Cultural Tastes and Cosmopolitanism with Clayton Childress and Takeshi Matsui

Culture and Social Analysis Workshop 
Cultural Tastes and Cosmopolitanism

• Clayton Childress, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto
• Takeshi Matsui, Professor of Marketing, Hitotsubashi University
  
  Register here to attend virtually

Abstracts:

Clayton Childress

Tokenism and its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field

Research on tokenism has mostly focused on the career outcomes and negative experiences of individuals who are tokenized. Yet what happens to those individuals who are excluded from opportunities due to the structure of tokenism, as well as the meso-level cultural foundations under which different forms of tokenism may occur, are comparatively understudied phenomena. We focus on these two other sides of tokenism using original data on the creation and long-term retention of postcolonial literature. In an institutional environment in which the British publishing industry was consolidating the production of non-U.S. global literatures written in English and readers were beginning to convey status through openness in cultural tastes, the conditions for tokenism emerged. Relying on data on the emergence of postcolonial literature as a category organized through the Booker Prize for Fiction, for nonwhite authors we test for and find (1) evidence of tokenism, (2) unequal treatment of those under consideration for tokenization, and (3) long-term retention consequences for those who were not chosen. We close with a call for more holistic work on both sides of tokenism, analyses that address inequality both across and within groups, and a reconsideration of tokenism within a broader suite of practices that have grown ascendent across arenas of social life.

Takeshi Matsui

"Sake is NOT rice wine": The Opportunities and Difficulties of Introducing Japanese Cuisine to the U.S.

This project explores the history of Japanese cuisine in the United States from a sociological and marketing perspective. As evidenced by examples of Americanized Japanese, such as inside-out rolls like the California roll, it is common for foreign cuisine to be localized in another culture, but such localization has been criticized as not being "authentic." This project aims to answer the question of what marketing efforts have been made to attract American consumers to Japanese cuisine in order to overcome their rejection of the exotic from other cultures. Based on the interviews conducted in New York City, Los Angeles, and other areas in the U.S. with Japanese restaurants, chefs, Japanese restaurant associations, wholesalers/distributors of Japanese food ingredients, Japanese grocery stores, street food event organizers, consultants, an educational institution, food journalists/writers, etc., and archival documents such as old recipe books and restaurant menus, this research attempts to answer this question.