Cultural Reception and Production: The Social Construction of Meaning in Book Clubs

Investigation of the reception of textual objects has alternately emphasized structural, demographically-conditioned patterns of evaluation and taste, or the agency of viewers, readers and listeners in constructing their own interpretations of cultural texts. In the present article we advance an empirical and formal analysis of the cultural reception of texts in which interpretations of the multiple dimensions on which a text may be evaluated are transmitted and modified within small groups of individuals in face-to-face contact. We contribute an approach in which the intersection of social structure, individual readings, and interactive group processes all may enter in readers’ interpretations of a novel. Our investigation is focused on a set of book clubs on which data has been collected on group members’ pre and post discussion evaluations of a specific book, and the interpersonal influence networks that were formed during the groups’ discussions. We analyze these data with a multilevel model of individuals nested in groups which allows us to address both structural and group dynamics effects on cultural reception in a single analytical framework.