Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology

2nd Edition

Laura Grindstaff, Ming-Cheng M. Lo, John R. Hall, Laura Grindstaff, Ming-Cheng M. Lo, John R. Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351974097
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sostenibilità nel business
• Index: Business

The thoroughly revised and updated second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology provides an unparalleled overview of sociological and related scholarship on the complex relations of culture to social structures and everyday life. With 70 essays written by scholars from around the world, the book brings diverse approaches into dialogue, charting new pathways for understanding culture in our global era.

Short, accessible chapters by contributing authors address classic questions, emergent issues, and new scholarship on topics ranging from cultural and social theory to politics and the state, social stratification, identity, community, aesthetics, and social and cultural movements. In addition, contributors explore developments central to the constitution and reproduction of culture, such as power, technology, and the organization of work.

This handbook is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in a wide range of subfields within sociology, as well as cultural studies, media and communication, and postcolonial theory.

Part I
Sociological programs of cultural analysis

1
The Strong Program in cultural sociology

Meaning first

Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith

Introduction

The contours of the Strong Program were publicly announced some years ago in a polemic that underwent several iterations (Alexander 1996; Alexander and Smith 1998, 2001, 2010). However, its origins go back further. In the late 1980s a small research group at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) attempted to bring deep meanings into sociological analysis in a non-reductionist way. We are now some 30 years from those cult-like origins in evening meetings at studio apartments scattered over greater Los Angeles. Today the Strong Program is a recognized, institutionally sustained global force.

But just what is the Strong Program? To our reading it remains the most controversial, least apologetic, and least ambiguous advocate of the cultural turn in sociology. It asserts that every aspect of social life, even those that appear purely coercive like torture, war, or imprisonment (Binder 2013; Smith 2005, 2008a, 2008b) or technocratic and instrumental like central banking policy (Tognato 2012) has a meaningful dimension. The role of the sociologist is to grasp these meanings, to interpret them, to understand their force, and to see how they can be considered as “causes” that shape policy, outcomes, opinions, technologies, actions, politics, preferences, consumption, gestures, and expressions. The Strong Program insists these meanings cannot be traced back or reduced to origins in power or social structure. Rather they exist in autonomous and patterned ways as culture structures that circulate through social life: they are codes, narratives, myths, icons, or other non-material collective representations. For the Strong Program, these meanings are also “hot” and laden with affect. They mark things out as sacred or profane and hence are far more potent than the “cold” schemas or pragmatic “toolkits” that are at the analytic center of many rival, mainstream, and less threatening approaches. The Strong Program is revolutionary, not just additive. Although it believes that social life is multidimensional (in addition to meaning, there are also power, reason, materiality, and organization), it does not hold meaning to be just another factor to be thrown into the explanatory mixing bowl. Like Emile Durkheim in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, we insist that the deepest foundations of social life are ideal, not material. No meaning, no society.

The Strong Program is also unique relative to its immediate competition in having a big picture vision of our social world today. It proclaims that modernity is not really “modern,” never fully “rational.” Ideas about the sacred, ritualistic politics, narratives of salvation, collective emotions, and iconic attractions still shape social life at every level from the interpersonal to the macro-historical. Yet the Strong Program is more than simply a provocation, or manifesto, or worldview. It is also a research program, along with a set of transposable modules – models, methods, and conceptual tools – that taken separately or together allow interpretation and explanation of the social world. With these, it has relentlessly made the case for a switch from the “sociology of culture” toward a truly “cultural sociology.”

Origins

For a long time American sociology resisted the cultural turn upon which the Strong Program has built. Yet in the mid-1980s, things started to change. The initial gestures were hesitant. Like a swimming lesson where the students stay in the shallow end, people wanted to talk about meaning but were unwilling to trust an elusive medium. They made certain their toes could still touch power, interests, and class, and all the other tiles at the bottom of the pool – hence the growing influence during this period of the three big “weak programs” we identified and called out in the initial Strong Program chapter. Although the water wings and rubber rings were initially useful, such aids as Foucault, Bourdieu, and the Birmingham School were eventually debilitating.

During this same period, there emerged from within American sociology influential middle-range nods to meaning that similarly revealed the uncertainties of this early phase: John Meyer’s neo-institutionalism, Ann Swidler’s toolkit theory, David Snow’s “framing” concept, and the work of Pete Peterson, Wendy Griswold, and others on the production of culture. Yet we do not wish to make the Strong Program the only white knight in our tale. Key figures such as Viviana Zelizer, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Barry Schwartz, Michele Lamont, and Eviatar Zerubavel also pioneered. As early as 1987, John R. Hall’s book on Jonestown was subtitled with the words “cultural history” (Hall 1987). However, only the Strong Program had the qualities of a “program,” movement, or collective enterprise. By picking fights with weak programs (Sherwood, Smith, and Alexander 1993) and by calling out reductionist accounts as inadequate (Alexander, Sherwood, and Smith 1993), it was also the most visibly combative force in American cultural sociology.

Today the Strong Program grows in power and influence. One indicator is that it has global reach, with self-defined associates and/or partner centers in such places as Japan, Korea, China, Colombia, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Israel, the Czech Republic, Russia, South Africa, and Australia. The creation of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS) in 2003 offered a symbolic home for this worldwide intellectual movement, hosting visitors and sponsoring conferences. The depth and range of scholarship has also improved as second-generation Strong Programmers move into midcareer. Google Scholar has a “cultural sociology” label; at the time of writing, Strong Program affiliates make up six of the 30 most cited profiles under that tag. Consider also the case of monographs. Earlier versions of the present chapter tended to circle around book-length investigations by Alexander, Eyerman, Jacobs, Ku, and Smith, and to cite shorter articles by our students. The past five years have seen the pool of Strong Program monographs dramatically expand. We now have access to long-awaited books by Binder, Howe, Jaworsky, Kane, Mast, McCormick, Osbaldiston, Reed, Riley, Tognato, West, and Woods that explicitly deploy and deepen our paradigms (see references). In another indicator of success, the Strong Program has become a point of reference for other scholarship. The Strong Program set up its stall in opposition to weak programs; today, we can enjoy the irony that others define themselves in contrast to us. For example, in their introduction, the editors of this volume identify a “Broad Program” that is more inclusive of diverse intellectual orientations. Gary Alan Fine (2010) promoted a “puny program” that contrasts with the Strong Program in giving more attention to pragmatics and interpersonal contexts. Strong Program scholars have gained disciplinary centrality and gatekeeping power, founding and editing the American Journal of Cultural Sociology and the Palgrave Macmillan Series on Cultural Sociology. Although such enterprises are not exclusively Strong Program in brand, the pursuit of meanings and meaning-centered explanation is a requirement for entry. We are also deeply concerned with an effort to systematically explain the world around us. From the Strong Program perspective, too much cultural work is theory of theory, history of theory, “compare and contrast scholars and concepts,” pseudo-theory, intervention, and normative theory, or impressionistic “readings” of meaning without long-term empirical investigation. By contrast, the Strong Program draws upon and reconstructs theory so as to engage in sociological explanation.

Achievements

Doing cultural sociology is not as easy as it sometimes looks. Indeed, the late arrival of the cultural turn in sociology undoubtedly reflected the problem of translating resources from literary theory, theater studies, aesthetics, philosophy, and anthropology into tractable idea-sets for explaining contemporary (and historical) social life. This translation is necessary in order to move beyond the impressionist hit-or-miss schools of esoteric interpretation. Indeed, we see the emergence and refinement of a range of middle-level resources over the past three decades as perhaps the single most important contribution of the Strong Program. These research programs, paradigms in the Mertonian sense, are set out below.

Collective conscience, civil society, and the mass media

Durkheim wrote many years ago about the collective conscience of a society. The idea is intuitively appealing, but also somewhat amorphous and plagued by metaphor. Drawing from Habermas’s ideas about the public sphere and rejecting his pessimistic conclusions as well as the notion that deliberation is “rational,” the Strong Program has argued since the late 1980s that we can see the collective conscience at work in a “civil sphere” (Alexander 2006). This is a place where the diffuse moral authority and pressure of public opinion is concretized and where the social evaluation of actors and policies is made possible. With the civil sphere in mind, there can be a concerted effort to explore public and observable speech acts through which claims are made, both in political and social movement arenas and in the mass media (Alexander and Jacobs 1998; Sherwood 1994). Recent work has explored issues of access and symbolic power in this process (Jacobs and Townsley 2011). Moving away from an early reliance on quality journalism, political speeches, news conferences, and opinion leaders, scholarship has expanded its methodological repertoire to include civil debate among ordinary people. This is possible due to the rise of new media environments that facilitate direct citizen-to-citizen exchange. Examples include enthusiast threads deliberating racism in video games (McKernan 2015), town-based internet forums on local immigration (Jaworsky 2016), and posts in response to environmental news items in the mainstream media (Smith and Howe 2015).

Binary oppositions and the discourse of civil society

Binary opposition, of course, was a staple of semiotic structuralism from Jacobson to Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and Sahlins. A major step by the Strong Program pioneers of the 1980s was to understand public sphere talk as shaped by strong binary logics. Emerging out of Alexander’s Watergate research, we published studies about the “discourse of civil society” that offered a new way of reading politics (e.g., Alexander and Smith 1993; Smith 1991). Not only debate and public thinking but political action itself was shown to be organized around the codes through which sacred and profane motivations, relations, and institutions were defined and applied in processes of typification. Strong Program scholars have confirmed their distribution throughout liberal democracies (e.g., Smith 2005 for the UK, Spain, and France) and in pro-democracy movements in less tolerant places (Baiocchi 2006 for Brazil; Ku 2001 for China). In addition, there have been efforts to explore illiberal codes (fascism, authoritarianism, communism) and their relationship to civil discourse (Baiocchi 2006; Edles 1998; Smith 1996b). Finally, the investigation of the binary opposition has by no means been restricted to political arenas. Strong Program members have identified diverse, context-flexible binaries at work in more local institutional settings and lifeworld domains. The early computer was coded by commentators as bringing salvation or doom (Alexander 1992); concert performers are seen by their audiences as deeply musical or as robotic and shallow (McCormick 2015); in the men’s movement, masculinity can be read as regressive and hegemonic or as sensitive and reformed (Magnuson 2008); and places like a remote Afro-Ecuadorian valley (Jijon 2013), an Australian beach resort (Osbaldiston 2012), or an American small town (Kidder 2018) are perceived as authentic and life-enhancing in a binary that contrasts them with the anomic, soul-destroying, and corrupt city.

Narrative and genre

Analyzing binary oppositions is a critical intellectual tool, but its use does not exhaust the culture structures that we should be trying to detect in a post-Geertzian theoretical world. More is needed to capture fully the nuance and hermeneutic specificity of particular settings and struggles. Draft papers written by our members toward the end of the Cold War and during the buildup to the Gulf War developed a model of narrative process in civil society (e.g., Sherwood 1994). The Strong Program argues that narratives, just like binary codes, circulate and are contested in the collective conscience/civil sphere, and in this process can shape history. The political crises of Watergate and Irangate, for example, are similar in that each involved an intensive deployment of the discourse of civil society, yet each also featured divergent efforts at storytelling and narrative accounting.

Realizing that cognition is tied to storytelling, Strong Program members have developed two approaches to narrative. One is more inductive and historically embedded, even if it employs general theory or language of plot and character en passant. Thus, Alexander (2002) demonstrates that the Holocaust was initially seen as a war crime and only later renarrated as universal evil. Eyerman (2001) traces continuous conflict in African American history between more optimistic and progressive narrations of slavery and more pessimistic and tragic ones. In multiple case studies with very different aims West (2015) and Howe (2016) both show how the nation, locale, history, memory, and the sacred are intimately connected through collective narrative work. The other approach is ontological and Aristotelian, identifying the inner logic of culture structures. This approach has produced a more systematic and robust model of narrative process. Jacobs (2000) and Smith (2005) first employed Northrop Frye’s theories of literary genre to show how powers of action, plot trajectories toward a happy society or its collapse, and imputed motivations vary systematically over a gamut of genre types (romance, tragedy, comedy, irony). These play out in predictable ways in struggles over legitimacy, authority, and reconciliation. Such models open the way toward a less idiographic mode of narrative inquiry, making a more systematic comparative cultural sociology possible. Tracking genres against outcomes, for example, Smith (2005) explains decisions in four nations as they encountered the same foreign policy crises. And Jacobs (2000) is able to predict the kinds of narrative that will accompany successful civic repair in a time of racial crisis. Likewise, divergent attitudes toward climate change are embedded in narrative projections of possible futures (Smith and Howe 2015). This structural narrative model remains one of our most persuasive generalizable tools.

Performance

A major problem of text-based approaches to culture is that agency tends to be squeezed out of the frame. The Strong Program has responded to this challenge by conceptualizing cultural pragmatics, thus building upon a general understanding, derived from Aristotle, Victor Turner, and others, that political and social life is deeply dramatic. The turn toward performance was foreshadowed in earlier studies, such as that of Edles (1998) on the democratic transition in Spain, Jacobs (2000) on civic crisis in Los Angeles, and Smith (1996a) in his account of the eighteenth-century public execution. More recently, these intuitions have been formalized and thickened by drawing on the philosophy of performativity, drama theory in the humanities, and the new discipline of performance studies; and also through careful alignments with other bodies of theory on the nature of social power (Reed 2013). The “cultural pragmatics” that emerged in the early 2000s (Alexander, Giesen, and Mast 2006) provided a repertoire of transposable concepts – fusion/defusion/refusion, scripts and background representations, means of symbolic production, mise-en-scène, hermeneutical power – and showed how they could be employed in various settings to explain social dynamics. What separates this approach from Goffmanian dramaturgy is not only its macro orientation but its insistence that performances are oriented by and toward deep culture structures and myths, not only situational contingencies and interpersonal interaction norms. This model has been especially effective for case study investigations of politics such as the reputational travails of Bill Clinton (Mast 2012), various acts of political viol...