Jennifer C. Lena’s research while affiliated with Columbia University and other places

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Publications (18)


The Living Legacy of W. McNeil Lowry: Vision and Voice: edited by Frank Kessel, Foreword by Darren Walker, New York, Peter Lang, 2020, 502 pp., $94.95, ISBN 978-1-4331-6965-6
  • Article

March 2021

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6 Reads

The Journal of Arts Management Law and Society

Jennifer C. Lena

The Process Model of Closure and Nonprofits: The Exit of Exit Art

November 2017

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40 Reads

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1 Citation

The Journal of Arts Management Law and Society

Experts think of arts nonprofits as fragile organizations, prone to closure. Despite these predictions, little research has been completed on the process of closure within these organizations. I leverage a comprehensive organizational database and seventeen in-depth interviews with staff and board members to understand the process of closing New York's Exit Art. I explore the value of Sutton's (1987) process model, and its application to nonprofits by Duckles et al. (2014), to analyze the case. This study offers novel insights into management practices that may benefit nonprofits in the future, and interest scholars who study management transitions and organizational closure.




Who is an artist? New data for an old question

April 2014

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420 Reads

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84 Citations

Poetics

Employment in the arts and creative industries is high and growing, yet scholars have not achieved consensus on who should be included in these professions. In this study, we explore the “professional artist” as the outcome of an identity process, rendering it the dependent rather than the independent variable. In their responses to the 2010 Strategic National Arts Alumni Project survey (N = 13,581)—to our knowledge, the largest survey ever undertaken of individuals who have pursued arts degrees in the United States—substantial numbers of respondents gave seemingly contradictory answers to questions asking about their artistic labor. These individuals indicated that they simultaneously had been and had never been professional artists, placing them in what we have termed the “dissonance group.” An examination of these responses reveals meaningful differences and patterns in the interpretation of this social category. We find significant correlation between membership in this group and various markers of cultural capital and social integration into artistic communities. A qualitative analysis of survey comments reveals unique forms of dissonance over artistic membership within teaching and design careers.


Fig. 1. Career distribution of artist singles.
Fig. 2. Percentage of charting rap songs by supra-genres, 1979-1999.
Fig. A1. Construction of a sampling lineage.
Billboard rap single (musical) sample statistics.
The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Innovation, Repetition, and Status in an Art Movement
  • Article
  • Full-text available

June 2013

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496 Reads

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51 Citations

Poetics

How does art influence the status of the artists that make it? Sociologists argue that the shared use of artistic conventions produces status arrays, but we have not subjected this claim to empirical investigation. Some common metrics of status are popularity with the public and esteem from peers or critics, but these measurements have not been connected with artistic conventions. We expect that convention-derived artistic status achieves independence from other status orders (e.g., that built from sales) only after the field establishes its autonomy, or becomes “artistically legitimate.” Using rap music as a case study, and a novel operationalization of artistic status (the innovation and repetition of artistic content), we explore the association between artistic status and public popularity before and after rap music acquires the attributes of an “art” genre. We find support for our expectations of status order decoupling and find suggestive evidence that organizational and aesthetic category-spanning pays dividends in artistic status. Our study provides an empirical demonstration of the micro-processes that produce the status orders that theorists have argued characterize art worlds.

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Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular MusicHow Communities Create Genres in Popular Music

February 2012

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5 Reads

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29 Citations

Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches? This book explores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music. Drawing on a vast array of examples from sixty musical styles—ranging from rap and bluegrass to death metal and South Texas polka, and including several created outside the United States—the book uncovers the shared grammar that allows us to understand the cultural language and evolution of popular music. The book discovers four dominant forms—avant-garde, scene-based, industry-based, and traditionalist—and two dominant trajectories that describe how American pop music genres develop. Outside the United States there exists a fifth form: the government-purposed genre, which the book examines in the music of China, Serbia, Nigeria, and Chile. Offering a rare analysis of how music communities operate, the book looks at the shared obstacles and opportunities creative people face and reveals the ways in which people collaborate around ideas, artworks, individuals, and organizations that support their work.


Banding together: How communities create genres in popular music

February 2012

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761 Reads

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184 Citations

Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches?Banding Togetherexplores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music. Drawing on a vast array of examples from sixty musical styles--ranging from rap and bluegrass to death metal and South Texas polka, and including several created outside the United States--Jennifer Lena uncovers the shared grammar that allows us to understand the cultural language and evolution of popular music. What are the common economic, organizational, ideological, and aesthetic traits among contemporary genres? Do genres follow patterns in their development? Lena discovers four dominant forms--Avant-garde, Scene-based, Industry-based, and Traditionalist--and two dominant trajectories that describe how American pop music genres develop. Outside the United States there exists a fifth form: the Government-purposed genre, which she examines in the music of China, Serbia, Nigeria, and Chile. Offering a rare analysis of how music communities operate, she looks at the shared obstacles and opportunities creative people face and reveals the ways in which people collaborate around ideas, artworks, individuals, and organizations that support their work.


Tradition and transformation at the Fan Fair festival

May 2011

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58 Reads

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10 Citations

Fairs and festivals provide a context for the reenactment of institutional arrangements and the negotiation of values within institutional and geographic fields. These arrangements include the spatial and temporal ordering of events, financial management, the provision of lodging, food and entertainment and safety and crowd control, among others. The values participants negotiate are plural and cultural and include material/technical, situational, appreciative and functional aspects of the event. The value orientations of participants rationalize, organize and motivate institutional arrangements, and, in turn, these arrangements reinforce the symbolic meanings that position participants in a relational system (Glynn, 2008: 1,118). At some festivals and fairs, new relational and symbolic arrangements emerge from the confluence of participants, and therefore have significance for the institutional fields in which they are located. These events can be viewed as tournament rituals, or ‘complex periodic events’ that ‘occur in special times and places’ and whose ‘forms and outcomes are always consequential for the more mundane realities of power and value in ordinary life’ (Appadurai, 1986: 21). According to Durkheim (1965), rituals express and reinforce the cognitive categories that unite communities; tournament rituals serve this purpose within organizational fields (Anand and Jones, 2008: 1,038; see also Chapter 13 by Anand in this volume). Tournament rituals can be found in a variety of contexts, including high art productions (Barbato and Mio, 2007; Evans, 2007; Tang, 2007), sports (Glynn, 2008) and industry events (Havens, 2003; Anand and Watson, 2004; Harrington and Bielby, 2005). Indeed, scholars increasingly address tournaments of value as ‘field-configuring events’ (FCEs) (Lampel and Meyer, 2008) since they often lead to changing conditions in organizational fields (Anand and Jones, 2008).


Politically Purposed Music Genres

April 2011

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64 Reads

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16 Citations

American Behavioral Scientist

Building on previous work documenting musical genre forms in the United States, this exploratory study reports the discovery of a new type, which the authors term the politically purposed genre. They find two major types: those sponsored by governments, which benefit from national distribution and legal protection, and an anti—status quo type supported by an opposition party or constituency that shares its critique of the existing sociopolitical and economic order. Four nation-cases have been examined: the People’s Republic of China, Chile, Serbia, and Nigeria. The authors examine each case in turn and close with a discussion of the limitations and possibilities of this discovery.


Citations (14)


... However, we are sceptical of Kuti's ownership of Afrobeat if it can be considered a musical genre. Lena (2012) cites Kuti's music as an example of a political genre, but this evolved after the sound of Afrobeat was developed by a community of musicians at the Afro-Spot Club from 1968 to 1972. We argue that Afrobeat's origins are closer to Lena's description of a scene-based genre. ...

Reference:

Reconstructing Afrobeat as a Scene-Based Genre
Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular MusicHow Communities Create Genres in Popular Music
  • Citing Book
  • February 2012

... Previous studies in nonprofit demise and closure have noted that qualitative methods such as case study are useful in assessing the fate of subject nonprofits (Fernandez, 2008, Lena, 2018Searing, 2020). To assess whether the cases that left the sample actually ended their activities or not, we further explored organizations and carried out two explorations on the suspected cases. ...

The Process Model of Closure and Nonprofits: The Exit of Exit Art
  • Citing Article
  • November 2017

The Journal of Arts Management Law and Society

... For example, in contrast to Glynn's (2008) study of the Atlanta Olympic games that pointed to their longitudinal effects in forming corporative elites in the hosting city, Thiel and Grabher's (2015) study of the London Olympics explored how learning took place during the event, especially in highly observed moments such as the opening ceremony. Focusing on what happens in field-level events, researchers found that they redirect participants' attention (Anand & Watson, 2004), facilitate interactions, negotiations, and expressions of conflict (Anand & Jones, 2008;Hardy & Maguire, 2010;Jolly & Raven, 2016;Lazega, Quintane, & Casenaz, 2017;McInerney, 2008;Zilber, 2007), and affirm membership (Lena, 2011). Field-level events, then, constitute certain understandings of the field. ...

Tradition and transformation at the Fan Fair festival
  • Citing Article
  • May 2011

... It is now acknowledged that New York or London are not the only case studies representative of the punk music culture. The study of the L.A. punk scene offers the opportunity to study the emergence and development of a DIY music scene before music scenes became instruments for cultural production (Lena, 2012) or as part of strategies of redevelopment initiatives (Seman, 2010) or became entities serving economic development objectives within music city policies. L.A. is first known to be a movie city before being a music city and punk rock is seldom associated to L.A. The emergence of the Hollywood punk scene happened in the pre-internet era from the late 1970s until the early 1980s (1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981). ...

Banding together: How communities create genres in popular music
  • Citing Article
  • February 2012

... Engaging in musicking, a form of social interaction, facilitated the development of innate musical talents in young individuals (Trevarthen et al., 2014), shaped further by cultural norms and community interactions. Regarding artistic identity, the study revealed that musicians overwhelmingly identified themselves as "artists," contrary to findings suggesting some felt excluded from the wider art world (Lena & Lindemann, 2014). Musicians perceived their involvement in music as inherently artistic, requiring creative aptitude and emotional expression in composition and performance (Gerry et al., 2012;Pitts, 2009). ...

Who is an artist? New data for an old question
  • Citing Article
  • April 2014

Poetics

... Songs whose lyrics were more differentiated from their genres were more popular, suggesting that songs whose content deviated from the norm were more likely to go viral (Berger & Packard, 2018). Likewise, a case study with rap music suggested that rap artists gain more status by first showing a repetition of practices that are understood as legitimate by their audience and then introducing novel artistic content that increases their popularity (Lena & Pachucki, 2013). Deviant form and content in art render an artwork more appealing and the artist more successful. ...

The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Innovation, Repetition, and Status in an Art Movement

Poetics

... Genres are not based on some objective characteristics and most authors distinguish music genres from styles. Lena and Peterson (2008) define music genres as 'systems of orientations, expectations, and conventions that bind together an industry, performers, critics, and fans in making what they identify as a distinctive sort of music'. In the digital age, streaming platforms also utilise genres but rely more on algorithms and available data rather than traditional industry conventions. ...

Classification as Culture: Types and Trajectories of Music Genres
  • Citing Article
  • October 2008

American Sociological Review

... We can, for instance, point to particular moments in history -such as the year 1955 for the advent of rock (Peterson, 1990) -as well as identify how different music genres were valued, how they were valued, and by whom they were valued (see Wolff, 2008 for an example of this in relation to art). In general, we find in the rich sociological work of Richard A. Peterson different analyses of the factors that explain cultural shifts: that is the case in his work with Roger M. Kern (1996) on omnivorous taste (see also Chapters 5 and 6), in his work with David G. Berger (1975) on the cycles of popular music production, and in the work he conducted with Jennifer C. Lena ( , 2011 on music genres. In looking back at aesthetic evaluations on 'popular music' since World War II, Frith (1991) notes that there have been three temporal moments: from a first perspective summarised by the phrase 'if it's popular it must be bad' (echoing Adorno's), to an approach stipulating that 'if it's popular it must be bad, unless it's popular with the right people' (as in subcultural perspectives), finally to a perspective highlighting that 'if it's popular it must be good' (as in some research with music audiences). ...

Politically Purposed Music Genres
  • Citing Article
  • April 2011

American Behavioral Scientist

... This would lead to low symbolic capital and hamper reaping economic benefits in the long run (Bourdieu 1993c). Artists do not deal directly with auction houses, or at least, not openly, with a few exceptions (Lena and Levin 2009;Velthuis 2011). Galleries present themselves as interested in art and in long-term artistic careers, and construct distance between themselves and "parasitic" auction houses with their commerce-oriented, short-term mentality (Velthuis 2005). ...

Valuing Art
  • Citing Article
  • May 2009

Contexts

... Traditionally, research on genre emergence in the creative industries looks at the formation of new genres from pre-existing ones (e.g., Becker, 1982;Ennis, 1992;Peterson, 1990;Peterson & Anand, 2004). Recent work highlights the role of cognitive boundaries in these processes (Lena, 2012;Lena & Peterson, 2008). However, the question of how a creative genre emerges within a commodity-based industry remains unaddressed. ...

Types and Trajectories of Music Genres
  • Citing Article
Jennifer C. Lena

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Richard A. Peterson

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