Sociology, Cultural Studies and the Cultural Turn

Abstract

For 40 years, the relationship between sociology and cultural studies has posed central questions of self-definition and practice for both projects. By orchestrating a range of manifesto-style statements — the full literature can only be gestured towards — this chapter offers an analytical profile of the unfolding dealings between the two formations, starting with the prevailing discourse around sociology at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the 1970s (‘Birmingham’). The second sketch — ‘postmodern con-juncturalism’ — takes as background the worldwide growth of cultural studies as an undergraduate quasi-discipline, involving the active displacement of disciplinary sociology. In a third movement —‘sociological readjustment’ — the tables are ostensibly turned once again, but at this point the whole notion of the ‘cultural turn’, which rhetorically governs most of the debate, requires critical focus. In the years after 2000, a mood of ‘pragmatic reflexivity’ emerges in cultural studies and sociology alike, in which, despite latent tensions, various balances are struck between culture and economy, theory and method, political purpose and academic professionalism. With these developments, the prospect of a more principled partnership between the ‘warring twins’ (D. Inglis, 2007) could be glimpsed. However, several recent currents of thought and research are undermining the ‘culture and society’ problematic that has sustained most versions of the sociology-cultural studies encounter.