Buchholz has published in different areas sociology and cultural theory, including the sociology of intellectuals and knowledge, inequality in intellectual and cultural fields, the international circulation of ideas, the sociology of embodiment, Harrison C. White’s network theory, (global) field theory, world polity theory and the diffusion of Human Rights, or culture and sustainability. Currently, most of her research centers on the globalization of culture and art markets, cultural consumption and inequality, and global/transnational theorizing.
The Globalization of Culture and Art Markets
A central line of Buchholz’s research examines the globalization of cultural production and art markets, with a particular focus on how cultural value is constructed, circulated, and transformed across borders. Her work asks how global cultural spaces and circuits emerge, how different regimes of valuation operate within them, and how inequalities in recognition and access are reproduced or reconfigured under conditions of (de)globalization.
Her book The Global Rules of Art (Princeton University Press, 2022) analyzes the formation of a global cultural field and shows how distinct logics of symbolic recognition and market exchange shape the trajectories of artists and cultural goods. Moving beyond simple dichotomies between “Western” and “non-Western” contexts, the research highlights the coexistence of multiple, partially overlapping systems of valuation and the institutional diversity through which global cultural dynamics unfold.
Building on this foundation, her current research explores how cultural markets emerge and evolve across different global contexts. Related projects examine the global circulation of cultural genres, forms of transnational coordination among cultural actors, and the territorial and interpretative geographies through which cultural flows are organized and understood.
Cultural Consumption and Inequality within a Global Context
Buchholz’s upcoming book project, Cultural Kaleidoscopes: Decentering Taste and Art Value in the Global South (working title), extends her research on cultural valuation by shifting the analytical focus from mediation to the role of consumption, collectors, and inequality in the making of art markets.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in China, Mexico, and Qatar, the book offers a comparative analysis of how contemporary art markets emerge, stabilize, and differentiate across diverse global contexts. It critically engages dominant West-centric perspectives, showing how global art worlds are reconfigured through locally grounded yet globally connected processes. The project develops a new conceptual approach examining how domestic, regional, and global forces recombine to generate different cultures of consumption that shape heterogeneous pathways of market development. Situated at the intersection of cultural sociology, economic sociology, and globalization studies, the book reframes how cultural value and markets take shape under conditions of globalization, while opening new directions for studying valuation and consumption across borders.
Global/Transnational Theorizing – Denationalizing Field Theory
Based on insights from her substantive research, Buchholz’s work also engages with broader theoretical and methodological questions of global/transnational sociology, particularly regarding the advancement of global field theory as a relatively new paradigm in global studies. Buchholz’s work on globalizing field theory introduces the concept of “relative vertical autonomy” to theorize the emergence and multi-scalar structure of global fields, advances a Bourdieusian “center-periphery model,” and refines the idea of “asymmetric interdependencies” from a field-theoretical perspective. Her publications also discuss the need to rethink relationalism in field theory for global/transnational research and the utility of analogical theorizing, causal mechanisms, and real-type concepts for theorizing across borders.
Copyright © 2023 L. Buchholz