Two ways culture is produced

Abstract

This has been written in response to the editors' question, ‘how did you get into the sociology of culture and how do you see what you have done?’ The answer is that in trying to be what was then called an industrial sociologist, I stumbled on ‘culture’, a word that wasn't then being employed in a useful way. With others I tried to make something out of it that a wide range of serious sociologists could use in finding their own way. The strategic idea was to turn from culture as ‘normative values’ or ‘abstract norms’ and view it as ‘expressive symbols’. This paper shows the origins of the observation that culture in this sense is produced and explores how that idea moved from a focus on the institutionalized culture industry worlds to the auto-production that takes place as individuals and collectivies adopt expressive symbols and, in recombining them, make them the source of their identity.