Funding bodies, the economics of publishing, and the affordances of Web 2.0 platforms have spurred learned societies, publishers, and scholars to experiment with new media venues for scholarly communication. Why, then, have we seen few widespread changes in how scholars disseminate research in most disciplines? Drawing on qualitative interview data from the Mellon-funded Future of Scholarly Communication Project (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011), we describe how scholars share their work-in-progress and the disciplinary values driving these practices. We then discuss credit, time, and personality as significant barriers to change across disciplines, and we explore these obstacles through an examination of two new paradigms for sharing: open peer review and data sharing. By situating larger discussions about the future of scholarly communication in the everyday lives of scholars, we argue that integration with disciplinary cultures will be key to the success of new media initiatives.

Through its embrace of the “cultural turn” and the “practice turn” in cultural sociology, recent work in the subfield of arts sociology has helped to advance our understanding of the role of culture in social life through its focus on arts-in-action. Empirically, this focus grew out of earlier work in the production and consumption of the arts, while, theoretically, it resonates with traditions within ethnomethodology, cognitive sociology, and the sociology of science and technology. The authors describe how new work in arts sociology unearths and develops our understanding of aesthetic consciousness, the tacit and often embodied bases of action, cognition, and engagement with cultural forms. This recent emphasis on materials and actions in turn permits critique of rule-based and more overtly cognitive models of agency structure. It also leads some of its proponents into areas that would not normally be viewed as topics for the field.

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In contemporary art, the curator plays an important role in the production of artistic meaning through exhibition-making. Although sociology has tended to see this work as the exercise of tacit or embodied knowledge, curatorial knowledge and plans may be elaborated and altered by the situated actions of exhibition installation. While curators know a successful installation "when they see it," this depends on the indexical particularities of artworks and environments which cannot be predicted in advance. In demonstrating the practical ways in which culture is mobilized in situations of object (inter) action, this paper emphasizes the "making" in artistic meaning-making.

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