The Emergence of Genres

Abstract

Genres are collective concepts that emerge in scenes, which are loosely bounded social worlds oriented to forms of cultural expression. This paper proposes a cognitive sociology of genre emergence that focuses on the shared cognitive processes that contribute to the emergence of genres. We define a genre as a collective concept shared by a group of agents who interact in producer and audience roles in a scene. We argue that the emergence of a genre is the result of a process of conceptual convergence, in which the meanings that people assign to the genre label become more similar. We identify a number of factors that can contribute to conceptual convergence, including the role structure of the scene, the level of engagement and intensity of interaction among scene members, and the solidarity and heterogeneity of the membership. We argue that our model can be used to explain the emergence of genres in a variety of social contexts, including music, science, and social protest.