The market for Japanese comics, called manga, in the United States grew rapidly at the beginning of the twenty first century at a rate unprecedented in the publishing industry. Sales grew a remarkable 350% from $60 million in 2002 to $210 million in 2007 and did not begin to decline until the beginning of the recent economic downturn beginning in late 2008. No published research is yet able to account for this phenomenon in a manner that is both socially-situated and mediumspecific. In this paper, I provide such a sociological account of the rise of manga in the United States and its implications for the globalization of culture. Adapting Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical formulation of the cultural field, I argue that manga migrated from the comics field to the book field and that the ways in which industry practices, distribution networks, and target demographics differ between the two fields are directly responsible for the medium's newfound visibility. Furthermore, I argue that, despite the now-common transparency of the Japanese origin of Japanese titles, the American publishing industry's creation of manga as a category of books distinct from other comics is an ineluctable naturalizing process that ultimately erases from American consciousness the Japanese, the foreign, the other.
Much has been written on the neoliberalization of the academy on the one hand and precarious creative labour/work in the culture industries on the other, but there has been comparatively little writing which makes explicit the intimate links between these two sociological phenomena and how
Though it is widely accepted that academic publishing has both communication and credentialing functions, there have been no systematic attempts to categorize journals according to their various socio-political aims since Toby Miller's intervention in the early 2000s. Yet one-third of all peer-reviewed academic journals currently in print did not even exist at the time of his writing. This article takes these new journals into account in order to develop a systematic typology of academic journals based on their intended social purpose, both within and beyond the academy. After an overview of similar typologies and their strengths and limitations, the author proposes a tripartite typology for academic journals: journals of (1) record, (2) transformational activism, and (3) professional legitimation. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the symbiotic relationship between the academy and scholarly publishing and argues that, in the digital age, this relationship is as important as ever.
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