PUTTING CIRCUITS INTO FIELDS, OR HOW ITALIAN CANZONE GAINED THE STATUS OF ‘ART’ IN THE MUSIC MARKET

On the night of January 26th, 1967, the dead body of a singer-songwriter was found in a hotel room in Sanremo, a small sea town near Genoa. The cause of death was a gunshot to his head. Evidence that the singer-songwriter had committed suicide was made explicit in the note he left behind:

The note made explicit reference to the annual Festival della canzone italiana (Italian Song's Festival) established in 1951 and which was then taking place in the small Ligurian town. The singer-songwriter, Luigi Tenco, was participating in the festival for the first time, as a representative of his new record label, the American-based (and Vatican controlled), ‘RCA Italiana’. His song, a canzone, was his own composition, Ciao amore, ciao (‘Hello my love, hello’), and focused on the effects of urban emigration on the emotional and economic life of farmers. The location where the suicide took place was thus far from neutral. Since its inception, the Sanremo festival had indeed become a ‘media event’ (Dayan and Katz 1992), broadcasted first on radio and later on television, and was able to capture the attention of more than 20 million Italians in three consecutive nights. Committing suicide at the time of the festival was thus strategic, a way of translating a private gesture into a very public event. However, economic and political considerations meant that the festival went on despite the tragedy. It was in the following months and years, through the mobilization of culturally legitimated writers and artists, fans, amateurs and popular music critics that Tenco's death was to become part of Italy's national, collective memory. As we will see, the incident was to have profound consequences on the subsequent development, reorganization, and reframing of the popular music market in Italy.

Tenco's story is a particularly relevant example to illustrate the role of morality in processes of cultural production and art legitimation. Although it may not be obvious, morality – or moral values – influences the way artistic value is defined by key market players. Aesthetic and social distinctions alone do not explain fully the intricacies of artistic legitimation processes. As art historians and cultural critics well know (Shirer 2001), what makes art ‘art’ is not only beauty and social power but also deep moral concerns – a dimension too often neglected by sociologists of art but acknowledged by economic sociologists (e.g., Etzioni 1988; Zelizer 2010).

The thrust of this article is to show how such a morally charged event as a singer-songwriter's suicide may impact on the commercial organization of popular music. Radically changing the meaning of song writing, the event generated the conditions that elevated the canzone d'autore to the (sacred) status of art. Tenco's suicide elicited a process of valuation and boundary-setting whereby certain songs could be differentiated, and then distinguished, as instances of serious and valued art objects, a seriousness and worth which was previously attributed only to ‘high’ music works and musicians.¹ More specifically, I contend that a suicide like Tenco's, while sparking a harsh symbolic struggle about its meanings and significance, also produced the conditions for a politics of singularization of song as a cultural form: an instance of de-commodification (Kopytoff 1986), or at least of distancing from the world of commerce, through the import of the highly personal and emotionally charged system of meanings attributable to suicide as the most extreme, and extremely meaningful, human act (Douglas 1967). This translation took place with the help of a cultural device, that of the ‘author’, drawn from cinema and film studies (e.g., Allen and Lincoln 2004), and employed strategically by some actors within the world of popular music as a framing resource for a politics of field construction; the newly imagined field of the canzone d'autore.

Previous research has shown how the workings of aggressive and self-promoting popular music criticism and ‘prize industry’ practices have been responsible for the legitimation and even consecration of popular music, especially rock and jazz (Regev 1994, 2006; Lopes 2002; Watson and Anand 2006). My Italian case study will reveal how the singularization of song writing and the legitimation of songs as potential cultural objects of high aesthetic value can take place along a different track, i.e., by means of the invention and establishment of a specific, local category (which is still rare to find elsewhere except in Catalonia, where the Italian label has been imported in the last decade): this is canzone d'autore, or ‘author's song’ – a device enabling the classification of popular music according to values such as civility, morality, authenticity and, of course, authorship.²

But the impact of morality on markets requires the mobilization of individuals, resources and ideas. In this paper, I will show how this mobilization occurred in Italy, in the market of popular music, as a consequence of such a tragic human act as a suicide. In fact, Tenco's suicide created the conditions for the public sacrilization of both the singer-songwriter (as a form of cultural identity), and his major typical product, or creation: i.e., the authored song. The term sacrilization refers here to the investment not only of emotional but also of religious meaning – a process not infrequent in the history of art (as in the case of van Gogh, see Heinich 1991).

The article is divided into four parts. Firstly, it proposes a conceptual model to discuss the complex intertwining of artistic and commercial values in cultural fields: the model is built upon Bourdieu's structural framework for the field of cultural production, and the far less prevalent (at least in the sociology of arts: but see Velthuis 2005) idea of ‘circuit’ set forth by economic sociologist Viviana Zelizer. Tenco's suicide, alongside its cultural and organizational effects, is discussed in the following two sections to illustrate empirically the model's main tenets. A conclusion summarizes the article's main argument, contextualizing it within the literature on authorship and copyright as institutional devices for the art market, and the more general sociological literature on markets as social and cultural structures.³

In a now well-known study, Viviana Zelizer documented how the value of children changed its status in the USA between 1870 and 1930: from a commodity in the labor market it became a sacred object, emotionally charged. However, while ‘a separate non-commercial place, extra-commercium’ (Zelizer 1985: 11) was reserved for children, this did not prevent the formation of a market for children's life insurance: even if economically useless, and emotionally priceless, children's lives were imbued with economic value. I suggest that Zelizer's model could be deployed in the world of songs, and more generally, of mass mediated cultural products. Thus the children studied by Zelizer are just one case in an overarching dialectical mechanism of commodization vs. sacralization, which can be found in many contexts, including popular music.

The suicide of Italian singer-songwriter Luigi Tenco in 1967 offers a window for the sociological analysis of this process of sacrilization in the field of popular music, shedding light also on the mechanisms that organize the recording market as a cultural system. My point is that sacrilization, far from negating or reducing the economic value of songs, contributes to their legitimation and reproduction: it offers a powerful symbolic resource that hides the commodity aspect of songs, something the recording industry needs for its survival (see Marshall 2005).

I conceive Zelizer's circuits of commerce, qua webs of ‘conversation, interchange, intercourse’ (ibid: 124), as an integral part of what Bourdieu has called fields of cultural production, distinguishing within them a subfield of restricted and one of large-scale production (Bourdieu 1972, 1992). It is through such circuits that the two only apparently secluded subfields communicate, and that the values produced within one subfield circulate to the other. The notion of ‘circuit’ introduces a dynamic factor in a conceptual system which looks rather static and weak in accounting for change – a critique addressed to Bourdieu's social theory even by his more sympathetic readers (e.g., Gartman 2007). Indeed, it is in and through circuits that people interact with cultural products, use them, discuss their values, produce new values and meanings for them. In the same manner, cultural goods circulate among individuals who occupy different field positions, and their value changes depending on the social uses they are put to, and the social meanings they are imbued with. Far from being inscribed in the object, artistic value is thus a relational and emergent phenomenon, which identifies moments in the cultural biography of an object (Kopytoff 1986), be it a painting, a novel, a song, or even a whole song production unified by its reference to a unique and valued authorship. Circuits are the missing link between the two Bourdieusean ideal-typical instances of cultural production: the restricted i.e., artistic production (or production mainly for other producers), and the large i.e. (mass) market oriented production.

However, Bourdieu is not unaware of this circulation (or maybe ‘circuitation’) of values and products through different regions of social fields. In his framework, this is what specialized agents named ‘cultural intermediaries’ are claimed to do (Bourdieu 1979; see also Negus 2002). But his focus is on their active role in the social control of market demands – or consumption – such that the latter could be easily adjusted to production. Cultural intermediaries are the main agents working to guarantee some degree of homology between the field of the (consuming) social classes and that of production. Still, Bourdieu (1979, 1992) also recognizes the existence of ‘middlebrow’ forms of cultural production, as photography and jazz, as well as of changes in the aesthetic status of cultural objects, which make a case for the circulation of values between different regions of the cultural field. However, the dynamics through which ideas, styles and discourses migrate from the ‘high’ to the ‘low’ pole (and vice versa), remain unexplored in his framework. The idea of circuit offers a way, I suggest, to enter this black box, by locating and specifying its mechanism in concrete systems of practices, relations, and situations. In other words, it offers a way of addressing not some supposed homology, but the dynamic production of values through the active and situated circulation of products between different subfields or regions of the cultural field (analytically and not concretely distinguished,⁴ that is, always located, and locatable, in various regions of the entire field, whose boundaries have to be empirically discovered).⁵ A circulation captured analytically by an explicit social mechanism in the form of a ‘bounded set of relations among social sites’ (Zelizer 2004: 125): this is what the idea of the circuit might possibly add to the conceptual model of the cultural field. In the following two sections I will briefly show how this mechanism works drawing upon the case of Luigi Tenco's suicide and post-mortem life as an empirical example.

Born to a farming family, Luigi Tenco was one of the first Italian singers, in the early 1960s, to be described as a singer–songwriter, that is – with a neologism deemed to successfully enter national culture – cantautori or ‘singing authors’ (see Santoro 2002). The phenomenon of the cantautore was indeed an integral part of the Italian recording industry of those years, of its ‘ongoing search for new voices … for original material’ (Prevignano-Rapetti 1962: 34), but it was also helping transform the world of the Italian canzone from within, following examples of the French chanson and the nascent movement of the American protest song (see Santoro 2010). In this developing context, Tenco's songs stood out almost immediately, and were noticed by the most culturally sophisticated critics for the innovation of his writing. Tenco used a colloquial, crisp, and occasionally harsh language, derived from the Ligurian and Piedmontese poets and authors he closely read (especially Nobel Prize Eugenio Montale and Cesare Pavese). In musical terms, his models ranged from the French chanson to American rock but also, and increasingly over the years, Italian folk music. It was precisely the search for a link between commercial pop music and the Italian musica popolare – which was enjoying a revival in those years, privileging political rather than aesthetic elements – that would become the keystone of his song-writing style. According to one of Tenco's biographers, he was attempting an operation ‘in the style of Gramsci, an expansion of consensus’ (Fegatelli 1982: 82). Indeed, his vision of contemporary culture and the role of songs within that culture, were bound up with an explicit program of cultural transformation that willingly accepted the strategic exploitation of the media, rather than scorning and struggling against it. As Tenco himself put it during a public debate on protest music held in November 1966:

The Sanremo festival was clearly one of those instruments, faithful to the commercial logics of the industrial society Italy was eager to become. From its very first year, Sanremo's Festival della Canzone italiana took the peculiar form of a competition among songs as well as singers, broadcasted live on the radio and, from 1955, on television. Competitors were enrolled by music publishers and recording companies, and winnowed down through an intricate system of panels, juries, and ballots, a system that was repeatedly modified over the years in response to pressure and protests from both the music industry and the press. Indeed, the festival was a ‘media facilitator’ of the music industry (Peterson 1973).⁶

Tenco's suicide was explicitly framed by its author as an act of protest against the festival and the music industry behind it, and it had immediate, strong emotional impact. However, the machinery of Sanremo – a giant promotional agency generating millions of dollars in business – was not stopped even by such an extreme gesture. After all, that suicide was traumatic but also deviant and deplorable in moral terms (especially because of the hegemony of Catholic morality), and entirely out of keeping with a piece of ‘light’ entertainment, the staging of an escapist spectacle such as a singers and songs competition. The suicide was indeed suggesting exactly the opposite; that a song contest could be more than an escapist show or the site of mere entertainment, because a song was something that could be imbued with deep meanings. Not so much as an individual work but as a cultural genre; a song was something worth sacrificing even a human life because of the social, moral and human meanings it embedded and circulated. This was the lesson that an influential commentator such as the Nobel poet Salvatore Quasimodo drew from the event:

It is difficult to say what effect such culturally authoritative statements might have had upon the Italian public opinion at the time. Still, it is unquestionable that they would be repeatedly utilized by those who, in the following years, worked to build Tenco's memory and reputation (even if a “difficult” one: see Fine 2001), ultimately making him a cultural icon, almost a sacred symbol, through which to consecrate a whole new field of cultural production that could hearken back genealogically to his mission if not to his art. Indeed, what happened after the festival was something Tenco himself would have been unlikely to foresee.⁷

The process of Tenco's sacrilization began the day after his death, with the publication in the daily press of a number of photographs of children lighting candles and building little shrines in memory of the singer. The suicide was, more generally, the occasion for a series of ritual acts – including that modern ritual embodied in the act of purchasing commodities (Miller 1998), in this case records – whose symbolic power elevated Tenco onto a new and higher cultural level than the one he had occupied while alive. It was, however, primarily through an intense correspondence, letters written to newspapers and magazines by fans or from those who were simply upset over his suicide, that over the course of a few weeks a movement started with substantial symbolic effects.

It is in this context that we can best understand the significance of the reputation politics practiced by that very odd cultural organization that still nowadays is the Club Tenco. Founded in Venice immediately after the singer's/songwriter's suicide, a first Club Tenco coalesced as a non-profit informal association. It was little more than a network of young people scattered throughout Italy and joined together by their love for the cantautore (De Angelis 1982: 168). Its difference from an ordinary fan club was made clear in the Club's first public outcome, a small book containing about 80 poems written and dedicated to Tenco by young people from all over Italy (see Club Tenco 1968). However, the ‘beatification’ of Luigi Tenco would not have been possible without a more general reorganization of the field of popular music, a transformation the first Club Tenco – with its very limited economic and cultural resources – would not have been able to produce. A second Club Tenco was established in 1972 in San Remo at the initiative of a flower merchant, Amilcare Rambaldi, with a passion for (mainly jazz) music. It was Rambaldi who, in the years immediately following the war, as a young member of the local Socialist party, had first come up with the idea of a song festival, though he had been unable to bring it to fruition (see Santoro 2006). Around Rambaldi, a whole circle of fans, musicians and critics coalesced in the early 1970s, which organized themselves as the Club Tenco. The organization's new charter laid out its cultural mission: ‘to bring together all those who recognize and accept Luigi Tenco's message and intend to use the means at their disposal to increase appreciation of the canzone d'autore, in an attempt to gain artistic dignity and poetic realism for popular music’ (quoted from Mollica and Sacchi 1982).⁸

The process was thus two-fold: one of creation of an institutional basis (the Club Tenco itself), and one of reframing the whole realm of Italian popular music (see DiMaggio 1987). This reframing took place through the elaboration of a new aesthetic category that identified and separated itself from more commercial songs, deemed easy to listen and thus inauthentic. The category canzone d'autore was borrowed from the field of cinema by a young musical critic deeply shocked by Tenco's violent death, Enrico De Angelis. Even if not consciously elaborated as such, (indeed, it started as a title for a newspaper column), it positioned itself as a crucial tool in the classification games characteristic of the music field (Santoro 2010: 155–58; see De Angelis 2009). The new label offered both an instrument for drawing boundaries and a focus of attention for the intellectual and artistic movement emerging around the new Club. What Tenco was trying to do, the Club claimed, was to develop a new genre of songs, and it was this new genre that the Club would have worked to legitimate, diffuse and impose as a standard – an evaluative benchmark – to the whole field of song-making. In other words, what we are describing here is authorship as a singularization device, symbolically magnified in the same label canzone d'autore, and Club Tenco as a singularizing institution in the field of popular music.

The organization of ‘Rassegna della canzone d'autore’ (the name ‘festival’ was dropped by the Club as a mark of distinction from the more famous and commercially minded Sanremo festival), which begun in 1974 and has been held every year since, and the establishment of ‘Prizes’, the so-called Targhe (i.e., Plates) bearing Tenco's name, turned into an influential force of cultural consecration in the field of canzone.⁹ The set of panelists/experts chosen to allocate the Prizes were all musicians, poets, and specialized journalists (De Luigi 1980: 54). At the same time, by consecrating, in the name of Tenco, artists with an established reputation, and by establishing a relationship of ‘warm, fraternal friendship’ with them, as Rambaldi himself phrased it (see Mollica and Sacchi 1982: 11), Club Tenco contributed not only to the preservation of Tenco's memory but also to the production of its own institutional legitimacy, what Bourdieu (1988: 259) describes as ‘consecration through contagion’.

Equally strategic for the success of this politics of cultural consecration, apart from the Rassegna (the festival) and the Premi (the awards), was the organization, from 1975, of conferences and publications about canzone d'autore, with the presence and participation not only of cantautori, but also of recording executives, journalists, music critics, illustrators, and scholars. The crucial importance of the intellectual component in the overall mix for the creation and legitimization of cultural fields cannot be underestimated because it is in the context of discourses – that is, through words and texts – that standards of quality and judgments of value are created, and cultural products are legitimized (Becker 1982; Baumann 2001). From this point of view, the Club Tenco served from the beginning of the 1970s as a crucial place for a politics of ‘intellectualization’ of the world of canzone, offering a unified and recognizable social and institutional context to a plurality of discursive agencies, which would have been otherwise dispersed.

Sociologically, the very social structure Club Tenco has generated is to be emphasized. The relevance of social, ‘communitarian’, and personal relations within fields of artistic creation is widely acknowledged in the sociological literature. Friendships, brotherhoods and different forms of fellowship represent a typical element of cultural life, especially if innovation-oriented (e.g., Farrell 2001). Artists’ creativity can greatly benefit not only from the feeling of belonging, which comes from sharing the same spaces and relations, but also from the emotional effervescence fostered by repeated, ritualized and symbolically charged encounters, which can provide the fundamental emotional and motivational resources to keep up the artists’ constant – and often problematic, in terms of status and economic means – commitment to search for new ideas. Creativity cannot be explained as a form of individual talent alone, as sociologists well know; networks of relationships in which individual talent is expressed, understood and valorized play a significant role in the establishment and reproduction of creativity (e.g., Becker 1982; Toynbee 2000; Farrell 2001). From the beginning, the Rassegna of canzone d'autore – and, by extension, Club Tenco – has been characterized by a strong vocation for social life and friendly relationships,¹⁰ communication and sociability, and more or less ritualized interaction, including the sharing of food and, above all, wine.¹¹ Post-show dinners have in fact represented one of the most important moments in the social life of the Club. These gatherings offer not so much the pleasure of eating and sharing food, as the opportunity for musicians to play together outside the confines of official competitions. Casual, but music-oriented, sociability makes possible new collaborations, offering younger artists the chance to be known and appreciated by older and already established artists, as well as by music producers and managers. Social interactions, the exchange of ideas and emotions, the opportunity to meet old friends and develop new acquaintances represent the main reasons why many artists go to the Tenco Club year after year. They are indeed friends who do not ask for any money and continue to show loyalty towards the Club which has contributed to transform the Rassegna in a true institution of the Italian song world.

The legitimating effect of sacrilization on the field of popular music is clear: assigning the values of sacredness to songs and of a deeply human activity to the practice of song writing lent cultural legitimacy to a sphere of cultural production strongly intertwined with profit-making, commercialism and mass production, all marks of commodification which are considered to be at odds with the presumed deep values of art. Of course, the tension between art and commodity is not in re, but it is part of a larger cultural structure (or ideology) whose roots go back to the ‘Romantic ethics’, or the notion of the author as a unique, special creator of original and authentic cultural items (Toynbee 2000; Marshall 2005). In this sense, Club Tenco has exploited a trope well rooted in European culture since at least the end of the eighteenth century and strongly identified with Romanticism. It has linked such cultural trope to a specifically Italian, i.e., local, event such as Tenco's suicide and – most importantly – to a kind of cultural production, that of songs, fairly distant, at the time, from such seriously elaborated matters. What the Italian case adds to a well known mechanism in the field of popular music studies, i.e., the salience of ‘a certain ideology of authorship’ as a device for reconciling commercial and artistic success (Toynbee 2000: 29), is the insertion of this mechanism into a whole institutional structure explicitly grounded on the idea of the ‘author’ as the embodiment of deep human values. Indeed, I would suggest that in no other country has the sacrilization of songs or popular music operated to such a great extent as in Italy after Tenco's suicide.¹²

Similarly to what happened with children and insurance in the USA (Zelizer 1985), the sacrilization of songs works also to produce, and possibly increase, their economic value in the popular music market. In Italy, this process has been possible through the constitution of a special niche inside the market, where canzone d'autore has found room and a whole critical discourse endorsing its value. I have underlined the implications for creativity of such a relational space. But this is only half of the story. This relationality is what makes the Club a relevant institution not only in the world of music-making, but also in the song market – a market economic sociologists may suggest to read less as a mechanism for making profits or generate prices and more as a network of both social relations and cultural meanings (White 2003). It is through relational, indeed ritual spaces such as this that a production market for songs develops, making it possible the mutual screening and reciprocal knowledge which organize any single market as a clique in White's sense. There is a market of ideas and a market for recorded sounds in the field of popular music. The role of Club Tenco extends to the latter in so far as new acts can find recording contracts in and through the Club, and already established acts receive prizes, which could increase – but even qualify – the demand for their product and therefore their market value. Let me develop this point.

The relationship between Club Tenco and the world of the (music) market, and more generally, of commerce and money, is a complicated one. A distinctive feature of the Rassegna – that distinguishes it from other similar enterprises – is the gratuitousness of the work carried out by both artists and individuals working within the organization. None gets paid to work, sing and play during the Rassegna: this is a crucial criterion not only of selection but also of identification – something which distinguishes the Rassegna from the more renowned Festival of Sanremo. But Club Tenco is not outside the market sphere: it contributes to the cultural biography of songs in so far as they also increase their economic value. Being a recipient of a Tenco plate offers clear benefits, such as an increased promotion and popularity within the recording market. But the impact of Club Tenco on the music market operates through other mechanisms.

I contend that Club Tenco exists through, or better ‘as’, what Zelizer (2004: 125) named ‘circuits of commerce’, i.e., those ‘dynamic, meaningful, incessantly negotiated interactions among the sites’, being them individuals, organizations or other social entities, which also ‘include distinctive media … and an array of organized, differentiated transfers (for example, gifts or compensation) between sites’. As a space of conversation and intercourse among singer-songwriters, critics, producers and even managers of recording firms, Club Tenco has activated a Zelizerian circuit in the Italian field of song production, providing resources for the valorization of some songs and authors, selected amongst the entire output of the recording industry. In these circuits, prizes act as distinctive media of exchange, symbolic tokens which function at the same time as objects of discourse, signifiers of social ties, and measures of worth. Even listeners have a place in this circuit. They are constantly interpellated as music lovers (Hennion 2001), conceived as amateurs rather than fans, as the recipients and users not only of songs but also of discourses about songs and their value.

As an institution involved in promoting a (Romantic) concept of authorship as the first requirement for the identification of (high) quality in song production, and in the categorization of canzone d'autore as a special genre marked by (high) quality and moral worth,¹³ Club Tenco worked like an interface inside the field of song production. Far from reducing the economic value of songs and the size of the popular music market, the invention of canzone d'autore, as both a classificatory device and a category of artistic judgment, contributed to the structuring of the songs’ market as a whole, in so far as certain songs and their creators/performers came to be perceived as distant from the negative cultural qualifications of ‘commercial music’ while retaining commercial appeal, opening new spaces of possibilities in song-writing, and making certain songs appealing and potentially acceptable as commodities to highly critical consumers. Far from being marginalized in a restricted market, where only other artists and experts could appreciate them, the songs and the authors prized by Club Tenco often gained wide, popular success, which translated also in large number of sales in the recording and live concert markets. This is a bidirectional process: in some instances, Club Tenco added artistic value to commercial success, and in others, commercial success followed the aesthetic valorization autonomously produced by the Club. If there is no necessary conflict between artistic and commercial value, the two subfields so carefully distinguished by Bourdieu are not so clearly separated from each other. Rather, a circulation of meanings and values occurs in between the two camps, albeit not freely. Circuits of commerce provide one mechanism – if not the mechanism – for governing this circulation.

Rather than being an antithesis or remaining in tension to processes of commercialization, consecration is part of a circuit through which commodities are imbued with value. In the same manner that singularization is not the opposite of commodification but just a phase in the social life of commodities (Kopytoff 1986), so could sacrilization be a phase in the social life of cultural commodities. With respect to our case study, this means that the commodification of songs, i.e., their market value, benefits from the workings of institutional spaces and places like Club Tenco, which add their own form of value to songs. At the same time, the establishment of these circuits provides a two-fold dynamic. On the one hand, it fosters a virtuous mechanism, helping infuse the recording industry with human and artistic values, thus guaranteeing a niche for the creation, recording and distribution of less standardized songs; on the other hand, it works as a deceptive mechanism distancing consumers from the objective connections between records (and recorded songs) and commodities. As Adorno (1941) admonished (and this is something we should save of his legacy in this field),¹⁴ the latter remains a fundamental aim the recording industry has to pursue for its own survival as market actor. A politics of authorship-building grounded on the memory of a human sacrifice and on a mission of moral repair could achieve similar effects to those of copyright (Marshall 2005), working at the margins of the market and interfacing it with universes of value of a rather different genealogy.

The author would like to thank Jim English, Marta Herrero, Motti Regev, Roberta Sassatelli, and especially Viviana Zelizer for their precious comments to a previous version, and Paolo Magaudda and Marco Solaroli for their generous editorial help.

Marco Santoro is associate professor of Sociology at the University of Bologna. He works on cultural production and consumption, music, professions, mafia, and the history of sociology. He is a co-founder and co-editor of ‘Sociologica. Italian Journal of Sociology online’.