Our respondents' experiences draw attention to the need to refine the field's theoretical and practical understandings of what it means to be marginal and its consequences for older drug users and people in general. The results also point to what happens when society changes but some of its members do not.
Current research and theory on rave culture has articulated a link between solidarity and drug use, although the precise nature of this relationship remains unclear. Work conducted in the field of cultural studies contends that while rave participants engage in drug use, it is by no means the exclusive source of solidarity. However, work in the fields of public health and medical science portrays rave culture as a site of extensive drug consumption and personal risk, where solidarity is dismissed or dubiously acknowledged as chemically induced. Prior research has not sought to reconcile this tension, or to consider how the relationship between drug use and solidarity may have changed over time. Using data from a multimethod ethnography of the rave scene in Philadelphia, we found the drug use–solidarity relationship substantially more complicated than prior scholarship has articulated. Our discoveries, consequently, provide clarification of this relationship as well as advance the literatures on solidarity, collective identity, youth culture, and music scenes.
The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the gendered social and economic organization of the illicit drug world by articulating several dimensions of women’s power. The main thesis is that women are not only powerful actors in the drug world, but that their work is central to the drug economy. Four core activities (e.g. providing housing and sustenance needs, purchasing drugs, subsidizing male dependency and participating in drug sales) that women routinely perform are both fundamental to drug world organization and earn them important forms of capital that may facilitate future, conventional pursuits. Pursuing this objective may improve our knowledge about the relationship between illegal market organization, gender, power and capital. It may also assist crime control and social welfare policies.
The presence of aesthetically based cultural goods and their ever‐increasing influence in modern society may pose a new conceptual opportunity to sociology. Specifically, how can the discipline forge an understanding of how value associated with beauty returns forms of individual wealth? A new term, i.e. aesthetic capital, might be an answer. Such a concept, we maintain, covers the privileges and wealth people receive from aesthetic traits, such as their face, hair, body, clothes, grooming habits and other markers of beauty. The purpose of our paper is to review the kinds of perks, and penalties, people receive from being deemed beautiful. Our review shows that visually appealing traits greatly impact our lives, in matters of modest importance (friend selection) to great importance (e.g. getting a job and career mobility). Thus, the promise of an aesthetic capital concept lies in enabling sociology to better understand inequality and the socially based forms of wealth available to individuals in modern society.
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