Cultural Sociology, History of

This course provides students with an outlook of the genesis, institutionalization and current trends in cultural sociology. There will be a particular focus on the development of this field in the past four decades, which have seen the rise, the stabilization and the internal criticism of the so called "cultural turn" in the social sciences and the humanities. The two main objectives are a) to familiarize students with a growing, diverse, and exciting body of literature that approaches cultural analysis with the goal to contribute to general sociological theory; and b) to prepare students for doing their own cultural research. These two aspects -at least in my vision -always walk hand in hand, linking theory and metatheory to empirical analysis. Many of the questions, approaches, and articles that will be discussed in the course successfully bridge these two sides of cultural sociology, and should therefore be read both as important contributions to a culturally oriented social theory and as exemplar case studies in the analysis of the relationship between culture and society. As students will notice very early on, it is impossible to give even a cursory overview of cultural sociology given the constraints of a brief course. I have made selections, with two consequences: a) although cultural sociology has relevant classical roots in the work of Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Simmel, and Saussure, I have limited the time devoted to the discussion of the classics: I expect students who are supposed to finish their MA's soon to be familiar with the general ideas of these authors' works, and I will bring them up occasionally in class when it is required by the lecture; b) my own inclinations and prejudices about what cultural sociology is and what it should be will feature heavily in class discussion; therefore, I will give prominence to one particular positioncultural autonomy -one problem (how can we achieve cultural explanation?), and some substantive areas like politics, the arts, and the intersection between cultural autonomy and cultural production. There will also be a strong preference towards cultural historical sociology. My biases notwithstanding, my main goal for this course is to have students become familiar with the best examples of cultural analysis from a sociological perspective, and this means exploring all the range of approaches that create the landscape of contemporary cultural sociology: cognitive sociology, the production perspective, repertoire theory, social semiotics, and many more. At least a couple of them should suit one's inclinations and interests. The articles, books, and essays I have chosen combine the definition of theoretical questions, rigorous empirical analysis, and some methodological innovations. And, at the end of the day, they are great examples of sociological imagination. One can learn a lot about the politics of nature by looking at how gardens were designed in France during the ancien regime, and a lot about the way bureaucracy works from the problems restaurant chefs face in the day-to-day management of cooking. So, in the end, choose your topic, learn a lot, and make me learn a lot that I don't know yet.

In this statement, the new editorial team for Cultural Sociology considers the position and legacy of the journal, offers their interpretation of the current state of the field, and reflects on what it means for the journal to serve as an ‘organ of self-consciousness’ (Inglis et al., 2007: 7) in cultural sociology today. We also identify some of the hot topics and critical conversations we would like to encourage in the journal, as well as our hopes for strengthening and widening the journal’s visibility.

A B S T R AC T This article attempts to clarify some misunderstandings between English-speaking and French-speaking scholars in the field of the sociology of arts and culture. In addition to a number of ambiguities in the definition of what 'culture', 'ar ts' and 'sociology' mean within the French and the Anglo-American academic traditions, the very words 'culture', 'cultural sociology' and 'cultural studies' exhibit important differences between each other as they are understood within each linguistic context. Seen from a French point of view, so-called 'French theory' appears as a typically Anglo-American category, along with 'post-modernism', while French debates among sociologists of art seem to have few echoes abroad. The linguistic dissym-metry between French and Anglo-American academic cultures should be taken into account in order better to understand the nature of these misunderstandings. K E Y WO R D S cultural sociology / cultural studies / French theory / post-modernism / sociology of art / sociology of arts / sociology of culture

Journal of Sociology, 2008

This 'Cultural Sociology' special issue of the Journal of Sociology comes at a significant time in the development of cultural sociological analysis. Culture sections are thriving within North American, British and European sociological associations and the Cultural Sociology Group has established itself as amongst the most popular thematic sections in The Australian Sociological Association. Culture is also the subject of a burgeoning sociological literature. This includes the establishment of the journal Cultural Sociology, the first international sociology periodical exclusively dedicated to the examination of cultural matters. The emergence of cultural sociology as a sub-discipline can be understood in reference to a broader 'cultural turn' in the social sciences. In sociology this has had two implications. Where cultural spheres such as the media, popular culture, art, music, fashion, consumption and lifestyle were once not considered a basis for serious sociological scholarship (Zolberg, 1989), there is now a widespread appreciation of their importance in shaping the economy, politics and the conduct of public life (Lash and Urry, 1994). The 'cultural turn' has also seen the integration of cultural theories, concepts and methods into mainstream sociology. As the editors of a recent sociological collection on 'matters of culture' surmise, '[w]here sociologists once spurned culture', today they embrace problems and topics 'traditionally within the humanist's purview … [and] increasingly emphasize the role of meanings, symbols, cultural frames, and cognitive schema' (Friedland and Mohr, 2004: 1). The linguistic and semiotic analysis of French structuralism, in particular, has provided a vocabulary for the emergence of a more cultural form of the 'sociological imagination' that avoids the reductionism of both grand systems functionalism and purely materialist understandings of social life.

Journal of Classical Sociology, 2006

It is argued that a renewed reception of the works of the Polish and American scholar Florian Znaniecki should be carried out by any so–called ‘cultural turn’ in sociology. If the new cultural sociology is to obtain firm and broader theoretical grounds, it needs to transcend its mere reaction against structural–functional normativism in search of classic studies of cultural dynamics such as those of Florian Znaniecki. The reasons behind the blurring of Znaniecki's influence upon 20th–century sociologists, including Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schutz, are investigated through a general examination of the reception contexts of his work. An overview of Znaniecki's general theoretical contribution to cultural sociology is simultaneously presented.

Being Cultural (edited by Bruce M. Z. Cohen), 2012

This chapter introduces students to some of the important issues and terminology which will help to ground the sociological study of cultural studies and popular culture. This includes a discussion of the deeply contested nature of ‘culture’, a word that Raymond Williams famously described as ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (1983: 87). Definitions are appropriate starting points for sociological discussion and the chapter takes time to note some of the keywords that are often encountered in the area, such as ‘cultural text’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘resistance’. Some time is also spent considering the rise of industrial capitalism and mass production in the nineteenth century. It is crucial for students to understand the fundamental social, economic and political changes that resulted from the industrial revolution and the rise of industrial society. The development of machines and processes which could mass produce items led to the emergence of ‘mass culture’ (or ‘popular culture’). The effects that mass-produced ‘culture’ had on Western society has formed a key debate within cultural studies between the cultural conservatives (such as Arnold and Leavis) and ‘culturalists’ such as Williams. This debate is the focus of the second half of this chapter.

Culture, 2003

Well before it became autonomous, which made possible contemporary value pluralism and multiculturalism, neo-classical sociologists had been aware of the ascendancy of culture. For instance, Parsons registered the process of 'cultural revolution' through which the cultural system was being differentiated from the social, political and economic systems; and Habermas saw a growing concern with 'motivation and meaning' in 'postmodern societies' taking the place of the older concern with 'value'. The increase in the significance, awareness and discursive availability of culture anticipated by these and other authors took, at least from a neo-classical sociological point of view, a rather unexpected turn. It culminated in the cultural heterogenization of the social that favoured such new developments as postmodernism and cultural studies and, by the same token, threatened sociology with obsolescence and placed sociologists on the defensive. 3

European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2020

This is the syllabus of the course I will teach at the University of Trento in 2015/2016. Please notice that the syllabus is not final. Students must refer to the material officially published in the course's page and in the online teaching website.