What is Cultural Sociology?. Lyn Spillman

What is Cultural Sociology? - Lyn Spillman


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open to different views about the nature of the processes involved. It bears a close relationship to the Berger and Luckmann idea of “the social construction of reality,” which sociologists generally embraced, but makes conceptual space for more analytical precision and flexibility, opening social construction up to analysis, rather than closing it down as a generic sociological assumption about “reality.” And it allows us to take a step back from overarching sociological debates about conflict and consensus, structure and agency, and interpretation and explanation, capturing an idea common to them all and turning those debates into specific empirical questions, like “what is the mix of conflict and consensus in this situation, and why?” And as this book will show, the concept of culture as meaning-making process also encompasses more recent perspectives within cultural sociology about how to study culture.

      Cultural sociologists explore meaning-making processes based on these conceptual foundations. Given these foundations, what do you need to know to do cultural sociology? This book examines three lines of research in the field.

      First, cultural sociologists focus on cultural objects and their properties. Unlike most other sociologists, they analyze in some depth what Berger and Luckmann called the “signs” mediating “the social construction of reality.” For instance, how can different ways the same story is told generate different meanings? Or how does the weathering of billboards affect what they communicate? Rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories all express meaning through signs, and rather than taking this for granted, or assuming that signs can be ignored because they are transparent and simple, cultural sociologists consider how the cultural forms of signs influence processes of meaning-making. This is the most distinctive added value of cultural sociology compared to other perspectives in sociology.

      Second, cultural sociologists analyze interaction as a meaning-making process. Frequently building on sociology’s long interest in symbolic interaction, they focus on how interaction between individuals and within smaller groups influences meaning-making. For instance, how do childhood interactions create long-lasting musical or political tastes, and how do those tastes affect an individual’s subsequent interactions and prospects? Or how do subcultures demonstrate their differences from the mainstream? Processes of action and interaction shape the expression and interpretation of the meaning of even widely shared signs.

      So cultural sociologists use three different lenses when they examine processes of meaning-making. They explore cultural forms, interaction, and the organization of production. The perspectives offered by these three angles of vision are irreducible, but compatible. Certainly, cultural theorists sometimes debate which lens is best, or question the significance of one aspect or another of meaning-making. As we will see, many investigations highlight one or another. However, since each lens offers different insights about culture, they can and often should be fruitfully combined for a fuller picture.

      This framework is built primarily around concepts, rather than people. For this reason, it should be possible to follow it through to apply it flexibly to different authors, works, and research projects beyond those mentioned here. The overall schema can be used to think about different thematic emphases and significant authors, and to identify similarities and differences in different scholarly contexts, including different national contexts.

      These foundations have proven strong and the three angles of investigation highly productive for learning about culture from a sociological point of view (Alexander et al. 2012; Hall et al. 2010). The range of new knowledge cultural sociologists have produced is exciting; many examples will be offered in the following chapters.

      This new knowledge about processes of meaning-making is important for several reasons. First, since meaning-making is important to everyone, understanding more about meaning, rather than sidelining it, should be important to sociologists. Second, understanding the meanings people share helps us understand how social groups cohere, and how complex social organization is accomplished. Third, understanding more about cultural difference offers important insights into how power and inequality are maintained. Fourth, understanding more about cultural conflict offers important insights into some of the most pressing social problems we face. To take a few recent examples, research in cultural sociology has shed light on bias in hiring processes, on health and aging, on environmental issues, and on processes of globalization.

      The topic of age and health may seem fundamentally biological, but Corey Abramson explores the cultural context


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