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This article focuses on the relationship between sociology and cultural studies, arguing that sociological cultural studies represent an important transdisciplinary platform. The discussion highlights the work of a number of under-valued authors, positing, in a provisional way, that where sociology remains drawn to an ethos of 'explanatory' causal reasoning, cultural studies typically occupies a register of evocative and engaged social 'description'. Despite the heuristic value of this schema, which casts light on more recent theoretical initiatives (such as'the method of articulation') as well as 'canonical' figures, the distinction between explanation and description is shown to be ultimately difficult to sustain. This reinforces the overall theme of the paper that whilst there are sometimes very different emphases at work within sociology and cultural studies, they need to be seen as complementary discourses operating within the same intellectual field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While 'cultural studies is caught in a traffic jam', at the same time the seemingly global crisis of cultural studies coincides with the late reception and high popularity of cultural studies in the German-speaking countries after the 'cultural' and the 'linguistic turns'. Yet, the political and academic history and the contexts of the emergence of cultural studies and 'Kulturwissenschaften', as well as their by now established academic traditions and the manifold relations to current developments, are rarely defined and scrutinized. In this paper,we will relate some theoretical and historical perspectives concerning the relationship between cultural studies and the historical disciplines in the German-speaking context. We shall try to trace the potential of mutual benefits between cultural studies and history by foregrounding the political commitment of academic work that still seems to be one of the most important traits of CS as much as the necessity of a stronger notion of the contextualization that history and historiographical methodology provides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]