Henrik Fürst

• Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology
• Professor (Associate) at Stockholm University

Included in the definition of being an aspiring person is the risk of failure. Aspiring fiction writers are no exception. This article shows that the role of aspiring fiction writer involves managing three issues: the hope of being published, rejection by a publisher, and the perception of the rejection as a failure. Drawing on 47 interviews with f...

Among artists who have made their debut, a minority will become credited a second time in their career. This article investigates why some fiction authors continue publishing books while others do not. The study tracks all 1479 novelists, who published their first book between 2001 and 2010 in Sweden, including their literary activities and the lit...

Arrivals have an unexplored significance as a phenomenon in sociology. This article studies depictions of arrivals to art education courses at Swedish folk high schools in fiction. These arrivals are liminal transitions between two states, warranting personal change, either being the solution to a previous problem or creating a problem (to be solve...

This book shows the continuing importance of art education. Art education attracts students who see multiple meanings and justifications for the worth of that education. Their engagement in art education is not limited to the uncertain prospects for jobs or routes into employment in the arts. Fürst and Nylander approach art education through a rich...

Most artists who venture into an artistic career discontinue after their debut work. This article contributes to the understanding of early artistic career discontinuation and continuation by drawing on 53 mainly longitudinal interviews with early-career Swedish novelists. The article develops interactionist theories of careers and social worlds, a...

Drawing on convention theory and sociology of critique, this article examines how teachers at a Swedish folk high school coordinate students’ activities through tests. Through ethnographic descriptions of exercises, assignments, presentations, and exhibitions that test students’ engagement, it is shown how the teachers seek to depart from the stand...

This article proposes a reassessment of the concept of talent and offers tools for a conceptual and methodological shift in the study of talent identification in sports. Drawing on American pragmatism, specifically the pragmatic maxim, the article aims to clarify the concept of talent in talent identification that makes an athlete open for selectio...

Artists both desire and dread reviews of their work by media critics. This article draws upon 66 interviews with Swedish novelists in order to examine their experiences of being publicly reviewed. A 'successful' reception creates resonant experiences that can be examined on two levels. On the level of interpersonal responsiveness, the authors' long...

In this concluding chapter, we summarise the main findings of the empirically oriented chapters that precede it and discuss the implications for our argument about understanding the value of art education more broadly. Although art education often has been narrowed down to a means-end instrument in public policies, on-the-ground actors hold a much...

This chapter covers how students account for their engagement in art education. While students sometimes engage in strategic action, following an individual plan for their education, we demonstrate that a wide plurality of engagements is characteristic for art education. In particular, engagements at the folk high school come in the form of individ...

Art education at the folk high school provides an infrastructure for employing artists as teachers and for teachers to practice art. This chapter adopts a mixed-method approach to show how the teacher identity in the arts is bound up with rivalling orders of worth. The teachers need to find ways to navigate potential conflicts between them. Broadly...

In this chapter, we move from the engagements formulated by students to looking at how teachers qualify and justify the selection of new students for art programmes. In particular, we investigate how the folk high school teachers, in their role as gatekeepers, determine applicants as appropriate and worthy for their programmes, that is, the kind of...

This chapter focuses on the institutional characteristics of folk high schools and the lived experience of being at the folk high school as expressed by its students in arts programmes. The students’ experiences differ depending on whether they live on campus or commute to the premises. The folk high schools connect to the rest of society through s...

In this introductory chapter, we want to highlight that there are attractions to art education that go well beyond the narrow economic outcomes of the labour market integration, let alone rosy dreams of achieving winner-take-all fortune and fame. We do so by focusing on Swedish folk high schools as a case that allows us to understand the stakes of...

Who are the students that partake in art education at the folk high school? This chapter provides an empirical foundation to understand the formation of engagements in art education provided by the Swedish folk high schools. From the vantage point of exteriority and based on statistical variables related to social origin, gender, and age, we provid...

In this chapter, we investigate how the students’ engagements are shaped in the concrete classroom practices by the relationships forged between the students and teachers. We use material from fieldwork case studies within visual arts and creative writing. This ethnographic data contains exercises, assignments, presentations, and exhibitions that a...

Dangerous Fun is a very dramatic book. The book is filled with epic stories of near-death experiences while surfing the largest waves of Hawaii. Ugo Corte has done impressive fieldwork, including interviews, trying out big wave surfing himself, and hanging out with big wave surfers on the Hawaiian Islands, to capture the ‘memory of a community’ (p....

The creative economy is together with other economic domains, such as financial economy, natural resource economy, or labor economy, an obvious case of interest to economic sociologists, and a field to which economic sociologists have made contributions. It has grown to become an important part of the economy. The academic field covering the creati...

While many public performances of culture were shut down during much of the pandemic, the homes of many artists became prominent places for making culture. In particular, the pandemic created a rift in the temporal and spatial organization of work and leisure, affecting time management. This article turns to the creative lives of 32 novelists in Sw...

Our paper begins in the early days of the 2000s, a time when techno-futurist imaginaries sprung up around two emerging digital book formats: the e-book and the digitalized audiobook. However, while many actors celebrated the opportunities they saw in these new formats, many worried over what the consequences a digital future would have for the trad...

Phillipa Chong’s Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times details the process of book reviewing from start to finish through interviews with reviewers of fiction books at major newspapers in the United States. The book contributes to the sociological understanding of reviewers’ responses to uncertainties when making evaluations...

While becoming an author is a dream shared by many in Sweden, relatively few people can make it their full-time job. With such bleak prospects, why do people still dream of becoming authors? Drawing on insights from the sociology of creative work, this article explores and analyses potential answers to this question. These answers include (1) the n...

How is art education valued in society? In Swedish public discourse the value of educational trajectories is often equated with their usefulness for employability. With competitive winner-takes-all labour markets for artists, art education is largely perceived as a worthless credential and form of education. But what kinds of worth does art educati...

There are more aspiring artists than available positions for artists in artistic labor markets. For fiction writers, the publication of a first book often means getting the first big break in their literary career and entering the literary world as a published author. However, few writers succeed in their aspiration to become published. This articl...

A do-it-yourself culture and amateur production are significant features of creative industries. Self-publishing is an eloquent expression of these features. Self-publishers invest in and make decisions to publish their creative goods without the involvement of an established and external production company or publishing house. In creative industri...

Denna bok handlar om debutanters karriärvägar fram till deras skönlitterära debut och uppmärksamhet efteråt. Främst analyseras de urvalsinstanser som är avgörande för att bedöma framgången för debutanter, debutböcker och förlag. Dessa instansers arbete resulterar i pyramider av prestige med få debutanter, debutböcker och förlag i toppen. Boken byg...

This chapter presents an analysis of a video clip of a lethal drone strike on YouTube. Two cultural frames are identified—seeing the killing either as legitimate or illegitimate. The first audience framing views the uploader’s framing as legitimate by constructing (1) a moral response where death through drone strike is justified and the killed liv...

Some of the most prominent educational institutions within art and culture in Sweden are the folk high schools. Of the 154 folk high schools across the country, most offer aesthetic programs at the post-compulsory educational level, specializing in music, fine art, handicrafts, performing arts or creative writing. The number of students engaged in...

Gatekeeping appears central to creative industries. To better understand gatekeeping, this article introduces a distinction between discovering and justifying the selection of cultural goods. Most research deals with legitimation and justifications for selecting cultural goods. This article draws on American pragmatism to elucidate gatekeepers' dis...

På 1970-talet gavs den första längre skrivarkursen på folkhögskola. Flera skrivarkurser kom att etableras under 1980-, 1990- och 2000-talet. För deltagare, som aspirerade på att bli författare, har dessa skrivarkurser kopplats samman med att göra skönlitterär debut. Mitt bidrag visar hur denna koppling faktiskt sett ut genom en analys av litterära...

Aspiring artists are uncertain about how their work’s quality will be evaluated by gatekeepers on artistic markets. Learning to evaluate the quality of one’s work and its prospects on the artistic market is central to artistic careers, yet often overlooked in research. An analysis of 47 interviews with aspiring writers in Sweden shows that they use...

In many markets for cultural goods, gatekeepers select the cultural goods, relatively few cultural goods are selected, and the criteria for selection are unclear to both artists and gatekeepers. Not knowing whether cultural goods are of the 'right' quality to be selected, artists and gatekeepers become preoccupied with handling quality uncertainty....

I Sociologi genom litteratur förstås inte analysen av skönlitteratur i huvudsak som en slutpunkt. Skönlitteraturen ska inte förklaras, den ska användas för möjliga framtida sociologiska studier. Därför kan denna bok te sig främmande för en litteraturvetenskap som intresserar sig för skönlitteraturens tillkomst, påverkan och inomlitterära världar. A...

There is quite some consensus that today’s international security environment has substantially changed following the end of the Cold War in 1989/90 and that this requires the transformation of modern armed forces from conventional ones to something else. This ‘something else’ may indeed be an expeditionary military. The military metamorphosis that...