IntroductionCultural sociology can be understood as an emergingfield of investigation entirely dedicated to analysingthe centrality of meaning-making in social life.Generally speaking, cultural sociologists develop arobust conception of culture, which enhances themost reflexive underpinnings of sociology. As anemerging field of investigation, cultural sociology cov-ers a wide and diverse range of conceptual andmethodological tools. In this article, I compare twodifferent ways to define cultural sociology. On the onehand, cultural sociology is presented as an approachthat places culture as an independent variable of soci-ological analysis. Often, the authors supporting thisapproach argue for the analytical separation of cultureand social structure. This trend is mainly sustained bythe Yale approach, which defines itself as against thesociology of culture and its focus on culture as adependent variable (Alexander, 2003). On the otherhand, I also focus on another conception of culturalsociology, which is thought of as a synonym of sociol-ogy of culture lato sensu. In this case, cultural sociolo-gy is conceived as a broad field encompassing allsociological approaches on culture. Thus, its bound-aries are set by non-sociological approaches, such as
cultural studies. The main concern of the authors inthis approach is to explore the amalgamationsbetween culture and social structure. This trend wasrecently strengthened by the creation of the Britishjournal Cultural Sociology (Inglis et al., 2007). Bothconceptions of cultural sociology are intended to placethe notion of culture as foundational for sociology inso far as they seek to explore the interplay betweencultural codes and social relationships.
Rather than an exhaustive genealogy, what is pro-posed here is a selective and partial review of this field.The term ‘cultural sociology’ has been increasinglyemployed in a diverse range of theoretical traditions insociology throughout the world. The main objectiveof this article is to analyse the different meaningsascribed to this term with a special emphasis on itsmost recurrent contexts: the American and Britishsociologies. In the first section, I briefly outline themain theoretical frameworks associated with the exer-cise of such cultural sociology. Next, I draw on sever-al empirical analyses. The third section presents ashort assessment of these works, while the fourth sec-tion concludes the article with a few suggestions fordeveloping cultural sociology.
Cultural sociologyFernando Lima Neto Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil
abstract Cultural sociology aims at incorporating the central role of meaning-making into the analy-sis of social phenomena. This article presents an overview of cultural sociology, focusing on its main the-oretical frames, methodological strategies and empirical investigations. It compares two different ways ofconnecting cultural codes and social interactions in the analysis of social phenomena. The interplaybetween the cultural and the social and the focus on meaning variations are two central principles ofanalysis from which cultural sociologists seek to revitalize the notion of culture in sociology.
keywords ◆ cultural sociology ◆ cultural studies ◆ culture and social life ◆ meaning ◆ sociology ofculture
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Cultural sociology: theoretical frames
During the last decades, sociologists have increasing-ly focused upon the notion of culture as a way ofreframing sociological thought. This has been donein order to deal with the new analytical challengesfaced by sociology throughout history. Many sub-jects that used to be treated as secondary and resid-ual are now raising central questions for the future ofthe discipline. The case of cultural sociology is par-ticularly revealing. Instead of considering culture asan epiphenomenal effect of social relations, culturalsociologists are more likely to stress the centrality ofmeaning in the production and the reproduction ofsocial life. Often, but not always, this involves call-ing into question some well-established sociologicalapproaches that seek to unveil the underlying powerrelations that supposedly determine the meanings ofsocial life (Alexander, 2003; Litcherman, 2007;Madsen et al., 2001; Robertson, 1978).
The main task confronting cultural sociology isto incorporate the central role of meaning-makinginto the analysis of social phenomena. In this sense,cultural sociologists are involved in theorizing cul-ture as a central dimension of the sociologicalapproach (Alexander, 2003; Robertson, 1978).Nonetheless, there are deeply different ways for themto proceed towards this analytical revitalization ofthe notion. On the theoretical ground, by refusing toconsider culture as an epiphenomenal effect of ‘non-cultural factors’, cultural sociologists investigate thedynamic interactions between the cultural and thesocial. However, on the methodological ground thatlinks theory to empirical processes, the strategies forrelating cultural and social structures entail two dif-ferent ways of grasping culture as foundational forsociology, two different ways of addressing the inter-play between cultural codes and social relationships.At this point, either cultural sociologists analyse cul-tural codes in the light of social relationships or they doprecisely the opposite, which is to analyse social rela-tionships in the light of their cultural codifications. Inorder to account for this variation, I begin with abrief overview of the American and the British con-tributions to the debate. These are the most articu-lated and influential modes of addressing this issuein terms of what they call cultural sociology.Although I am not primarily concerned with the spe-cific national character of these approaches (indeed,one could argue for their internal heterogeneity), adisposition in these two national frames is fairly rep-resentative of the current state of the art in culturalsociology and, consequently, may be helpful toorganize its major theoretical standpoints. My task isnot to explain the why of this national alignment,
but rather to examine how the concept of culturalsociology varies in the two contexts.
Yet, before presenting cultural sociology againstthe background of the American and the Britishscenes, it is worthwhile to briefly recall its classicalroots. The works of Max Weber and EmileDurkheim have laid down the theoretical founda-tions for any ‘sociology of meanings’. Durkheim’sinterest in culture is particularly emphasized in thelater part of his life, when he becomes attracted tothe problem of social representations, taking religionas an object of study (Durkheim, 2008; Lukes,1973). Durkheim finds in religion a form of symbol-ical power which allows a community to be repre-sented to itself in its relations with all the objectsaffecting it. He states that symbolical processes areself-sustained, which means that social life eventshave in religion a model (Alexander, 1988;Durkheim, 2008). In turn, Max Weber’s interest inmeaning-making goes beyond his sociology of reli-gion and is also central to his political and method-ological questions. Weber focuses on values andbeliefs to provide a sociological theory that seeks tounderstand the links between power and culture inthe way social relations are constructed. Culture andreflexivity are two fundamental starting points forWeber’s approach, which allow him to reconcile tra-ditionally opposed philosophical influences such asImmanuel Kant (1999) and Friedrich Nietzsche(1978), for example. Thinking with Kant, Weberconcedes that there is no ‘essence of things’ or ‘reali-ty-in-itself ’ in the phenomena of social life. Rather,what ‘exists’ is the subjective activity creating mean-ing. However, contrary to Kant, the potency creatingmeaning is not the human mind with its pure intu-itions, but divergent values that come into conflict inand through human action. In this sense, Webertakes up the Nietzschean critique of values to assertthat the way in which conscience reacts to empiricalstimuli is not merely rational, but above all cultural-ly conditioned. While in Kant’s view reason shouldrecognize itself as reason in order to point out itsown internal limitations, for Weber values need torecognize themselves as values in order to evaluatetheir own implications. Indeed, this is indicative ofhis very idea of objectivity, which is also a value, thegreatest value that scientists promote (Weber, 1949).
After the pioneering work of these classics, inter-est in the cultural approach in sociology underwenta relative decline. In the Anglo-American contextthis omission was still more pronounced. Throughthe following periods, the objects and research ques-tions that prevailed in the discipline were primarilyrelated to themes of modernity and national society.However, in some specific niches such as sociology of
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religion, symbolic interactionism and the eth-nomethodology, interest in meaning did not wane.Considering sociology of religion, authors likeRobert Bellah (1964), Peter Berger and ThomasLuckmann (1963) and Roland Robertson (1978)furthered the interest in culture by considering reli-gion as the primary source of meaning in humansocieties. In these works, religion was regarded as anempirical resource from which analysts tackled a spe-cific theoretical question, namely the production ofmeaning in social life. Through a fruitful dialoguewith sociology of knowledge, these sociologists ofreligion problematized the social dimensions ofbelief and analytically strengthened the conceptionof meaning-making as a condition for social life.
Among these authors, the works of Bellah andRobertson were pivotal in defining the first outlinesof what would come to be called cultural sociologyin the USA and the UK at the end of 20th century.Arguing against the reductionism of religion assomething to be explained by ‘external’ social con-straints, Bellah (1970) introduced the concept of‘symbolic realism’ to deal with symbolically consti-tuted realities that are mutable and that transcendparticular individuals and groups (Madsen et al.,2001: xi). In turn, Robertson’s interest in religion liesin understanding daily life’s ‘taken-for-granted reali-ties’. The author draws on religion to analyse howindividuals share fundamental beliefs that confermeaning to their daily practices. More specifically,Robertson’s sociology of religion posits the exerciseof comparative analysis to argue that what is consid-ered as taken-for-granted varies significantly fromone cultural context to another (Robertson, 1978:20). While Bellah drew on the Durkheimian and theParsonian traditions to understand religion as anintrinsic attribute of social life (Madsen et al., 2001;Thomas and Flippen, 1972), Robertson built on theParsonian interpretation of Weber to stress the waysin which world religions interpret the meanings ofthe world, both as cosmovision and human concrete-ness (Robertson, 1970; Turner, 1992).
In the American scene, Bellah was not alone inpromoting the cultural turn. Clifford Geertz, amongother key thinkers, also developed a cultural analysisdedicated to the hermeneutic reconstruction ofsocial texts. Through a semiotic perspective, Geertz(1973) attempted to interpret meaning from withinthe cultural categories into which it is constructed.Taking up from Parsons in a different direction, bothBellah and Geertz worked out the structural integri-ty of culture without sustaining a monolithic con-ception of it. In doing this, they initiated the firststeps towards contemporary American cultural soci-ology (Alexander and Sherwood, 2001; Smith,1998). From the 1980s onwards, their seminal works
were reappropriated by several sociologists such asAnn Swidler, Michèle Lamont and Jeffrey Alexander.By the late 1990s, cultural sociology’s theoreticalframeworks were firmly rooted in the American soci-ology, a process that became increasingly institution-alized in the following years.
The underlying premises promoted by thesediverse approaches inspired by the work of Bellahand Geertz tend to concentrate on the task ofanalysing cultural codes through social interactions.Thus, Swidler (1986, 2001) understands culture as a‘tool kit’, or repertoire of meanings upon which peo-ple draw to make sense of their lives. The metaphorof ‘tool kit’ is thought of as ‘useful in understandinghow culture is actually brought to bear on experi-ence’ (Swidler, 2001: 39). In turn, Lamont (2000b;Lamont and Molnar, 2002) is concerned with exam-ining how symbolic boundaries are drawn across thevaried situations of social life. The author develops asimilar approach with ‘cultural repertoires’ as ele-mentary grammars by which people construct sym-bolical boundaries that can turn into constraintproperties and then legitimate social differences.However, she focuses on ‘the factors that push indi-viduals to select certain tools rather than others’(Lamont and Thévenot, 2000: 20). Generally speak-ing, both Swidler and Lamont focus on taken-for-granted cultural understandings that are embeddedin the meaning-making practices of daily life, so thatculture is understood through social actions.
One of the main references of cultural sociologyas the analysis of cultural codes through social inter-actions is the ‘strong program’, or Yale approach,defended by Jeffrey Alexander, the most discussedauthor in the field. Alexander’s seminal work bringsto sociology the study of the internal dynamics ofsymbolic systems related to social performances ofsecular life. This task is undertaken by postulatingthe theoretical autonomy of the cultural processes,instead of reducing symbols to their interactionalbases (Alexander, 1988, 2003; Cordero et al., 2008;Eyerman, 2004; Hess, 2005). The author combinesstructuralism and hermeneutics to develop anapproach in which culture is considered both as apre-structured system and a reflexive practice(Alexander, 2003: 22). In order to do this, he stress-es the close connections between his cultural sociol-ogy and the anthropological literature on ritual andsecular life by developing ‘a macro model of socialaction as cultural performance’ (Alexander et al.,2006: 77). Through the key concepts of ‘culturestructure’ and ‘performance’, Alexander aims atdefining the elementary formal procedures of mean-ing-making. While the author separates the culturaland the social structures in decomposing the analyt-ical elements of symbolic action, he also posits that
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the moral abstraction involving meaning-makingmust always be referred to concrete objects andpower relations in order to attain its symbolic effica-cy (Alexander, 2008; Alexander et al., 2006).
Alexander opposes cultural sociology to the soci-ology of culture and its focus on organizational andinstitutional settings. One of the main targets of hiscriticism is the production-of-culture approach, ledby the work of Richard Peterson. On the one hand,this approach was decisive for institutionalizing cul-ture as a sociological object, as it posits that culturalobjects are continuously shaped by their social con-texts rather than merely a coherent set of normativevalues (DiMaggio, 2000; Peterson, 2000; Santoro,2008). On the other hand, the production-of-cul-ture approach does not extend the focus on cultureto the methodological foundations of sociology.Instead, it conceives culture as a productive researchfield for testing and developing the various sociolog-ical theories (Hirsch and Fiss, 2000: 98). In turn,Alexander (2003: 12–13) posits that speaking ofsuch sociology of culture amounts to suggesting thatculture is something to be explained by somethingelse totally out of the realm of meaning. In short,while the Yale conception of cultural sociology placesculture as an independent variable in sociologicalanalysis, the production-of-culture approachattempts to explain culture as the result of other rela-tions in social life, making it a dependent variable insociological analysis (Cordero et al., 2008; Santoro,2008; Eyerman, 2004).
Another perspective on cultural sociology is thatof analysing social interactions through their culturalcodifications. Contrary to the American version, theemphasis of this trend of cultural sociology turns tomerging culture and social structures. One can tracethe origins of this definition back to the pivotal workof Roland Robertson. In his early works on sociolo-gy of religion, Robertson (1970, 1980) presents reli-gious beliefs and institutions as starting points totackle the most varied problems of meaning, such asthe fundaments of ethics, morals and values. Later inhis cultural theory of globalization, Robertson drawsagain on the Weberian notion of ‘world images’. Heproposes to consider globalization not merely as the‘compression of the world’, but above all, as an‘intensification of the consciousness of the world as awhole’ (Robertson, 1992: 8). Robertson formulates asystematic conception of ‘cultural variation’, criticiz-ing the more conventional models of sociology ofculture and consolidating the theoretical guidelinesthat had been nurtured since his early works.Whether in his sociology of religion or in his analy-ses on globalization, the chief concern is always to evaluate how cultural variations make tangible the different epistemic correlations between the
universal and the particular in specific historical con-texts. Robertson (1988, 1992) thus suggests that aquite substantive and circumscribed definition ofculture should be replaced by a systematic concep-tion not of culture proper, but of the terms in whichits variation occurs in the social world.
Besides Robertson’s seminal work on religion inthe 1970s, another starting point for this conceptionof cultural sociology was the emergence and the con-solidation of the British cultural studies. From thelate 1960s onwards, the sociological inclinationexperienced by cultural studies in Birmingham wasbased on a criticism of the ‘mainstream’ sociologicalapproaches that tended to consider culture merely asan epiphenomenal byproduct of social life (Bennett,2008; Inglis, 2007). The works of Richard Hoggart,Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams are well knowncontributions to this field. Currently, the legacy ofcultural studies for contemporary cultural sociologyis the object of attention of scholars like David Inglis(2007), for whom the disciplinary boundariesbetween these approaches is not well-worth consid-eration in so far as it overlooks their shared epistemo-logical assumptions. Inglis (2007: 118) states thatboth cultural studies and sociology are designed tomake ‘culture and power closely related, if not in factalmost synonymous’. The intellectual multiplicityand the strong political engagements of culturalstudies are presented as a stimulus to the develop-ment of cultural analysis in contemporary sociology.Nevertheless, there are other quite different ways ofperceiving and evaluating the contribution of cultur-al studies to cultural sociology. Rojek and Turner(2000), for instance, consider that heterogeneity andover-politicization of cultural studies are worthless asthey overestimate literary-oriented approaches inspite of sociological methods.
Whether as a productive source of dialogue or asa tendency to avoid, cultural studies set the bound-ary of this conception of cultural sociology. Themain difference between cultural sociology and thevarious forms of cultural studies is that the first isnecessarily driven by the centrality of sociologicaltheory and methods in the study of culture (Inglis etal., 2007). In this sense, cultural sociology is not aparticular position but refers to a broad field encom-passing all sociological positions vis-a-vis culture.Cultural sociology is then connected to a culture ofsociology, which means that its focus lies on differen-tiating sociological approaches on culture from otherapproaches on the same subject. The production-of-culture approach, for instance, has also been incor-porated into this large conception of culturalsociology (Santoro, 2008). Especially when it isemphasized its shift towards consumption (thechange of metaphor from production to auto-
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production of culture), this approach builds onmeaning issues to analyse how individuals and col-lectivities reappropriate previous symbols in order toproduce changing identities (Hirsch and Fiss, 2000;Peterson, 2000; Santoro, 2008).
How about the other contexts, outside the USand UK? In France, despite all its richness andimportant contributions to the field, the designation‘cultural sociology’ has rarely been applied to socio-logical analysis (Cefaï, 2009; Lichterman, 2007).Considering that symbolical thought was always amajor concern in French social sciences, one mighteven question the extent to which it is possible totalk about a cultural turn in France (Alexander,2003: 11; Cefaï, 2009; Inglis et al., 2007). Regardingsociology, the heritage of Durkheimian late sociolo-gy has been widely preserved through the attentionthat sociologists paid to the symbolic dimension ofsocial phenomena. The legacy of Bourdieu is likewisea valuable contribution to the reinforcement ofFrench cultural analysis, as one can note in NathalieHeinich’s sociology of art (Heinich, 2001). Besides,the blurred boundaries between sociology, anthro-pology and philosophy in France brought the worksof scholars like Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Baudrillard,Derrida and Foucault to the core of sociologicalanalysis, and also influenced the cultural turns ofelsewhere (Cefaï, 2009; Smith, 1998). Yet, there iscurrently one branch of contemporary French sociol-ogy that intends to promote a specific dialoguebetween the American cultural sociology and theFrench pragmatist sociology (Cefaï, 2009; Lamontand Thévenot, 2000; Lichterman, 2007). Theseapproaches endorse the interplay between the cultur-al and the social realms by focusing on how differentmoral criteria of evaluation are validated by individ-uals in their everyday lives (Lamont and Thévenot,2000). In turn, cultural sociology is acquiring grow-ing importance in the Australian sociology. Takingadvantage of the Australian cultural studies, authorshere seek to appropriate the existing literature on theEuropean cultural theories and the American andBritish cultural sociologies so that they can furthernew theoretical approaches (De la Fuente, 2008).This has been partially achieved in several works that take Australian social life as a laboratory foreither improving or reformulating the European andAnglo-American references. For instance,Osbaldiston (2010) has built on Smith’s (1999) ana-lytical classification of place with regard to its sacred,profane, mundane and liminal characteristics inorder to understand Australian citizens’ perceptionsabout the city, the countryside and the beach. Inturn, T Bennett (also an important reference in theBritish context) builds on science studies and actor-network-theory to criticize Alexander’s conception of
the autonomy of culture. He stresses the materialprocesses through which culture has been made animportant dimension of social life (Bennett, 2007,2013). Although one cannot deny the developmentof cultural sociology within Australian cultural stud-ies, it still has a long way to go to consolidate itself asa distinctive approach on culture.
Taken together, these theories of cultural sociolo-gy are linked by a few shared issues upon which theirmain differences are built. Generally speaking, cul-tural sociologists share the task of developing mean-ing-centred approaches that call into question thefallacy of social structure’s concreteness. The goal isto analyse meaning variations ascribed to historicalphenomena, so that meaning is considered asendemic to social life. Without endorsing cultureeither as a ‘consequence’ or as a ‘cause’ of social phe-nomena, cultural sociology seeks to avoid both thetrap of reducing culture to social powers and the trapof treating culture in a paralysing relativism. On theone hand, the authors that answer this challenge byfocusing on culture through interactions tend to sepa-rate the symbolic and the social, claiming for theautonomy of culture. This analytical separation isthought of as a precondition to understand theirempirical connections. On the other hand, theauthors interested in analysing the social interactionsthrough the cultural codes tend to merge the symbolicand the social, so that its empirical linkage is trans-planted to the theoretical front.
Both ways of conceiving cultural sociology pro-vide analytical tools to interpret the ongoing processof its consolidation as a subfield in sociology. Despitethe national constraints that are surrounding thisdebate, the analytical tendencies studied here refer tointerpretative schemes that cannot be reduced to anynational belonging, or even to the individuals them-selves. Nothing can prevent someone from usingboth lenses of cultural sociology in the same work.Besides, within each of the main two trends, one canfind quite different approaches to cultural sociology,such as the understanding of Alexander and Lamont,for example. If, on the one hand, both of them arededicated to study culture through social interac-tions, on the other hand they pursue this goal in dif-ferent ways. Alexander proposes the analyticalautonomy of culture and conceives cultural sociolo-gy as distinct from sociology of culture. Lamont isconcerned with the cultural codes that inform socialhierarchies. She stresses a broader definition of cul-tural sociology as the all-encompassing sociologicalapproaches on culture. Both the lenses of culturethrough social interactions and social interactionsthrough culture may be associated with any of thesetwo conceptions of cultural sociology.
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Cultural sociology on the ground:empirical matters
Race, arts, politics, the media, education, gender, lit-erature, sports, music, the list of empirical objectsanalysed by cultural sociology is almost inter-minable. The proliferation of edited collections andjournals’ special issues about cultural sociologyembraces a wide and varied range of theories, meth-ods and empirical objects. Consequently, there is noself-evident theoretical or methodological correspon-dence among the works identified as contemporarycultural sociology. In the previous section I outlineda way of addressing this heterogeneity by introduc-ing two theoretical trends towards the analysis of thedialogical relations between culture and socialaction. In the present section, I maintain this per-spective in order to expose some empirical mattersthat are being addressed by cultural sociologists.
Considering the approaches that inform the per-spective here broadly referred to as understandingsocial interactions through its cultural codes, the workof Robertson is an important reference and it offersa varied set of empirical finds. In his sociology of reli-gion, he argues that different civilizational matrixes,the world religions, developed varied cultural codesto relate individuals and communities (Robertson,1978, 1980). Turning to the studies on globalization,his main purpose is to analyse the particular ways inwhich different social groups work up and interpretthe fact that they live on the same planet. In thissense, Robertson is concerned with the formationand the intensification of images of world order, thatis to say, with the diverse conceptions of global orderwhich, although generally assimilated to the 20thcentury, are as old as millenarian civilizations andreligions. Therefore, the concept of globalization isused to analyse how social actors work out meanings,identities and institutions in their elaboration of the‘image of the world as a whole’ (Robertson, 1992).His work on football (Robertson, 2006; Robertsonand Giulianotti, 2007), for example, considers thesocial aspects of globalization through its culturaldomains. Robertson (2006: 173–4) examinesAmerican-based supporters of Scottish footballteams, who ‘prefer to transplant their old culturalallegiances and identities into this new territory,while typically cultivating little or no serious interestin the indigenous sporting cultures’. The extensionof these Scottish identities across North Americareveals important sociocultural dimensions of global-ization, such as the construction of interculturalpractices and glocal identities.
Many empirical analyses have attempted tounderstand the social through the cultural focus onmass and popular culture. These last are not taken as
a mere consequence of capitalism, but rather as alegitimate and also creative way of producing mean-ing in social life. Thus, drawing on popular music,Bennett (2008: 429) seeks to explore the localizedand subjective ways in which music and culturalpractice align in everyday contexts. In order to dothat, he invokes Robertson’s notion of ‘glocal’ tostress that the different local contexts in which rapmusic and hip hop culture are experienced end upshaping specific social meanings (Bennett, 2008). Ina similar vein, Inglis questions the alleged superiori-ty of art and high culture over mass and popular cul-ture. The author is concerned in showing thateveryday life bears as much upon art as upon popu-lar culture, so that ‘what counts as “art” depends oncontext; what is viewed very positively at one timeand place can be viewed very negatively at another’(Inglis, 2005: 84). Turning to the domain of cultur-al policy, Anwar Tlili (2008) develops another exam-ple of this trend of cultural sociology by consideringthe dialogical social relationships that assignedmeaning to the concepts of social inclusion/exclu-sion in recent British museum policies. In order toentrench their main cultural policies into the muse-ums, the government had to come up against differ-ent world views held by the museum professionals,and this ended up reframing their main directives.
Considering the perspective of analysing culturethrough the social interactions, Alexander presents awide range of empirical problems related to his the-ory. He seeks in events of social trauma the heuristicvalidation of his cultural-performative theoreticalmodel. Here I mention only his work on the cases ofWatergate and the Holocaust. In both phenomena,the author emphasizes two significant changes occur-ring in the North American collective consciousness.The case of Watergate, the initial perception ofwhich had been one of ‘mere politics’, or an exampleof how tortuous the pursuit of political objectivescan be, came to be seen as a ‘fundamental violation’of moral life. As to the perception of the Holocaust,it went from being seen as a common event in thecontext of war atrocities to the perception of a horri-fying crime against the whole of humanity. In orderto explain these variations, the author first recon-structs the variation of the meanings assigned to eachphenomenon and then he relates this dynamic cul-tural structure with the political and economicaspects of social life (Alexander, 2000: 40, 2007: 24).This macro-theoretical framework combining struc-turalism and hermeneutics allows Alexander toreconstruct the symbolic transformations which con-fer different meanings to the one same historicalevent (Alexander, 2000, 2003).
The publication of Habits of the Heart (Bellah etal., 1986) may be considered as another strong point
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of American cultural sociology. In this book, a teamof five scholars examines the moral foundations ofindividualism in contemporary USA by focusing oneveryday matters such as private and economic lives,religious practices and political participations. Theyargue that the utilitarian and expressive forms ofindividualism have developed with relative inde-pendence from the biblical and republican forms ofindividualism traditionally associated with civic andreligious life in America. Another example of thistrend towards understanding culture through the socialinteractions is the contribution of Swidler (2001),who explores the various ways in which love is tiedto middle-class American’s lives. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the author seeks to understandhow people use the cultural resources about love thatthey have at their disposal in their personal lives.Swidler argues that the extent to which culture canredirect individuals’ strategies of action depends onthe settled or unsettled circumstances upon whichone’s life is based. Love is thus considered as ‘a per-fect place to study culture in action’ (Swidler, 2001:4). In turn, Lamont (2000a) develops a similarapproach concerning the cultural repertoires fromwhich lower-middle-class working men in Franceand the USA draw to create their sense of self-worth.In the USA, she considers black and white Americanworkers, while in France she focuses on white Frenchworkers and North African immigrants. Throughthese social groups, Lamont identifies several pat-terns of mobilizing the moral criteria that frame thesymbolic boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in eachgroup. In the same vein, the volume that she editedwith Laurent Thévenot (2000) builds on cross-national analysis between France and the USA. Themain objective of that book is to analyse the differ-ent ways in which moral criteria such as market per-formance or civic solidarity are legitimized byindividuals in everyday life.
Amidst the works that are not usually classified ascultural sociology, sociology of culture or culturalstudies, one can find additional inspiration to facethe challenges posed by such a renewed approach onculture and social life. Bjorn Wittrock (2000), forinstance, presents an insightful contribution to thisdebate as he states the impossibility of thinkingabout modernity and its main projects (democracyand liberalism) without taking into account themodern epistemic changes that inaugurated in the18th century a still ongoing process of wide culturalimplications for both social life and sociology.Concerning the weight of history, one can mentionElisa Reis’s important work about the interplaybetween historical phenomena and sociological the-ory. Either focusing on the cultural construction ofpoverty and inequality (Reis and Moore, 2005) or
analysing the state building process in Brazil (Reis,1998), her main task is always to focus on the open-ended construction of ‘society’ as a cultural and his-torical phenomenon. Nilüfer Göle also provides animaginative approach that could further culturalsociology, as she revisits the classical discussion onpublic space, taking into account the current interre-lationships between Islam and Europe. Göle (2005,2010) draws on the notion of visibility and perform-ance to analyse the inclusion of religious culturalcodes into the formation of the emerging Europeanpublic space. Last but not least, William Sewell, Jr(1992) proposes to analyse the mutual influences ofmeaning and power in the consolidation and trans-formation of any social structure, whether it be a sin-gle couple, a factory, a national army or a language.His study on the political structures of the Frenchrevolution (Sewell, 1996) is highly inventive as hetackles the meaning variation that was associated tothe taking of the Bastille, from its planning on 12July to its assessment by the National Assembly on23 July. An unintended result of this process was thearticulation of the ideas of popular violence and pop-ular sovereignty, giving rise to the modern conceptu-alization of social revolution.
Evaluating cultural sociology
The diversity of themes, theories and empiricalobjects that are associated with contemporary cultur-al sociology is a double-edged sword. On the onehand, authors further the discipline by promoting arich dialogue through multiple disciplinary bound-aries. The influences of traditions such as poststruc-turalism, symbolic anthropology, various versions ofsociology of culture and cultural studies were of cru-cial importance for the formation of this reneweddebate about culture in sociology. On the otherhand, the growing number of edited collections withreference to cultural sociology in their title is too het-erogeneous a body of theoretical and methodologicalissues. Usually, the diversity is such that the task ofexplaining the merits of these contributions for theconsolidation of cultural sociology is restricted to theeditors’ introductions. Beyond these differences,there are several assumptions shared by these diverseapproaches, as I have argued in the above sections.The interplay between the cultural and the socialand the focus on meaning variations are two centralprinciples of analysis from which cultural sociolo-gists seek to revitalize the notion of culture.
If cultural sociology has been hailed as a promis-ing and influential mode of addressing the centralityof meaning in social life, it has also been subject tovarious criticisms. These criticisms are as varied as
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their targets. Nevertheless, most of them concern theplace of power in cultural sociology’s analytical andresearch agenda. Depending on their targets, thecritics point out either the underestimation or theoverestimation of the role of power relations. In thefirst case, it is argued that the separation of meaningand social life neglects the weight of the social hier-archies and the power mechanisms that are inextrica-bly linked to meaning-making. The main object ofthis line of criticism is the ‘strong program’ defendedby Alexander (Joas, 2005; Kurasawa, 2004). The sec-ond general line of criticism is directed againstapproaches that tend to merge the cultural and thesocial, especially to those proposing to include cul-tural studies as a valuable contribution to culturalsociology. The lack of historical depth and compara-tive research and the over-politicization of the debateon culture are presented as obstacles to include cul-tural analysis in cultural sociology (Rojek andTurner, 2000). In short, the greatest pitfall for thosewho attempt to separate culture and social structureis to deal with the notion of power in the same waytheir opponents have dealt with the notion of cul-ture. In turn, those who attempt to merge the cultur-al and the social risk replacing a substantialconception of the social with an essentializing con-ception of the cultural.
The apparently contradictory elements of thesetwo lines of criticisms only reinforce the heteroge-neous backgrounds from which cultural sociologysprings. The different ways of relating culture andpower into a sociology of meaning produces a variedrepertoire of what is, and what is not, cultural soci-ology. What is regarded as ‘internal criticism’ fromone standpoint can also be considered as ‘externalcriticism’ from another. The contribution ofBourdieu to cultural sociology is indicative of thisheterogeneity. His approach figures as both enablingand constricting (Kurasawa, 2004; Rojek andTurner, 2000). Bourdieu’s sociology appears as avaluable contribution to cultural sociology to theextent that he focuses attention on the problem ofinternalizing social structures through practicalschemes of perception and appreciation (Bourdieu,1997). However, in the methodological ground oflinking theory to empirical phenomena, the culturalpotential of Bourdieu’s analysis seems to berestrained by his obsessive focus on the market logicof distinction that structures social fields (Bourdieu,1979, 1998). As it was mentioned early, the borderdemarcation between cultural sociology, sociology ofculture and cultural studies is another open discus-sion that comprises distinct and even antagonisticpositions (Alexander, 2003; De la Fuente, 2008;Hays, 2000; Inglis, 2007; Rojek and Turner, 2000).
Cultural sociology and future directions
The fact of being overly based on the American andBritish contexts is one of the main obstacles that cul-tural sociology needs to overcome in order to achieveits analytical potential. Several collected volumeshave overlapped the boundaries between these twocontexts by bringing together a range of works representative of diverse conceptions of cultural sociology (Back et al., 2012; Hall et al., 2010).Nevertheless, with the exception of Australia andFrance on a smaller scale, it is quite rare to hearabout cultural sociology outside the American andBritish scenes. Cultural sociologists from elsewherecould reinterpret this debate from within differentsociological traditions. This would not only increasecultural sociological conceptual tools, but may alsocreate new ones.
Besides crossing the national lines that frame thecurrent effort to define cultural sociology, anotherimportant challenge for its future concerns the con-solidation of a more homogeneous framework oftheoretical and methodological procedures thatmake it possible to further the discipline withoutjeopardizing the dialogue with border disciplines.Cultural sociology should not be thought of either asa theory that precedes the historical phenomena inconceptualizing how the symbolic mechanisms ofmeaning-making work out, or as a style of analysisthat renounces disciplinary borders in favour of anindiscriminate interdisciplinarity. I contend that cul-tural sociology should be thought of as a sub-disci-pline situated at the intersection of other disciplinesand sub-disciplines (such as anthropology, historicalsociology, sociology of culture and political sociolo-gy), but this should not lead to a lack of a coherentset of theoretical and methodological tools. Even if itstill has a long way to go, cultural sociology has beensuccessful in establishing a particular direction todeal with its endemic heterogeneity. On the onehand, the traps of culturalism are partially avoided,as the focus has not been to build on a radical rela-tivist generalization of culture, but rather to use thenotion of culture in a kind of sociology of sociology.What matters is to consider culture as a startingpoint for the understanding and explanation of his-torical phenomena. Thus, the task is to avoid limit-ing the reach of culture to any factor other than itsvery symbolic autonomy. In other words, the focus ismainly on the variation of the meanings that areascribed to historical phenomena. Considering theempirical level, there are several inventive uses of cul-tural sociology in sociological research. Lamont isconcerned with applying cultural sociology’s analyti-cal frames as a way of exploring new themes of analy-
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sis, as in the recent debate on the concepts of evalu-ation and valuation (Lamont, 2012). The authoranalyses a number of works that explore the waysvalues are produced, diffused, assessed and institu-tionalized across a range of settings. She is especiallyconcerned with the definitions of worth and the sys-tems of evaluation that are shaped by different typesof constraints such as the law, the body, notions offairness, etc. Although there is no systematic dia-logue between the works that she labels as sociologyof evaluation and valuation, this dialogue could beachieved by cultural sociology’s analytical tools.
The aforementioned studies about the notion ofcultural trauma are another promising way of devel-oping cultural sociology, especially if one considersthe culture through power trend. Most of theseworks reveal the symbolical shifts that encompass theconstruction of cultural traumas. The transforma-tion of discrete events into a cultural trauma is madepossible by narrative plots which drive the transfor-mative potential of these events within the taken forgranted perceptions of collective identity (Eyerman,2011, 2012). Although most of these analyses con-cern political issues, it would be inventive to applythese analytical models to the study of religiousbelonging, professional ethics and other forms ofpublic discourses that are not primarily related topolitics. This does not need to lead to any form ofculturalism inasmuch as the focus on actors’ per-formances and power constraints is maintained.
I would like to finish these brief remarks byrecalling the importance of Max Weber’s concept ofculture as a fruitful way to work out cultural sociol-ogy’s dilemmas in relating the cultural and the social.Taking culture as synonymous to social values,Weber presents this notion as a requisite for bothindividuals, who assign meaning in their everydayinteractions, and for sociologists, who select specificevents and designate them as ‘social-historical phe-nomena’. Sociology, thus, elects its criteria of inter-nal validation among the cultural and historicalcontexts upon which it operates. By treating culturesimultaneously as object and method of analysis(Alexander and Reed, 2009; Lima Neto, 2007,2013; Robertson, 1978), cultural sociology is alreadydeeply committed to this dialogical perspective. Asfar as it refers to itself as a product of contemporaryshifts that have occurred in sociological theory, andconsidering the current reviews of classical conceptswithin sociology, cultural sociology offers a real pos-sibility to turn into solid ground the analytical shift-ing sands on which we are presently evolving.
Annotated further reading
Bonnell VE, Hunt L (eds) (1999) Beyond the CulturalTurn: New Directions in the Study of Society andCulture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press. This edited volume is dedicated to analysing historyand historical sociology under the general rubric ofthe cultural turn. Bonnell and Hunt’s well-knownintroduction discusses the intersection betweenculture and social life without accepting theobliteration of the social that is implied by the mostradical forms of culturalism. In order to escape thereductionism of culturalism, the scholars thatcontribute to this book seek further causalexplanations for cultural analysis in their differentsocial science traditions.
Friedland R, Mohr J (eds) (2004) Matters of Culture:Cultural Sociology in Practice. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.This edited volume presents 14 essays by scholarswho are committed to advancing differentapproaches to cultural analysis in sociology. Theeditors’ introduction offers a critical review andassessment of the cultural turn in Americansociology. The following chapters discuss a variety ofsubjects related to cultural sociology, boththeoretically and empirically.
Inglis D, Hughson J (2003) Confronting Culture:Sociological Vistas. Cambridge: Polity Press.This book presents a detailed analysis of howparticular sets of themes in sociology of culture weredeveloped over time in Germany, France, GreatBritain and the United States. In addition to this,Inglis and Hughson also devote one chapter to thegreat contribution of classical sociology to thecontemporary debate on cultural sociology.
Sahlins M (2000) Culture in Practice: Selected Essays.New York: Zone Books. This book is a collection of articles written by theauthor between the 1960s and 1990s. Sahlinsexamines from various perspectives the differentsymbolic logics that inform social practices andperceptions of the world in everyday life, whether insocieties organized around the principle of totemismor economic rationality. Through concepts such asmetaculture or structure of conjuncture, Sahlinsdevelops an approach about the cultural variationsthat is an important source of inspiration for scholarsin cultural sociology: ‘Physical things have causes,but human things reasons – symbolically constructedreasons even when they are physically caused’ (pp.28–9).
Wedeen L (2002) Conceptualizing culture: Possibilitiesfor political science. American Political Science Review96(4): 713–28. This article explores several possibilities to considerculture as an independent variable in politicalanalysis. Instead of thinking about culture as a reifiedand fixed system, such as the political cultureoriented analyses, Wedeen focuses on meaning-
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making practices in order to understand how actorsinvest political phenomena with meaning. Theintelligibility of political phenomena is then analysedin the light of the interplay between practices andsigns.
Wray M (2013) Cultural Sociology: An IntroductoryReader. New York: WW Norton.This volume gathers a range of classical andcontemporary texts which are important references tounderstand the debate on cultural sociology. Theselection of texts is quite successful in encouraging areflection on the relationships between the classicalparameters and the present challenges with regard tothe sociological approach on culture. Texts arepreceded by an introduction that explores complexthemes of social theory in a simple language,accessible to non-specialist readers.
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Fernando Lima Neto is Professor of Political Science at the Catholic University of Rio deJaneiro (PUC-Rio). He has a PhD in sociology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro(UFRJ, Brazil) and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, France). His doctor-al dissertation examines the social values which confer meaning to the notion of NGO in Brazil.His interests include sociological theory, politics and culture in global phenomena and NGOs.[email: [email protected]]
résumé La sociologie culturelle vise à intégrer le rôle central de la production de sens dans l’analyse desphénomènes sociaux. Cet article présente un aperçu générale de la sociologie culturelle, en se concentrantsur ses principaux axes théoriques, méthodologiques et empiriques. Il compare deux différents façons delier des codes culturels et des interactions sociales dans l’analyse des phénomènes sociaux. L’interactionentre le culturel et le social et l’accent mis sur les variations de sens sont deux principes centraux del'analyse à partir de laquelle les sociologues culturels cherchent à revitaliser la notion de culture ensociologie.
mot-clés culture et vie sociale ◆ études culturelles ◆ sens ◆ sociologie culturelle ◆ sociologie de laculture
resumen La sociología cultural tiene por propósito incorporar el papel central de la construcción designificado en el análisis de los fenómenos sociales. Este artículo presenta una visión general de lasociología cultural, centrándose en sus principales marcos teóricos, estrategias metodológicas yinvestigaciones empíricas. Se comparan dos maneras diferentes de conectar los códigos culturales y lasinteracciones sociales en el análisis de los fenómenos sociales. La interacción entre lo cultural y lo socialy la atención a las variaciones de significado son dos principios centrales de análisis de sociólogosculturales, que buscan revitalizar el concepto de cultura en la sociología.
palabras clave cultura y vida social ◆ estudios culturales ◆ sentido ◆ sociología cultural ◆ sociologíade la cultura
