The Sociology of Culture: Four Good Arguments (and One Bad One)

Abstract

As recently as fifteen years ago, work in the sociology of culture took place in relative isolation. The field consisted of a handful of individuals roaming around like a scattered clan of hunter-gatherers, investigating such phenomena as the cultural practices of poor people, the system of literary reference, the values of revolutionaries, the structure of popular movies, or the organization of art markets. Such investigations, generally animated by either Marxian or functionalist assumptions, produced significant results, both theoretically and empirically. Especially notable were the theoretical advances produced by the Birmingham School's combination of Marxism, feminism, and semiotics; the increasing methodological sophistication shown in cultural analysis, especially through the application of network approaches and hermeneutics; and the substantive advances in understanding cultural organizations and markets made by the production-of-culture school. What these investigations and advances did not produce, however, was debate, at least not within the field of the sociology of culture itself. Few forums existed in which students of culture came together to discuss and disagree. Engagement and disagreement, essential to any field's development, came about with the institutionalization of cultural studies that occurred in the 1980s. This institutionalization took a number of concrete forms. One was the formation of a culture section in the American Sociological Association in 1987, which mushroomed into being one of the largest ASA sections. Subfields like the study of organizational cultures boomed (for a somewhat skeptical account of this growth, see Alvesson 1990). New journals appeared, such Theory, Culture, and Society in 1982 and Cultural Studies in 1987 (both journals reflecting the continued influence of the Birmingham School). Other journals shifted their attention, as when the editors of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Literature, the Media and the Arts turned from concentrating on linguistics towards a greater emphasis on psychological and especially sociological studies; this shift was spearheaded by Cees van Rees, a sociologist and part of the Tilburg group of scholars studying literary institutions, who became Poetics' editor in 1991. Moreover, the mainstream sociology journals began publishing a growing number of cultural studies. To give a crude indication of the field's growth, comparing the 1976-78 and the 1989-91 coverage of 'culture' (including 'cultures' and 'cultural') in the volumes of the Social Sciences Citation Index, one finds that, while the total citations (measured by numbers of columns) have increased by only 5 per cent, the citations involving culture have increased 41 per cent. Why this institutionalization took place, why cultural studies and cultural variables moved from the margins toward the center of the discipline, is far from clear. A generational theory would point to the extraordinary influence of Clifford Geertz and E. P. Thompson upon graduate students in the 1970s; members of that cohort are now moving into the forefront of the discipline, and bringing their cultural interests with them. A more dialectical approach would (C) Scandinavian Sociological Association, 1992