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

Investigations of the reception of textual objects have alternately emphasized demographically conditioned patterns of evaluation and taste, or the agency of viewers, readers, and listeners in constructing their own cultural interpretations. 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 into readers' interpretations of a novel. Our investigation focuses on a set of book clubs for which we collected data 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 the effects of structure and group dynamics on cultural reception in a single analytic framework.