Though largely confined to middle-class techno-literates, the article points to the impact of micro-organisational cultural worlds on the record industry and suggests that punk’s “DIY aesthetic” has become a structural condition of cultural production. The figure of the “new amateur” is injected into this story as a novel technocultural type, equipped with high-quality cultural tools, whose practices are transforming boundaries between professional and amateur, expert and non-expert, authentic and inauthentic.

Keywords: amateur, digital, DIY, production, new media, web 2.0, music

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The Plural iPod: A Study of Technology in Action

Based on a study of iPod use amongst 155 undergraduate students, the paper argues that an emphasi... more Based on a study of iPod use amongst 155 undergraduate
students, the paper argues that an emphasis on the mediated constitution of what Bull calls "auditory bubbles" raises limited questions around the situated and varied practices of iPod users. The paper instead suggests that we need to develop more sophisticated understandings of how mobile digital devices are used and appropriated in context, not just by letting users tell their own stories but by listening carefully to how these stories point to anomalies, variations and discordances in their use and
non-use.

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Editorial preface