The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology

by Alexander, Jeffrey C.; Jacobs, Ronald; Smith, Philip

• ISBN13: 9780195377767
• ISBN10: 0195377761
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-26
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In recent decades, the focus of the study of culture in sociology has been divided between the sociology of culture and cultural sociology. In the former approach, culture is seen as a reflection of the deeper and more "real" social structures. A cultural sociology, however, begins from the premise that ideas and beliefs retain autonomy from the social structures to which they refer and illuminate. Only after the internal logics of meaning have been discovered and understood--the codes, narratives, and rhetorical techniques--can the cultural be put back into social structure, and analyzed in a multidimensional way. Edited by Jeffrey Alexander, arguably the leading cultural sociologist in the world, and two other widely respected practitioners, Ron Jacobs and Phil Smith, these essays from an international cast of the best and brightest cultural sociologists cover topics in theory and method; power, politics, and states; economics and organization; mass media; social movements; religion; aesthetics; knowledge; and health. Organized by empirical areas of study rather than particular theories or competing intellectual strands, the editors demonstrate that cultural sociology is not so much as a specialized subfield of sociology but, rather, an intellectual approach that can be generalized across all the core fields of the discipline.

Author Biography

Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University.

Ronald Jacobs is an Associate Professor of Sociology at University at Albany, SUNY.

Philip Smith is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Cultural Sociology Today

The Cultural Method in Sociology

Cultural Sociology as a Research Program: Post-Positivism, Meaning, and Causality

Rationalization Processes inside Cultural Sociology

Four Ways to Measure Culture: Social Science, Hermeneutics, and the Cultural Turn

The Economic as Culture

Culture and the Economy

Culture and Economic Life

The Political as Culture

From Moral Sentiments to Civic Engagement: Sociological Analysis as Responsible Spectatorship

Reinventing the Concept of Civic Culture

Cultural Sociology and Civil Society in a World of Flows: Recapturing Ambiguity, Hybridity and the Political

The Media as Culture

Mediatized Disasters in the Global Age: On the Ritualization of Catastrophe

Media, Intellectuals, the Public Sphere, and the Story of Barack Obama in 2008

Entertainment Media and the Aesthetic Public Sphere

Race and Immigration as Culture

Rethinking the Relationship of African American Men to the Street

Ethnicity, Race, Nationhood, Foreignness, Etc.: Prolegomena to a Cultural Sociology of Difference-Based Interactions

Burning Schools/Building Bridges: Ethnographical Touchdowns in the Civil Sphere

Religion as Culture

The Constitution of Religious Political Violence: Institution, Culture and Power

Globalization, Culture and Religion

Social Movements as Culture

Narrative and Social Movements

The Politics of Authenticity: Civic Individualism and the Cultural Roots of Gay Normalization

Trauma as Culture

Rethinking Conflict and Memory: the case of Nanjing

Cultural Trauma: Emotion and Narration

The Chinese Construction and Repression of Trauma: The Rape of Nanjing

Events as Culture

Events as Templates of Possibility: An Analytic Typology of Political Facts

Cultural Pragmatics and the Structure and Flow of Democratic Politics

Materiality as Culture

Consumption as Cultural Interpretation: Taste, Performativity and Navigating The Forest Of Objects

The Force of Embodiment: Bodies, Dispositions and Culture

Music Sociology in a New Key

Knowledge as Culture

Narrating Global Warming

Classification and Ambiguity as Culture

Broadening the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Focus On Mundane Life in Organizations

Inbetweenness and Ambivalence

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.