Lyn Spillman - What is Cultural Sociology?

From the 1970s, though, and in the process of dealing with these questions, sociologists stopped treating the idea of culture as vague and residual, as an abstract thing, and explicitly specified concepts and approaches to understanding culture, cultural difference, and cultural conflict. The thriving field of cultural sociology emerged.

So several sources of confusion can make the idea of culture seem unclear, especially in sociology. Not only is there extreme real-world variation in particular rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories we may encounter, there are also many options and debates about how to analyze them. Moreover, the historical genealogy of the idea of culture still generates two distinct connotations: culture as a separate institutional sphere within modern societies (highlighting differences with economics and politics); and culture as a property of whole social groups (highlighting social differences). And beyond that, disputes within sociology about whether to emphasize cultural conflict or consensus, social structure or agency, and interpretation or explanation added a further layer of complexity to thinking about culture, including different vocabularies to understand cultural elements. As a result, sociologists have occasionally complained that culture is so complicated and confusing that it is impossible to analyze. But this complaint makes little sense: any topic can be complex and ambiguous when we start to dig deep, even topics that some would consider easier to study, like politics or economics. What is needed is a sociological concept of culture which offers coherence in complexity. Since the seventies, cultural sociologists have been working with just such a concept.

All cultural sociology shares a central focus on processes of meaning-making . Cultural sociologists investigate puzzles and questions about meanings, and in doing so they account for the various rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories that people may share, and take for granted as natural. They also offer a fresh understanding of how taken-for-granted ideas may generate power, inequality, and conflict. Meaning-making processes generate both pattern and variation.

This concept of culture, referring to processes of meaning-making, actually returns to and extends what Raymond Williams found to be the first uses of the concept as a noun of process, before “culture” was reified as a unitary, abstract thing. Since the term is now understood to refer to a process, it can encompass various elements, because meaning may be generated and expressed in ritual, symbolization, evaluation, normative action, and categorization (and numerous other cultural processes).

The concept of culture as meaning-making process also works well to include both historical connotations of the term: meaning-making processes are involved whether our analytic focus is on culture as a distinct set of social institutions producing symbolic objects (arts, popular culture, mass culture, etc.) or on culture as a property of groups (and characterizing group differences).

Within sociology, considering culture as meaning-making process highlights what different approaches and perspectives share, while remaining open to different views about the nature of the processes involved. It bears a close relationship to the Berger and Luckmann idea of “the social construction of reality,” which sociologists generally embraced, but makes conceptual space for more analytical precision and flexibility, opening social construction up to analysis, rather than closing it down as a generic sociological assumption about “reality.” And it allows us to take a step back from overarching sociological debates about conflict and consensus, structure and agency, and interpretation and explanation, capturing an idea common to them all and turning those debates into specific empirical questions, like “what is the mix of conflict and consensus in this situation, and why?” And as this book will show, the concept of culture as meaning-making process also encompasses more recent perspectives within cultural sociology about how to study culture.

However, all investigations begin with presuppositions, and it is helpful to make them explicit. The major presuppositions of cultural sociology are captured in the foundational concept of meaning. Cultural sociologists assume that humans are meaning-making creatures and that meaning is an essential component of all human groups and human action. Meaning is understood as distinct from biological processes: although meaning-making is certainly an emergent natural capacity of humans as biological creatures, and biology and culture can influence each other, meaning is not reducible to biological processes. Meaning is also understood as fundamentally public: although individual, subjective experience is certainly essential in meaning-making, meaning is not reducible to that experience. Rather, collective meaning-making processes create the conditions for individual, subjective experience. These presuppositions – that humans are meaning-making creatures, that culture is irreducible to biology, and that meaning is irreducible to private, subjective experience – have formed a firm foundation for research, and also guide the development of cultural theory (Spillman 2016).

Cultural sociologists explore meaning-making processes based on these conceptual foundations. Given these foundations, what do you need to know to do cultural sociology? This book examines three lines of research in the field.

First, cultural sociologists focus on cultural objects and their properties. Unlike most other sociologists, they analyze in some depth what Berger and Luckmann called the “signs” mediating “the social construction of reality.” For instance, how can different ways the same story is told generate different meanings? Or how does the weathering of billboards affect what they communicate? Rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories all express meaning through signs, and rather than taking this for granted, or assuming that signs can be ignored because they are transparent and simple, cultural sociologists consider how the cultural forms of signs influence processes of meaning-making. This is the most distinctive added value of cultural sociology compared to other perspectives in sociology.

Second, cultural sociologists analyze interaction as a meaning-making process. Frequently building on sociology’s long interest in symbolic interaction, they focus on how interaction between individuals and within smaller groups influences meaning-making. For instance, how do childhood interactions create long-lasting musical or political tastes, and how do those tastes affect an individual’s subsequent interactions and prospects? Or how do subcultures demonstrate their differences from the mainstream? Processes of action and interaction shape the expression and interpretation of the meaning of even widely shared signs.

Third, cultural sociologists analyze how culture is produced in large organizations, institutions, or fields of action. Frequently building on sociology’s long interest in social structure and in large organizations, they focus on how meaning-making is influenced by large-scale patterns of social relations and organizational constraints. For instance, how does the mass production of music in large corporations affect the sort of music produced, compared to music performed in smaller and more informal settings? Or how does the pattern of relations among journalists, government officials, and non-profit providers all interested in humanitarian aid affect how mass violence is viewed? While any given individual may be unaware of the larger patterns of social relations affecting their meaning-making, cultural sociologists demonstrate many ways in which patterns of relations in the larger society are a critical influence on cultural production.