Discourse and Hierarchy in the Artworld

Analysing reputational hierarchies and discourse practices in European fields of art and music, this book develops a new approach to discourse analysis that draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, enhancing the capacity of discourse analysis to attend to social structures. Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Norman Fairclough, Michel Foucault and Paul Ricoeur, 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 and qualitative text and corpus linguistic analysis of artists’ and cultural organisations’ online discourse, this book develops a novel theory of the relationship between field, capital and habitus on the one hand, and discourse, genres and utterances 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 within the Western contemporary artworld. Outlining key field theory and discourse analysis concepts, Discourse and Hierarchy in the Artworld addresses a noted research gap between cultural sociology and discourse analysis, and enhances the capacity of discourse analysis to attend to social structures.