Meaning and Method

The Cultural Approach to Sociology

Isaac Reed, Jeffrey C. Alexander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594515705
• eBook ISBN: 9781317256229
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Culture is increasingly important to American social science, but in what way? This book addresses the core issues of the sociology of culture-questions about the social role of meaning, along with those about the methods sociologists use to study culture and society-in a manner that makes clear their relevance to sociology as a whole. Part I consists of essays by leading cultural sociologists on how the turn to culture has changed the sociological study of organizations, economic action, and television, and concludes with Georgina Born's methodological statement on the sociology of art and cultural production. Part II contains a highly original, and at times heated, debate between Richard Biernacki and John H. Evans on the appropriateness of abstract and quantifiable coding schemes for the sociological study of culture. Ranging from the philosophy of science to the concrete, practical problems of interpreting masses of cultural data, the debate raises the controversy over the interpretation of culture and the explanation of social action to a new level of sophistication.

1

Culture as Object and Approach in Sociology

Isaac Reed

Culture is increasingly important to American sociology,¹ but in what way? At least twenty years on from the (latest) “cultural turn,”² can we specify what it means that so many sociologists “study culture”? A lot of work has been done to define cultural history and a lot of postmodern ink spilled over the epistemic status of cultural anthropology; this book is intended to reflexively comprehend what is going on in cultural sociology. It is about, in particular, how the consideration of culture—and its accompanying term, meaning—reforms and reframes the nature of sociological inquiry as a whole. It is thus concerned with method in both the broad, conceptual sense of the concepts that define and frame inquiry, and in the technical sense of what sociologists who study culture do in their everyday research practices. In this introductory chapter, I want to set out a schema for thinking about culture in sociology that puts into perspective the purpose and scope of the chapters that follow.

To begin with, consider a very intuitive distinction concerning how culture can be important to sociology: as object and as approach. Culture as an object would approximate what people mean when they refer to high and low “culture,” and thus would include the sociology of art, literature, and television—and perhaps also religion, science, and other forms of knowledge. The study of what has been thought and said, and of the produced cultural artifacts of this or that society, would take culture as its object and apply well-known sociological methods and theories to this object.

Culture as approach would refer to how standard sociological objects of inquiry (e.g., race, class, gender) are researched “from a cultural perspective”—that is, examined for their discursive or symbolic elements or aspects. Here all of sociology is fair game for the sociologist who “does culture,” as the symbolic dimension of social life becomes an essential part of the description of social facts and the explanation of social action.

To specify this distinction in a more rigorous manner, I would like to make a distinction between the context of investigation and the context of explanation. The context of investigation refers to the social and cultural environments of operation of the sociological investigator herself. The context of explanation refers to the social and cultural environments of the actors who are studied by the investigator—the subjects and social phenomena that demand explanation. It is with full intention that I use the vague term “context” here, because the very specification of the nature of each of these contexts—through theory, research, or the combination of the two—is exactly what I am interested in exploring as a way to think about the role of culture in sociology.

According to this schema, what we mean when we talk about culture as an object for sociology is that we are expanding the context of explanation to include many more social facts to be described and more social actions to be explained (Which movies get made, how and why? Which movies get watched, how and why?). This is a strictly concrete and empirical expansion. The tools that we use to investigate these new objects may of necessity go through some changes, particularly at the most technical level, but in a larger sense the conceptual resources of the sociologist herself are merely reapplied and refocused. In other words, the context of investigation remains largely unchanged and unchallenged.

When we discuss culture as an approach, something slightly more complex is implied. Here, too, we can start with the context of explanation. The sociologist who practices a cultural approach to her object of study would argue that, in merely adding the production and consumption of cultural artifacts to the context of explanation, the sociologist commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Certainly, it is useful and important to study culture in this sense, but to work theoretically as if one can point out this phenomenon as “cultural” and this other one as “political” or “economic”—or even “social”—is to labor under an illusion. It is rather the case that most social actions that demand explanation have a “cultural aspect.” What the cultural turn implies, in this case, is that the context of explanation is seen to have a dimension that was neglected before.

Now, of course, the whole project of Parsonian grand theory was to recognize and synthesize the many “dimensions” of the context of explanation, understood as a social system—including the cultural dimension. But the consequences of taking the cultural dimension seriously have not turned out to be what Parsons thought they would be. Parsons thought that the recognition of the role of culture in explaining action meant that a single, scientific model of culture—norms and values—could be integrated into the voluntaristic theory of action, and thus into a single analytic model for explaining social actions, social reproduction, and social change. However, in the course of the latest cultural turn in sociology, we have come to see that (1) “culture” consists of much more than norms and values, and also requires several different kinds of theoretical tools to comprehend it, and (2) the consequences of this “approach” version of culture run much deeper than adding “one more factor” to each explanation of social action. Among these consequences is the thorough reformation of the context of investigation.

Another way of putting this is that the recognition that “culture” exists as a dimension of the context of explanation changes the basic relationship between the context of explanation and the context of investigation, and therefore how we consider the context of investigation itself. In Weberian terms, the cultural approach to sociology recognizes that to explain social action, one has to interpret culture. And to interpret culture, one has to retool the context of investigation around the interpretation of meaning, so that the “culture” that exists in the context of explanation can be adequately grasped and harnessed for the task of sociological explanation. In particular, one has to involve oneself in the messy work of studying subjectivity and its manifestation in, and molding by, discourse. The theories of semiotics, linguistic structuralism, and hermeneutics must be marshaled into service to answer sociological questions, and to comprehend collective representations and their enactment. Sociologists must start looking for narratives, genres, conceptual categorizations, and metaphors in the context of explanation; they must also start examining their social consequences.

This book takes up the cultural approach to sociology in exactly this sense. It is about meaning—specifically, the role of meaning in social life (i.e., in the context of explanation). And it is about method—the reformation of the context of investigation so as to better comprehend social meaning. The overall purpose, then, is to contribute to a conceptual restructuring of sociology toward a cultural approach, evident in the chapters in the first part of this book.

PART I: CULTURAL APPROACHES TO SOCIETY

Part I of the text begins with two examples of the necessity of interpreting culture to explain social action, even if the actions under study are not culture in the sense of culture-as-object.

In “‘A Special Camaraderie with Colleagues’: Business Associations and Cultural Production for Economic Action,” Lyn Spillman brings a cultural perspective to bear on a question that has long been of interest to neoinstitutionalists in sociology, political economists, and the new institutional economists: Why do business associations exist, and what is their role? For political economists, such associations (like Spillman’s favorite example, the International Concrete Repair Institute) are political interest groups, lobbying in Washington and other national capitals for policies that are to their advantage. For neoinstitutionalist sociologists, these associations serve as the site for mimetic institutional isomorphism—they are the means by which businesses learn to copy and calibrate their ideologies and practices. And for the new institutional economics, these associations are just another example of a social formation that serves to reduce transaction costs. Spillman finds that all of these perspectives are partially correct and that some of these associations do serve such purposes, some of the time. Yet she also finds much more.

Using the lens of cultural sociology, Spillman fleshes out several hunches of neoinstitutionalism, goes beyond them, and ends up with a remarkable new account of the basis for economic action. She finds that such associations construct and construe social ties, enforce standards, define and shift the boundaries of industries, and set the cognitive maps for how economic actors think of themselves and the environments they operate in. One can see in Spillman’s work the leaps and bounds that the study of culture has made in recent years. Hers is not a heavy-handed discourse arguing that values, norms, and solidarities, instead of power and interests, determine actions and social outcomes. Rather, she examines how culture works through cognitive mapping, identity formation, boundary maintenance, and so on. She marshals this conception of culture, furthermore, not to show that economic interests do not matter but, rather, to show how culture shapes these interests as well as the view that economic actors have of the environment they are acting and strategizing in.

If Spillman’s chapter builds out from neoinstitutionalism toward even more cultural insights into the nature of economic action, the chapter by Jerry Goodstein, Mary Blair-Loy, and Amy S. Wharton takes on a programmatic tone that is definitively “postneoinstitutional.” They set out a research program that is synthetic in its ambition to combine the insights of the “old” institutionalists (e.g., Selznick) with the new (e.g., Dimaggio and Powell) while reframing the emphasis on norms and values in terms of the newer, more subtle terms of cultural sociology. Specifically, they suggest that, if we view organizations (and in particular, firms) as actors, it is important to recognize that (1) they not only respond to their external environment but also iterate, maintain, and adapt internal ways of doing business, treating employees, and pursuing profit—what Goodstein, Blair-Loy, and Wharton refer to as “core ideologies,” and (2) external “isomorphic” pressures and the internal forces of core ideologies structure action (organizational and individual) not just cognitively but also morally.

Here, too, we see the bringing together of new theoretical tools from a reformed, postcultural-turn context of investigation with new discoveries and insights into a specific context of explanation—in this case, the social world of organizations. Hence Goodstein, Blair-Loy, and Wharton’s call for a redirection of cultural research on organizations toward “moral action” is an imperative both to reform the context of investigation, adding new interpretive tools and theoretical orientations to sociology, and to reconsider the context of explanation—organizations—in its cultural dimension.

Of course, there is no reason why the “cultural approach” cannot be brought to bear upon “culture-as-object” as well, and Kenneth Thompson’s chapter points us in this direction. He takes cultural artifacts as his objects of sociological study: Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl performance, Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, and the reactions to both in the mainstream media. Yet he also uses a cultural perspective to analyze the events, and to explain the public outrage and change in FCC regulations that followed upon Jackson’s exposure of her breast, as well as the massive monetary success and tremendous popular appeal of Gibson’s film. He does so, furthermore, via a risky but ultimately productive theoretical move; he brings into dialogue with each other the (primarily Durkheimian) literature on moral panics and the (primarily Foucaultian) literature on governmentality or “government at a distance.”

What holds this all together is a specific tool of the context of investigation—discursive theory—that allows him to grasp, in the context of explanation, the binary discourse of American civil society. Thompson shows how these notions of civility must be performed via binaries that define and denigrate “uncivil” others. He also points to the complex ways in which the American version of these civil binaries is inflected with an appreciation of visceral violence and a discomfort with sex. Ultimately, then, Thompson is able not only to explain the varying reactions to these two “scandalous” media events but also to draw a rich portrait of the cultural power of the religious right in the United States.

All of which brings us to the apotheosis of Part 1, Georgina Born’s chapter on the sociology of the arts. By taking on the fundamental opposition between the sociology of art and art history/art criticism, she sets the stakes high. How can a nonreductive, cultural-sociological approach to art remain sociologically relevant and avoid the fetishizations and idealisms of the kind of art criticism that remains in thrall to its object? More generally put, how can one take a cultural approach to culture without ending up in a vicious circle or a dead end? It is with the accumulated experience of two ethnographic studies of cultural production, a broad set of theoretical resources, and a keen eye for the heart of the matter that Born moves the sociology of art forward.

She does so through a critique of Bourdieu, an appropriation of certain insights from the anthropology of art, and by setting out the key theoretical changes that would be necessitated if sociologists are willing to admit to the relative autonomy of the aesthetic logic of artistic production. In particular, she emphasizes how such a move could make the sociology of art more sensitive to historical particularity, and better able to comprehend and explain the strategies and subjectivities of both artists and critics. Another result of this shift would be an ability to consider “together the object and performance arts, mass media and popular culture,” as opposed to delimiting the high arts as their own “field” of battle. Born is thus able to overcome Bourdieu’s notorious ambivalence about popular aesthetics.

Finally, then, Born suggests an epistemological and methodological shift to a “postpositivist empiricism,” which combines ethnography and genealogy. This will enable a sociology of art that “[cultivates] an intimate knowledge of, and a close dialogue with, the most contemporary developments and thinking in the arts, music, and media, but without capture or capitulation to the siren calls for affirmation.”

Thus Born raises a set of fundamental epistemological issues that, more generally, the question of culture raises for sociology as a whole. It is to an agonistic working through of these issues that the second part of this book is dedicated.

PART II: ON ABSTRACTION AND INTERPRETATION—THE BIERNACKI-EVANS DEBATE

In recent years, the epistemology of sociological research has become the subject of debate in American sociology, in disputes over rational choice theory’s applicability in historical sociology (Kiser and Hechter 1991; Quadagno and Knapp 1992; Skocpol 1994; Somers 1998; Kiser and Hecter 1998; Boudon 1998; Goldstone 1998; Calhoun 1998; Mahoney 1999; Mahoney 2004; Sica 2004) and over the political valences of ethnographic research on the American underclass (Wacquant 2002; Anderson 2002; Duneier 2002; Newman 2002). In Part 2 of this book, we bring to a sociological audience another dispute of this nature, one that concerns the methods available for studying meaning in general, and, in particular, the applicability and utility of uniform coding schemes to large amounts of textual evidence.

Thus Part II of the book opens with Richard Biernacki’s “After Quantitative Cultural Sociology: Interpretive Science as a Calling,” which takes as its case study John Evans’s book Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate (2002). Biernacki mounts a fierce critique of the abstraction necessitated by Evans’s coding and cluster analysis methods, arguing that the decontextualization that is necessary for these methods to “work” is in fact exactly what makes them unable to grasp the meanings that actually explain action. Instead, coders claim to “find” a set of meanings that were in their coding schemes to begin with; abstraction guarantees a vicious, as opposed to productive, hermeneutic circle.

Biernacki’s larger project is to criticize the modes of abstraction that disable interpretation in all sorts of sociological studies of culture. Yet his critique is so reliant on his in-depth study of Playing God that we as editors felt it necessary to elicit a response from John Evans, which he has provided. Biernacki’s extended critique is thus followed by Evans’s response, “Two Worlds in Cultural Sociology,” in which Evans defends his work and proposes to clarify why...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Culture as Object and Approach in Sociology
• Part I Cultural Approaches to Society
• Part II On Abstraction and Interpretation—The Biernacki-Evans Debate
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors