A Mears
Biographic Data
| ID | 16882 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Mears |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Mears |
| SIGNATURE | MEARS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Boston University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2774-9735 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 520 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The Right Amount of Sex: Digital Labor in the Grey Zone of Platform Governance
On platforms, workplace rules can be ambiguous and inconsistently enforced. This article examines the labor process within the "grey zone" of platform governance, bridging theories of organizational misbehavior to research on digital labor. We compare two groups of content creators-porn creators and viral entertainers-who earn a living by sharing pictures and videos on social media. Both strategically utilize sexual imagery to boost their visibil…
Learning to Like the Likes and the Hate: The Labor of Internet Fame in the New Attention Economy
How do people experience internet fame? Whereas public visibility and reputation were once tightly coupled, these can be decoupled in the new media attention economy. We illustrate this with an ethnography of virality. Going viral on social media can be a destabilizing experience, given the problems of hyper-visibility, context collapse, and hateful commentary from unknown audiences. Yet many people pursue online virality, reporting the experienc…
Getting In: Status Stratification and the Pursuit of the Good College Party
How do social hierarchies emerge from symbolic boundaries? Based on an ethnography of a college party scene, we consider "Who parties with whom" as a way to trace the micro-interactional bases of status stratification. Based on field observations and 60 interviews with college women and men in Boston, USA, we identify two main modes of partying: "crawling" and "climbing." Crawling is the search for a low-status house party to attend, often leadin…
Elites, bodies, and gender: Women's appearance as class distinction
Despite the importance of both gender and elites in contemporary social life, few empirical works examine gender among the elite. With a focus on embodiment, we develop a gendered theory of elite display, grounded in ethnographic observations of two elite spaces in which women are prominent: VIP clubs and philanthropy galas in the U.S. and Europe. Using a Goffmanian perspective, we examine the micro-dynamics through which elite bodies express sta…
Low-intensity focused ultrasound targeting the nucleus accumbens as a potential treatment for substance use disorder: Safety and feasibility clinical trial
In conclusion, LIFU targeting the NAc was safe and acutely reduced substance craving during the LIFU procedure, and potentially had longer-term impact on craving reductions. While early observations are promising, NAc LIFU requires further investigation in a controlled trial to assess the impact on substance craving and ultimately substance use and relapse
Bringing Bourdieu to a Content Farm: Social Media Production Fields and the Cultural Economy of Attention
Attention is a valuable and scarce resource in the online 'attention economy.' But not all attention is equally valuable. This article advances a relational theory of the value of attention by situating social media content production as a field. I draw from an ethnography of a 'content farm' and interviews with 60 creators who make highly-paid but low-status entertainment videos designed to go viral on Facebook, as well as on SnapChat, TikTok, a…
Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries
Transitory ties: A network ecology perspective on job opportunities in fashion modeling
Pause, Pivot, and Shift: Situational Human Capital and Responses to Sudden Job Loss
How, in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, do workers respond to rapid changes in the labor market? This paper mobilizes existing literature on occupational mobility and job loss to develop a theory of situational human capital in which some workers are better positioned to weather occupational transitions than others depending on the alignment between their skill sets, opportunities, and particular contexts. Previous literature looks at this in…
Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
A sociologist and former fashion model takes readers inside the elite global party circuit of "models and bottles" to reveal how beautiful young women are used to boost the status of menMillion-dollar birthday parties, megayachts on the French Riviera, and
Des fêtes très exclusives: Les promoteurs de soirées VIP, des intermédiaires aux ambitions contrariées
Les services de luxe destinés aux élites semblent présenter l’opportunité pour des individus aux positions de classe et raciales variées d’accumuler du capital social au sein de réseaux élitaires. Quelles sont les conditions de conversion du capital social accumulé de cette manière ? Cet article ethnographique se penche sur les discothèques et les fêtes d’un monde de la nuit et du loisir globalisé, afin d’examiner le travail et les aspirations de…
Bourdieu and the Body
Chapter abstract The work of Pierre Bourdieu provides a framework to see how class position is written on the body and expressed through classed styles of walking, talking, gesturing, eating, drinking, and so forth. This chapter considers how Bourdieu’s work on the body has informed and advanced empirical research on the body. From Bourdieu’s perspective, each body is the visible product of the composition and volumes of class-specific capitals a…
Theoretical and methodological pathways for research on elites
In this introductory essay to our special issue on elites, we outline some of the major challenges to research in this area and propose a series of theoretical and methodological pathways to address them. Theoretically we make four recommendations: (a) greater attentiveness to and specificity about the relationship between elites and power; (b) a clearer articulation of the relationships between elites and the varieties of capitalism; (c) far mor…
Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent
Locating local knowledge in global networks: Scouting in fashion and football
Puzzling in Sociology: On Doing and Undoing Theoretical Puzzles
One typical way to motivate a sociological argument is to present the research question as a puzzle. Unlike in physical sciences, sociologists work backward to construct theoretical puzzles from their data. Sociologists risk puzzling for puzzles' sake, and in so doing, they reify categories and concepts that are not necessary or useful to their empirical material at hand. This essay examines mostly qualitative sociologists' conventions for puzzli…
Ethnography Goes Out on the Town
The Paradoxical Value of Deviant Cases: Toward a Gendered Theory of Display Work
Major shifts in gender, work, and sexuality have led to the rising prominence of display work, the display of sexualized bodily capital for wages. This article develops the concept of display work and examines its implications for the gendered organization of work. Display work is a continuous rather than a categorical variable and can describe a range of jobs from those involving overtly sexualized bodies for sale as bodies to professionalized b…
Beauty, Race, and Power
Like race, beauty is a social fact tied to physical perceptions of the body, which can confer or deny power. Perceptions of whiteness, beauty, and social status are linked through historic systems of racial dominance, such as colonialism and scientific racism. While beauty standards are rooted in racial oppressions, beauty practices are also means for individuals to resist racial domination, build communities, and transform the self.
Working for Free in the VIP: Relational Work and the Production of Consent
Why do workers participate in their own exploitation? This article moves beyond the situational production of consent that has dominated studies of the labor process and outlines the relational production of labor's surplus value. Using a case of unpaid women who perform valuable work for VIP nightclubs, I present ethnographic data on the VIP party circuit from New York, the Hamptons, Miami, and Cannes, as well as 84 interviews with party organiz…
Girls as elite distinction: The appropriation of bodily capital
Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work, Gender, and Beauty
Amid the growing literature on the costs and rewards of physical appearance for labor market outcomes, an economistic emphasis on looks as an investment strategy has gained prominence. The concept of aesthetic labor is a useful sociological intervention for understanding how the value of certain looks is constructed, and how looks matter for social stratification. Aesthetic labor is the practice of screening, managing, and controlling workers on …
Seeing culture through the eye of the beholder: Four Methods in Pursuit of Taste
Ethnography as Precarious Work
Reflecting on a carnal ethnography of the fashion modeling market, I consider the analytic gains from observant participation and experimentation with the sociologist's body as a participant in a culture industry. The ambiguities and uncertainties of fashion modeling, as a highly competitive freelance labor form, parallel the risky position of insider ethnographer, in this case as a graduate student "studying up" among guarded cultural elites. Th…
Gender on Display: Peformativity in Fashion Modelling
Gender performativity has had significant influences in cultural studies and sociology, yet empirical cases of the theory remain scarce. While some analysis examines performativity in work, the focus is on organizations and how gender 'gets done and undone' within them with little attention paid to bodies outside organizations. Based on two empirical studies of freelancing fashion models, we extend Butler's gender performativity to analyse the ro…
Working for Free in the VIP: Relational Work and the Production of Consent
Why do workers participate in their own exploitation? This article moves beyond the situational production of consent that has dominated studies of the labor process and outlines the relational production of labor's surplus value. Using a case of unpaid women who perform valuable work for VIP nightclubs, I present ethnographic data on the VIP party circuit from New York, the Hamptons, Miami, and Cannes, as well as 84 interviews with party organiz…
Theoretical and methodological pathways for research on elites
In this introductory essay to our special issue on elites, we outline some of the major challenges to research in this area and propose a series of theoretical and methodological pathways to address them. Theoretically we make four recommendations: (a) greater attentiveness to and specificity about the relationship between elites and power; (b) a clearer articulation of the relationships between elites and the varieties of capitalism; (c) far mor…
Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work, Gender, and Beauty
Amid the growing literature on the costs and rewards of physical appearance for labor market outcomes, an economistic emphasis on looks as an investment strategy has gained prominence. The concept of aesthetic labor is a useful sociological intervention for understanding how the value of certain looks is constructed, and how looks matter for social stratification. Aesthetic labor is the practice of screening, managing, and controlling workers on …
How Do Cultural Producers Make Creative Decisions? Lessons from the Catwalk
Faced with high uncertainty, how do producers in the cultural economy make creative decisions? We present a case study of the fashion modeling industry. Using participant observation, interviews and network analysis of the Spring/Summer 2007 Fashion Week collections, we explain how producers select models for fashion shows. While fashion producers conceive of their selection of models as a matter of “taste,” or personal preference, we find that t…
Size zero high-end ethnic: Cultural production and the reproduction of culture in fashion modeling
Not Just a Paper Doll: How Models Manage Bodily Capital and Why They Perform Emotional Labor
Modeling is a challenging occupation because employment is irregular, the physical demands are great, and competition is fierce. Success as a model requires the careful management of bodily capital and the performance of emotional labor. Drawing on participant observations and interviews with models in the Atlanta fashion industry, the authors examine how they do the former and why they do the latter. They manage their bodily capital by subjectin…
Discipline of the catwalk: Gender, power and uncertainty in fashion modeling
The work of women's fashion modeling is a disciplining labor process in which female bodily capital is transformed into a cultural commodity. Based on participant observation of the New York modeling industry, this article examines how models are made into `looks'. Models are subject to intense surveillance, a discourse of infantilization, and uncertain judging criteria. This labor process typifies the politics of gender, in which women exercise …
Girls as elite distinction: The appropriation of bodily capital
Puzzling in Sociology: On Doing and Undoing Theoretical Puzzles
One typical way to motivate a sociological argument is to present the research question as a puzzle. Unlike in physical sciences, sociologists work backward to construct theoretical puzzles from their data. Sociologists risk puzzling for puzzles' sake, and in so doing, they reify categories and concepts that are not necessary or useful to their empirical material at hand. This essay examines mostly qualitative sociologists' conventions for puzzli…
The Paradoxical Value of Deviant Cases: Toward a Gendered Theory of Display Work
Major shifts in gender, work, and sexuality have led to the rising prominence of display work, the display of sexualized bodily capital for wages. This article develops the concept of display work and examines its implications for the gendered organization of work. Display work is a continuous rather than a categorical variable and can describe a range of jobs from those involving overtly sexualized bodies for sale as bodies to professionalized b…
Bringing Bourdieu to a Content Farm: Social Media Production Fields and the Cultural Economy of Attention
Attention is a valuable and scarce resource in the online 'attention economy.' But not all attention is equally valuable. This article advances a relational theory of the value of attention by situating social media content production as a field. I draw from an ethnography of a 'content farm' and interviews with 60 creators who make highly-paid but low-status entertainment videos designed to go viral on Facebook, as well as on SnapChat, TikTok, a…
Gender on Display: Peformativity in Fashion Modelling
Gender performativity has had significant influences in cultural studies and sociology, yet empirical cases of the theory remain scarce. While some analysis examines performativity in work, the focus is on organizations and how gender 'gets done and undone' within them with little attention paid to bodies outside organizations. Based on two empirical studies of freelancing fashion models, we extend Butler's gender performativity to analyse the ro…
Seeing culture through the eye of the beholder: Four Methods in Pursuit of Taste
Locating local knowledge in global networks: Scouting in fashion and football
Free to those who can afford it: The everyday affordance of privilege
Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent
Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful
Pause, Pivot, and Shift: Situational Human Capital and Responses to Sudden Job Loss
How, in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, do workers respond to rapid changes in the labor market? This paper mobilizes existing literature on occupational mobility and job loss to develop a theory of situational human capital in which some workers are better positioned to weather occupational transitions than others depending on the alignment between their skill sets, opportunities, and particular contexts. Previous literature looks at this in…
The Power of Looks: Social Stratification of Physical Appearance
The Right Amount of Sex: Digital Labor in the Grey Zone of Platform Governance
On platforms, workplace rules can be ambiguous and inconsistently enforced. This article examines the labor process within the "grey zone" of platform governance, bridging theories of organizational misbehavior to research on digital labor. We compare two groups of content creators-porn creators and viral entertainers-who earn a living by sharing pictures and videos on social media. Both strategically utilize sexual imagery to boost their visibil…
Getting In: Status Stratification and the Pursuit of the Good College Party
How do social hierarchies emerge from symbolic boundaries? Based on an ethnography of a college party scene, we consider "Who parties with whom" as a way to trace the micro-interactional bases of status stratification. Based on field observations and 60 interviews with college women and men in Boston, USA, we identify two main modes of partying: "crawling" and "climbing." Crawling is the search for a low-status house party to attend, often leadin…
Elites, bodies, and gender: Women's appearance as class distinction
Despite the importance of both gender and elites in contemporary social life, few empirical works examine gender among the elite. With a focus on embodiment, we develop a gendered theory of elite display, grounded in ethnographic observations of two elite spaces in which women are prominent: VIP clubs and philanthropy galas in the U.S. and Europe. Using a Goffmanian perspective, we examine the micro-dynamics through which elite bodies express sta…
Not Just a Paper Doll: How Models Manage Bodily Capital and Why They Perform Emotional Labor
Modeling is a challenging occupation because employment is irregular, the physical demands are great, and competition is fierce. Success as a model requires the careful management of bodily capital and the performance of emotional labor. Drawing on participant observations and interviews with models in the Atlanta fashion industry, the authors examine how they do the former and why they do the latter. They manage their bodily capital by subjectin…
The Ambivalence of Consumption - About Sassatelli Roberta, Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics (Los Angeles, CA, Sage Publications, 2007)
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Discipline of the catwalk: Gender, power and uncertainty in fashion modeling
The work of women's fashion modeling is a disciplining labor process in which female bodily capital is transformed into a cultural commodity. Based on participant observation of the New York modeling industry, this article examines how models are made into `looks'. Models are subject to intense surveillance, a discourse of infantilization, and uncertain judging criteria. This labor process typifies the politics of gender, in which women exercise …
The Power of Looks: Social Stratification of Physical Appearance
How Do Cultural Producers Make Creative Decisions? Lessons from the Catwalk
Faced with high uncertainty, how do producers in the cultural economy make creative decisions? We present a case study of the fashion modeling industry. Using participant observation, interviews and network analysis of the Spring/Summer 2007 Fashion Week collections, we explain how producers select models for fashion shows. While fashion producers conceive of their selection of models as a matter of “taste,” or personal preference, we find that t…
Comment and Reply
Ashley Mears' review of my book, The Power of Looks: Social Stratification of Physical Appearance, is perplexing for its significant omissions and false representation of the content. The social constructionist approach that I apply is negated as an unworthy explanation; yet the reviewer does not clarify what, precisely, is wrong with this interpretation. There is no mention of the chapters on theory and methodologies, which offer the reader clas…
Size zero high-end ethnic: Cultural production and the reproduction of culture in fashion modeling
Pricing Looks
This chapter examines the role of status for the economic value of products by focusing on the pricing of fashion models. More specifically, it considers the apparent arbitrariness of aesthetic evaluation that actors in the fashion industry face and how it leads to uncertainty regarding the value of the ‘look’ to be sold. Drawing on ethnographic data and in-depth interviews with modelling agents and fashion clients in New York and London, the cha…
Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model
Sociologist Ashley Mears takes us behind the brightly lit runways and glossy advertisements of the fashion industry in this insider’s study of the world of modeling. Mears, who worked as a model in New York and London, draws on observations as well as extensive interviews with male and female models, agents, clients, photographers, stylists, and others, to explore the economics and politics—and the arbitrariness— behind the business of glamour. E…
Prise de décision créative en situation d'incertitude: Le Cas De La Sélection Des Mannequins Par Les Maisons De Mode1
Face à l'existence d'une forte incertitude dans les industries dites « de la création », comment les producteurs culturels prennent-ils des décisions ? Nous abordons cette question en étudiant un cas particulier, la sélection des mannequins par les maisons de mode pour leurs défilés dans les villes de New York, Londres, Milan et Paris. Les données utilisées sont à la fois qualitatives (entretiens ethnographiques) et quantitatives (analyse de rése…
Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful
Free to those who can afford it: The everyday affordance of privilege
Ethnography as Precarious Work
Reflecting on a carnal ethnography of the fashion modeling market, I consider the analytic gains from observant participation and experimentation with the sociologist's body as a participant in a culture industry. The ambiguities and uncertainties of fashion modeling, as a highly competitive freelance labor form, parallel the risky position of insider ethnographer, in this case as a graduate student "studying up" among guarded cultural elites. Th…
Gender on Display: Peformativity in Fashion Modelling
Gender performativity has had significant influences in cultural studies and sociology, yet empirical cases of the theory remain scarce. While some analysis examines performativity in work, the focus is on organizations and how gender 'gets done and undone' within them with little attention paid to bodies outside organizations. Based on two empirical studies of freelancing fashion models, we extend Butler's gender performativity to analyse the ro…
Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work, Gender, and Beauty
Amid the growing literature on the costs and rewards of physical appearance for labor market outcomes, an economistic emphasis on looks as an investment strategy has gained prominence. The concept of aesthetic labor is a useful sociological intervention for understanding how the value of certain looks is constructed, and how looks matter for social stratification. Aesthetic labor is the practice of screening, managing, and controlling workers on …
Seeing culture through the eye of the beholder: Four Methods in Pursuit of Taste
Beauty, Race, and Power
Like race, beauty is a social fact tied to physical perceptions of the body, which can confer or deny power. Perceptions of whiteness, beauty, and social status are linked through historic systems of racial dominance, such as colonialism and scientific racism. While beauty standards are rooted in racial oppressions, beauty practices are also means for individuals to resist racial domination, build communities, and transform the self.
Working for Free in the VIP: Relational Work and the Production of Consent
Why do workers participate in their own exploitation? This article moves beyond the situational production of consent that has dominated studies of the labor process and outlines the relational production of labor's surplus value. Using a case of unpaid women who perform valuable work for VIP nightclubs, I present ethnographic data on the VIP party circuit from New York, the Hamptons, Miami, and Cannes, as well as 84 interviews with party organiz…
Girls as elite distinction: The appropriation of bodily capital
Ethnography Goes Out on the Town
The Paradoxical Value of Deviant Cases: Toward a Gendered Theory of Display Work
Major shifts in gender, work, and sexuality have led to the rising prominence of display work, the display of sexualized bodily capital for wages. This article develops the concept of display work and examines its implications for the gendered organization of work. Display work is a continuous rather than a categorical variable and can describe a range of jobs from those involving overtly sexualized bodies for sale as bodies to professionalized b…
Locating local knowledge in global networks: Scouting in fashion and football
Puzzling in Sociology: On Doing and Undoing Theoretical Puzzles
One typical way to motivate a sociological argument is to present the research question as a puzzle. Unlike in physical sciences, sociologists work backward to construct theoretical puzzles from their data. Sociologists risk puzzling for puzzles' sake, and in so doing, they reify categories and concepts that are not necessary or useful to their empirical material at hand. This essay examines mostly qualitative sociologists' conventions for puzzli…
Bourdieu and the Body
Chapter abstract The work of Pierre Bourdieu provides a framework to see how class position is written on the body and expressed through classed styles of walking, talking, gesturing, eating, drinking, and so forth. This chapter considers how Bourdieu’s work on the body has informed and advanced empirical research on the body. From Bourdieu’s perspective, each body is the visible product of the composition and volumes of class-specific capitals a…
Theoretical and methodological pathways for research on elites
In this introductory essay to our special issue on elites, we outline some of the major challenges to research in this area and propose a series of theoretical and methodological pathways to address them. Theoretically we make four recommendations: (a) greater attentiveness to and specificity about the relationship between elites and power; (b) a clearer articulation of the relationships between elites and the varieties of capitalism; (c) far mor…
Sociology (30 works) · Political science (18 works) · Fashion and Cultural Textiles (17 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Social science (14 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Art (9 works)