What is Cultural Sociology?. Lyn Spillman

What is Cultural Sociology? - Lyn Spillman


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classic sociological theorists were writing when the idea of culture was in flux, so they did not offer paradigmatic approaches to understanding “culture.” Nevertheless, all of them bequeathed related ideas and theoretical propositions that remain crucial, combining in different ways in later cultural sociology. Karl Marx showed how meaning-making could be important for domination, with his concept of ideology (Marx 1978 [1846]; see also Eagleton 1991; Wuthnow 1992). Max Weber established an important place for interpretive analysis in sociology and offered particular theories of social status and of historical rationalization which remain influential for cultural sociology (Weber 1998 [1904–5]; see also Schroeder 1992). Émile Durkheim provided the foundations of cultural analysis in sociology with his theories of collective conscience, collective representations, cognitive categories, and ritual (Durkheim 1995 [1912]; see also Alexander and Smith 2005). Georg Simmel contributed extensive reflections on the individual’s relation to surrounding culture by distinguishing objective and subjective culture (Simmel 1971; see also Frisby and Featherstone 1997). However, while all offered useful ways of thinking about cultural elements like rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories, they mostly did so only as a sideline in the course of answering other sorts of questions.

      For Berger and Luckmann, structured patterns of social relations in groups are internalized by individuals in everyday life, and individuals then reproduce and sometimes change those patterns. For instance, an individual might internalize hierarchical family relations and then go on to live them out anew. Internalization is mediated by “signs” generated by surrounding social relations. So a child might understand family hierarchy through practical signs of interactional deference or explicit symbols of authority. This perspective on “the social construction of reality” synthesized disparate strands of social theory, from the macro to the micro – theories of objective social structure, theories of interaction, and phenomenological theories of subjective experience. Essentially, Berger and Luckmann offered a distinctively sociological vocabulary for understanding processes of meaning-making – in other words, for understanding “culture.”

      One intransigent issue was a theoretical impasse between conflict and consensus views of culture, between an emphasis on power and conflict, captured in the concept of ideology, and an emphasis on solidarity and consensus, as in the concept of collective conscience. Another recurring tension surrounded whether to focus on the influence of social structures (recurrent patterns of social relations) or on interactional processes (in which human agency and creativity might sometimes be seen). A third issue revolved around whether to highlight the interpretation of meanings themselves (as Weber did, for example, in his famous study of the Protestant Ethic [1998 (1904–5)]) or whether a genuinely sociological approach should minimize extended, thick interpretation of rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories and focus instead on external social forces which might explain them. These persistent issues – conflict vs. consensus, structure vs. agency, and interpretation vs. explanation – were all the more intransigent for sociologists interested in culture because “culture” was understood in broad, abstract terms as reflecting whole societies. Inquiries into such broad, abstract topics as “American culture” make it hard to even begin to answer specific questions about meaning-making.

      From the 1970s, though, and in the process of dealing with these questions, sociologists stopped treating the idea of culture as vague and residual, as an abstract thing, and explicitly specified concepts and approaches to understanding culture, cultural difference, and cultural conflict. The thriving field of cultural sociology emerged.

      All cultural sociology shares a central focus on processes of meaning-making. Cultural sociologists investigate puzzles and questions about meanings, and in doing so they account for the various rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories that people may share, and take for granted as natural. They also offer a fresh understanding of how taken-for-granted ideas may generate power, inequality, and conflict. Meaning-making processes generate both pattern and variation.

      This concept of culture, referring to processes of meaning-making, actually returns to and extends what Raymond Williams found to be the first uses of the concept as a noun of process, before “culture” was reified as a unitary, abstract thing. Since the term is now understood to refer to a process, it can encompass various elements, because meaning may be generated and expressed in ritual, symbolization, evaluation, normative action, and categorization (and numerous other cultural processes).

      Within sociology, considering culture as meaning-making process highlights what


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