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Based on the work of Alfred Schutz, this article develops a theory of intersubjectivity—one of the basic building blocks of social experience—and shows how such a theory can be empirically leveraged in sociological work. Complementing the interactionist and ethnomethodological emphasis on the situated production of intersubjectivity, this paper revisits the basic theoretical assumptions undergirding this theory. Schutz tied intersubjectivity to the way people experience the world of everyday life: a world that he held as distinct from other provinces of meaning, such as religious experience, humor, or scientific reasoning. However, as this article shows, such neat distinctions are problematic for both empirical and theoretical reasons: The cognitive styles that define different provinces of meaning often bleed into one another; people often inhabit multiple provinces of meaning simultaneously. Intersubjectivity may thus be simultaneously anchored in multiple worlds, opening a host of empirical research questions: not only about how intersubjectivity is done in interaction, but about how different kinds of intersubjective experiences are constructed, how multi-layered they are, as well as opening up questions about possible asymmetries in the experiences of intersubjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a great deal of literature has looked at how individuals respond to stigma, far less has been written about how professional groups address challenges to their self-perception as abiding by clear moral standards. In this paper, we ask how professional group members maintain a positive self-perception in the face of moral stigma. Drawing on pragmatic and cultural sociology, we claim that professional communities hold narratives that link various aspects of the work their members perform with specific understanding of the common good. These narratives allow professionals to maintain a shared view of their work as benefitting society and to perceive themselves as moral individuals. As a case study, we focus on the advertising industry, which has long been stigmatized as complicit in exploitative capitalist mechanisms and cultural degradation. We draw on nine total months of fieldwork and seventy-four interviews across three US advertising agencies. We find that advertising practitioners use narratives to present their work as contributing to the common good, depicting themselves as moral individuals who care about others in the process. We analyze three prevalent narratives: the account-driven narrative, which links moral virtue to caring for clients; the creative-driven narrative, which ties caring to the production of meaningful advertisements; and the strategic-driven narrative, which sees caring in finding meaningful relationships for consumers and brands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological research on moral panics, long understood as 'struggles for cultural power,' has focused on the social groups and media conditions that enable moral panics to emerge, and on the consequences of moral panics for the social control systems of societies. In this article I turn instead to modeling the specific cultural process of how the conditions for a moral panic are turned into an actual moral panic, moving the understanding of moral panic away from its Durkheimian origins and towards a process-relational cultural sociology. Drawing on Roland Barthes' theory of myth and Kenneth Burke's dramatism, the paper posits the cultural process of resignification via synecdoche and metanarrative as the driver of the disproportion, concern, hostility, consensus, and volatility of moral panics. This process can be carefully traced in the case of the Salem Witch Trials; a retrospective reading reveals the same process at work in the 'Mods and Rockers' panic analyzed by Stanley Cohen. Beyond moral panics, theorizing resignification as a non-exclusive counterpoint to framing and ideational embeddedness enriches the theoretical repertoire of cultural sociology. 'Deep culture' and mythological signification can, using the schema proposed here, be understood as practical accomplishments-rhetorical responses to particular situations that, when performed successfully, legitimate violence and other forms of domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine how white British members of a London-area environmental group conceptualize race in relation to ecological disasters. Based on a five-year (2018–2022) ethnographic study, members employed racialized narratives and symbolic boundaries to construct who was the cause of disasters, who had the moral responsibility or calling to remediate disasters, and who possessed the adequate resources and capacity to fix disasters. Together, these narratives formed a tripartite racial imaginary which functioned to demarcate the symbolic boundaries of an ideal, white racial identity that was intimately crocheted with notions of authentic guilt and remorse, responsibility and liability, work ethics, competent knowledge, resource mobilization, moral commitment, and racial paternalism and superiority. Through the pursuit of this White racial ideal, members frequently conceptualized ecological disasters throughout the non-white world as the fault of specific actions by non-White people, identified unique racialized actors as the proper responsible parties for working on the remediation of ecological disasters, and also assigned particular White people from Westernized, industrial, democratic states as the only people in possession of the appropriate knowledge, resources, and character to clean-up and manage a healthy environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the role of measurement in the sociology of culture and how can we sort out the complexities that distinguish qualitative from quantitative approaches to this domain? In this article, we compare the issues and concerns of contemporary scholars who work on matters of culture with the writings of a group of scholars who had prepared papers for a special symposium on scientific measurement held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) back in 1956. We focus on three issues-the recurring need to reinvent measurement (as illustrated by the career of the psychologist S.S. Stevens), the linkage between qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis (as articulated in the writings of the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld), and the assertion (by philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Peter Caws) that theorizing necessarily precedes measuring. We review a number of important advances in the way that measurement is theorized and implemented in the sociology of culture and we also point to a number of enduring dilemmas and conundrums that continue to occupy researchers in the field today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the extraordinary politicization of culture in an era of globalization, it is surprising that Sesame Street has gained acceptance and legitimacy in more than fifty countries during the last five decades. Sesame Street's ubiquity around the world presents us with the question I address in this article: how do partner organizations work together, on the ground, to locally adapt a hybrid cultural product? Using data from real-time interactions between NY staff and partners, I show how teams from different cultures who do not share collective representations are able to create them through transnational interaction by: (1) constructing value to align their interests (2) exchanging complex cultural knowledge to customize and build alliances together. The Sesame Street case, then, allows us to grapple with "culture in interaction" at the transnational level, shedding light on culture in transnational interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay we make a new proposal for the sociological approach to culture. We begin with a brief critical history of the social scientific treatment of culture and a criticism of some recent alternatives. In the section following this we develop our own model, and, in the third part of the essay, apply this in a construction of what we call the discourse of American civil society. In the fourth and longest section of our paper, we demonstrate the plausibility of this substantive model by using it to investigate a disparate range of events in American social and political history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While cultural sociology has recently made a comeback in research on social inequality both in the context of poverty studies and studies of immigrant integration, it has rarely investigated how particular constructions of the problem of socioeconomic mobility are themselves culturally situated. The article addresses this neglect by investigating the problematization of disadvantaged lives within the relational framework of Bourdieu's cultural theory of the state. Here, the state exercises symbolic violence by transforming one arbitrary cultural standpoint in social space into a universal standard, or a taken-for-granted "doxa," against which other cultural positions can only come off as deficient. The article extends this perspective by addressing the role of official statistics in this process. Taking Germany's official monitoring of the socioeconomic integration of immigrants as its case and drawing from document analysis, interviews, ethnographic observation, and data from the German General Social Survey, the article shows how such statistical instruments of the welfare state in fact tacitly universalize a model of the good life particular to civil servants, the very constructors of the monitors, as a benchmark for immigrant integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Micro-sociological theory has traditionally stressed interactional pressures towards alignment: actors' attempts to co-construct a shared definition of the situation. We argue that this model provides an insufficient account of the coordination of action and of the emergence of intersubjectivity among actors. To complement the focus on alignment, we develop a theory of disruption—a perceived misalignment of the dramaturgical structure of interaction in coordinating expected lines of action. We develop a theory of the interaction order that takes the interplay between interactional alignment and disruption as a foundational challenge both for sociology and for actors in their everyday lives. We focus on the practical ways in which actors negotiate both interactional breaches and wider relational ruptures, and how they differentiate between disruptions-of relations and disruptions-for them. By doing so, we connect the interaction order to a wider relational order, providing a bridge between micro-level interactionism and the sociology of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how distrust drives exchange. We propose a theoretical framework integrating the literature of trust into cultural sociology and use a case of patients giving hongbao (red envelopes containing money) to doctors in China to examine how distrust drives different forms of unofficial exchange. Based on more than two years' ethnography, we found that hongbao exchanges between Chinese patients and doctors were, ironically, bred by the public's generalized distrust in doctors' moral ethics. In the absence of institutional assurance, Chinese patients drew on the cultural logic of particularism and its associated cultural repertoire to induce fidelity from their physicians. They mobilized interpersonal networks to function as assurance and presented hongbao as a return of favor to the doctors. This form of exchange is gifting-oriented. Alternatively, if there were no interpersonal networks to rely on, they proactively offered hongbao to doctors at arm's length in an attempt to personalize the relationship to seek assurance and abate their anxieties. This form of exchange is bribery-oriented. Both forms of exchange co-existed when there was one-way generalized distrust manifested from patients to doctors. When doctors also developed generalized distrust in patients, arm's length exchanges declined, leaving embedded exchanges as the dominant form. Our study asserts the central role of culture in constituting exchange behaviors and the importance of institutions in shaping the form of exchange. It contributes to the midrange theory of trust, generating a number of hypotheses for future research on the relationships among culture, institutions, distrust, assurance, and illicit exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the Culturally Meaningful Networks (CMN) approach. Following a pragmatist perspective of social mechanisms more broadly, it develops and demonstrates an approach to understanding networks that incorporates both structure and meaning and that leverages time to understand how these aspects influence each other. I apply this approach to investigate a longstanding puzzle about why some of those who leave military service for civilian life fare well, and others badly. In a mixed-methods analysis, I follow a sample of individuals moving through the transition from military to civilian life in the contemporary United Kingdom. I find that the higher the proportion of alters (i.e., “contacts”) with a military background in the networks of leavers before discharge, the worse they fare after discharge. The CMN approach helps me locate a specific structural embedding that explains the presence or absence of durable cultural frames that set the context for the actual experience of the transition and cause problems during it. Attention to the temporal unfolding of network structure and social meaning is essential to bringing out this finding. By re-embedding networks within people’s experiences over time, the CMN approach helps grasp the distinctions by which leavers understand their interactions. I conclude by arguing that the CMN approach has implications for network sociology and cultural sociology that go beyond this substantive case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements carry out extensive character work, trying to define not only their own reputations but those of other major players in their strategic arenas. Victims, villains, and heroes form the essential triad of character work, suggesting not only likely plots but also the emotions that audiences are supposed to feel for various players. Characters have been overlooked in cultural analysis, possibly because they often take visual, non-narrative forms. By focusing on characters within movements, we illuminate some cultural dilemmas that both organizers and their opponents face as they try to influence players’ reputations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diffusion of similar organizational practices across the world has been a prominent research topic for quite some time. In the literature on sociological new institutionalism, two basic research perspectives have developed to address the diffusion and subsequent institutionalization of cultural models and formally organized practices. The first argues that diffusion happens as a top-down adoption process. The second describes diffusion and institutionalization as bottom-up emergence. My stance bridges both perspectives. In this article, I argue that for us to understand diffusion processes, emergence and adoption need to be integrated within a coherent theoretical framework, as both of these processes are inseparably interlinked. The global diffusion of truth commissions is employed as a case study to develop this framework. Starting with the empirical observation of the global diffusion of truth commissions, I dissect the case study by asking: How did truth commissions emerge and become adopted as a globally recognized solution to the problem of dealing with human rights violations after political transitions? To answer this question, I introduce three theoretical building blocks-reciprocal typification, narrative embedding, and fictional consensus. Taken together, these concepts constitute the process of collective learning, which I present here as a new approach to diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of culture and action, especially after the cognitive turn, have developed more complex understandings of how unconscious, embodied, internalized culture motivates action. As our theories have become more sophisticated, our methods for capturing these internal processes have not kept up and we struggle to adjudicate among theories of how culture shapes action. This article discusses what I call 'productive' methods: methods that observe people creating a cultural object. Productive methods, I argue, are well suited for drawing out moments of shared automatic cognition and resonance. To demonstrate the value of productive methods, I describe my method of asking focus group participants to devise and draw AIDS campaign posters collectively. I then 1) show how this productive method made visible distinct moments of both automatic and deliberative cognition, 2) offer an operational definition of resonance and demonstrate how the process of drawing revealed moments of resonance, and 3) suggest how this method allowed me to investigate the relationship between cognition and resonance and their effect on action. To conclude, I discuss strategies for using productive methods and advocate for their use in measuring culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a theory of humor and uses it to assess the attempt to measure meaning-structures in cultural sociology. To understand how humor operates, researchers need to attend to two layers of cultural competencies: general typifications and situation-specific know-how. These cultural competencies are then invoked in ways that define humor as a specific form of experiential frame-the bi-sociation of meaning, its condensation, and resonance with experienced tensions in the social world. I show the usefulness of this theorization through the empirical case of AIDS humor in Malawi, a small country in South-East Africa. Using conversational diaries, everyday interactions, and newspaper cartoons, I argue both that such humor is widespread and that it reveals important facets of life in a country ravaged by the pandemic-what it means for the shadow of AIDS to be ever-present. Through this case, I then turn back to the question of measurement, arguing that although measuring tools may be able to identify large-scale semantic shifts, they necessarily miss forms of interaction such as humor, that are based on allusion, condensation, and what is left unsaid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the Internet, social media, and digitized historical archives has produced a colossal amount of text-based data in recent years. While computer scientists have produced powerful new tools for automated analyses of such 'big data,' they lack the theoretical direction necessary to extract meaning from them. Meanwhile, cultural sociologists have produced sophisticated theories of the social origins of meaning, but lack the methodological capacity to explore them beyond micro-levels of analysis. I propose a synthesis of these two fields that adjoins conventional qualitative methods and new techniques for automated analysis of large amounts of text in iterative fashion. First, I explain how automated text extraction methods may be used to map the contours of cultural environments. Second, I discuss the potential of automated text-classification methods to classify different types of culture such as frames, schema, or symbolic boundaries. Finally, I explain how these new tools can be combined with conventional qualitative methods to trace the evolution of such cultural elements over time. While my assessment of the integration of big data and cultural sociology is optimistic, my conclusion highlights several challenges in implementing this agenda. These include a lack of information about the social context in which texts are produced, the construction of reliable coding schemes that can be automated algorithmically, and the relatively high entry costs for cultural sociologists who wish to develop the technical expertise currently necessary to work with big data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral culture can mean many things, but two major elements are a concern with moral goods and moral prohibitions. Moral psychologists have developed instruments for assessing both of these and such measures can be directly imported by sociologists. Work by Schwartz and his colleagues on values offers a well-established way of measuring moral goods, while researchers using Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory have developed validated measures of moral prohibitions. Both values and moral foundations are distributed across the social landscape in systematic, sociologically interesting ways. Although typically measured using questionnaires, we show that values and moral foundations also can be used to analyze interview, archival, or 'big data.' Combining psychological and sociological tools and frameworks promises to clarify relations among existing sociological treatments of moral culture and to connect such treatments to a thriving conversation in moral psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childhood scholars have found that age inequality can be as profound an axis of meaningful difference as race, gender, or class, and yet the impact of this understanding has not permeated the discipline of sociology as a whole. This is one particularly stark example of the central argument of this article: despite decades of empirical and theoretical work by scholars in 'the social studies of childhood,' sociologists in general have not incorporated the central contributions of this subfield: that children are active social agents (not passive), knowing actors strategizing within their constraints (not innocent), with their capacities and challenges shaped by their contexts (not universally the same). I contend that mainstream sociology's relative imperviousness has led to theoretical costs for both childhood scholars-who must re-assert and re-prove the core insights of the field-and sociologists in general. Using three core theoretical debates in the larger discipline-about independence, insecurity, and inequality-I argue that children's perspectives can help scholars ask new questions, render the invisible visible, and break through theoretical logjams. Thus would further research utilizing children's perspectives and the dynamics of age extend the explanatory power of social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While some research on collective memory has addressed the creation of memory projects such as memorials and historical commissions, less attention has been paid to explaining variation in these projects' success. America's troubled history of lynchings and race riots is one topic increasingly addressed by commemorative projects. This article evaluates factors shaping efforts to imprint past racial violence into broader collective memory. Building on research on constraints imposed by actual pasts and environmental conditions, I argue that structural influences on collective memory, or mnemonic opportunity structures, powerfully affect the success of commemorative initiatives. I identify three major dimensions of mnemonic opportunity structures: (1) an environment's present-day commemorative capacity, a past incident's (2) ascribed significance, and (3) the moral valence of key characters at the time it occurred. Qualitative data from multiple case studies and 90 interviews, along with supplementary quantitative and qualitative comparative analyses (QCAs) of all recent projects marking segregation-era racial violence, illustrate the utility of the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did cultural dynamics help bring about the societies we now recognize as modern? This article constructs seven distinct models for how structures of signification and social meaning participated in the transitions to modernity in the West and, in some of the models, across the globe. Our models address: (1) the spread, via imitation, of modern institutions around the world (memetic replication); (2) the construal, by socio-cultural forces and by state organizations, of the modern citizen-subject (social subjectification); (3) the continual search for new meanings to replace traditional religious meaning-systems (compensatory reenchantment); (4) repeated attempts, in modern revolutions, to remake society completely, according to a utopian vision (ideological totalization); (5) the cultural origins and social consequences of scientific and humanistic worldviews (epistemic rift); (6) the gendered politics of state formation (patriarchal supercession); (7) the invention and production of race in the colonial encounter (racial recognition). We explicate the models in reverse chronological order, because in our synthesis, we argue that the original modern break results from a dynamic combination of racial recognition, patriarchal supercession, and epistemic rift; these changes set the stage for the four other processes we theorize. In addition to our synthesis, we also consider, from a more neutral perspective, the kinds of causal arguments upon which these models tend to rely, and thus explicate the analytical undergirding for the application of any of these models to empirical research on transitions to modernity. Throughout the article, we consider how these models might, and might not, mesh with other families of explanation, such as the politico-economic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through their dense range of empirical sortings, Kaufman and Kaliner, in this issue of Theory and Society, are effective in showing mechanisms through which places replicate themselves over time, but also in how their cultural and economic profiles can shift. Their work points to the utility of matched comparisons of historical interaction, both symbolic and material, as tool for understanding trajectories of stability and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at integrating the phenomenon of the Central and Eastern European intelligentsia into the application of the theory of cultural capital of Pierre Bourdieu to the analysis of societies of that region. This is done by critically reevaluating the model of evolution of the post-communist countries of Central Europe proposed by Gil Eyal, Ivan Szelényi, and Eleanor Townsley, in their “Making Capitalism without Capitalists.” The present article argues for supplementing their approach with an analytical distinction between the concepts of intellectuals (as masters of the critical discourse culture) and the intelligentsia, which in countries like Poland have an important component of post-gentry culture. The identity and images of the intelligentsia are analyzed as important though highly contested aspects of cultural capital in Poland. Wide implications of discursive battles on the status of intelligentsia in contemporary Poland are exemplified in the case of the debates over the so-called Rywin Affair in Poland and the role played in that affair by the major Polish intellectual Adam Michnik. The political discourse related to the affair and to the status of Michnik are studied in context of the structure of the Polish political scene and related to the academic debates on the intelligentsia, whether it is a “really existing” and significant social group or merely a marginal one and “outdated discourse.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeffrey Alexander’s recent book on cultural sociology argues that sociologists must grant the realm of ideas autonomy to determine behavior, unencumbered by interference from instrumental or material factors. He criticizes the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as “weak” for failing to give autonomy to culture by reducing it to self-interested behavior that immediately reflects class position. However, Alexander’s arguments seriously distort and misstate Bourdieu’s theory, which provides for the relative autonomy of culture through the concepts of habitus and field. Because habitus is a set of durable dispositions conditioned by past structures, it may contradict the changed structures of the present. Further, the influence of the habitus is always mediated by the structure and strategies of the field of contest in which it is deployed, so that the same habitus may motivate different actions in different circumstances. However, Alexander is correct to argue that in Bourdieu’s theory culture generally serves to reproduce, not contradict social structures. Yet Bourdieu addresses this and other problems in his later work, in which he argues for the existence of certain cultural universals transcending particular structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses empirical evidence on networks of voluntary organizations mobilizing on ethnic minority, environmental, and social exclusion issues in two British cities, to differentiate between social movement processes and other, cognate collective action dynamics. Social movement processes are identified as the building and reproducing of dense informal networks between a multiplicity of actors, sharing a collective identity, and engaged in social and/or political conflict. They are contrasted to coalitional processes, where alliances to achieve specific goals are not backed by significant identity links, and organizational processes, where collective action takes place mostly in reference to specific organizations rather than broader, looser networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we assess how the concept of cultural capital has been imported into the English language, focusing on educational research. We argue that a dominant interpretation of cultural capital has coalesced with two central premises. First, cultural capital denotes knowledge of or facility with “highbrow” aesthetic culture. Secondly, cultural capital is analytically and causally distinct from other important forms of knowledge or competence (termed “technical skills,” “human capital,” etc.). We then review Bourdieu’s educational writings to demonstrate that neither of these premises is essential to his understanding of cultural capital. In the third section, we discuss a set of English-language studies that draw on the concept of cultural capital, but eschew the dominant interpretation. These serve as the point of departure for an alternative definition. Our definition emphasizes Bourdieu’s reference to the capacity of a social class to “impose” advantageous standards of evaluation on the educational institution. We discuss the empirical requirements that adherence to such a definition entails for researchers, and provide a brief illustration of the intersection of institutionalized evaluative standards and the educational practices of families belonging to different social classes. Using ethnographic data from a study of social class differences in family-school relationships, we show how an African-American middle-class family exhibits cultural capital in a way that an African-American family below the poverty level does not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The desire for authenticity now occupies a central position in contemporary culture. Whether in our search for selfhood, leisure experience, or in our material purchases, we search for the real , the genuine. These terms are not, however, descriptive, but must be situated and defined by audiences. In this analysis, I examine the development of the market for self-taught art, an artistic domain in which the authentic is a central defining feature, conferring value on objects and creators. Self-taught art is a form of identity art in which the characteristics of the artists and their life stories are as important as the formal features of the created objects. The article examines the justifications for this emphasis and the battles over the construction of biography. My examination of self-taught art is grounded in five years of ethnographic observation, interviews, and analyses of texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses that little effort has been made to formulate alternative models deliberately sensitive to the unique political, social, cultural, and economic developments in Latin America. The article is divided into two main sections. In the first, author examines and accounts for an intellectual gridlock in the study of Latin American social movements. In the second, author seeks to transcend the stalemate by proposing a new theoretical framework built around the concept of distance or, better said, citizens distance from the state, understood geographically, institutionally, and in terms of class and culture. The author discusses each of these four dimensions of distance and the overlaps between them, offer an explanation for how and why aggregate patterns of distance vary the way they do, and finally, theorize the "power" of distance, which can better explain social movement activity in Latin America, even as it dispenses with counterproductive dichotomization of political opportunity structure and new social movement paradigms.

This article discusses the role played by free spaces in mobilization. Depending on what meanings are attached to actual or perceived ties, dense and isolated networks are as likely to impede protest or limit it to purely local targets and identities as to facilitate it. Rather than providing insight into the dynamics by which such constraints are surmounted, free spaces remain a cultural black box grafted onto a political opportunity model or a structural breakdown one. Conceptualizing structures as cultural reveals resources available to insurgents and obstacles facing them that have been overlooked in analyses of free spaces. The network intersections are critical to generating mobilizing identities, not just because weak-tied individuals provide access to previously unavailable material and informational resources, but also because their social distance endows them with the authority to contest existing relations of status and deference among the aggrieved population. By mapping the structural relations without examining the meanings of those relations is insufficient exploration for the timing and form of collective action.

This article argues that referential perspective on discourse both poses problems for the analysis of frames and ignores important semiotic dynamics of the framing process. Frame analysis critically highlights processes of signification as a key dynamic for collection action. However, while it usefully focuses on the ideological problems, its proponents have failed to problematize the role of discourse in these processes. While the ideological visions structured by frames are exposed as contested and dynamic, the discourse used in framing is taken to be a generally straight-forward bearer of meanings. Drawing on the discourse theory of the Bakhtin Circle and work in sociocultural psychology, the article proposes an alternative framework emphasizing the analysis of discursive repertoires.

This essay was written as an introduction to a book about French ideas of education and of culture, of learning and of science, during the period between about 1890 and 1920. Part of the purpose in the projected book is to compare these French ideas with beliefs on similar subjects held among German academics around 1890-1920. The new book thus draws upon what was initially argued in "The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933." Some of the problems raised in the current essay arose simply because the author was forced to confront the difficulties that arise when one tries to compare ideas located in different cultures. The views expressed in a given setting are so thoroughly interdefined that they can be adequately characterized only in their complementary or oppositional relationships to each other. One almost habitually perceives certain groups of ideas in one's own culture as intellectually allied, and affinities of this sort have been thought to exist in other historical contexts as well. But even more remarkable is the degree to which opposed positions within an intellectual field tend to condition each other—their interaction is dialectical in the strictest sense of that term.

The reflexive nature of intellectual work, whether actual or potential, places serious obstacles in the way of any objectivist, or generalizing, account of that work. That intellectuals, especially social theoretical ones such as Marx Weber and the moderate mandarins, do regularly, even if inconsistently, provide accounts of their own ideas means that one cannot ever entirely eliminate the study of exceptional intellectuals or, correlatively, of the exceptional features of any intellectual's thought. To neglect the exceptional, the starkly individualistic, dimensions of any intellectual movement cannot help but reduce that movement to its common ground, leaving out precisely those unreconciled, reflexive aspects that may be the most distinctive feature of an intellectual's life and work. Most especially, insufficient regard for the reflexive, idiosyncratic ideas of an intellectual makes it difficult to answer the very reflexive questions one wants to ask in assessing an idea or a movement.

This article presents an analysis of cultural objects, their significance and tries to find out the answer of the question as to "How a culture works?" Culture is not something imposed on or done to a person; it is constitutive of the person. Culture is not separable from social structure, economics, politics, and other features of human activity. If one thinks of culture as the symbolic dimension of human activity and if one conceives its study as the study of discrete symbolic objects (art, literature, sermons, ideologies, advertisements, maps, street signs) and how they function in social life, then the question of what work culture does and how it does it, is not self-evidently foolish. Indeed, it can then be understood as a key question in sociology, anthropology, and history. The relevance of a cultural object to its audience, its utility, is a property not only of the object's content or nature and the audience's interest in it but of the position of the object in the cultural tradition of the society the audience is a part of. That is, the uses to which an audience puts a cultural object are not necessarily personal or idiosyncratic; the needs or interests of an audience are socially and culturally constituted.

This article focuses on sociologist Clifford Geertz, who has been the foremost among the proponents of culture-as-text. He said that culture is essentially a semiotic one. Believing that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance the man himself has spun, Geertz takes culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. On this view the sphere of social expression, of text, is largely coextensive with culture, because all the artifacts and actions, whether linguistic or not, are capable of being involved in those webs of significance whose enigmatic surface it becomes the goal of the anthropologist to decipher and explicate. As a programmatic generality this sounds unexceptionable, yet in Geertz's hands it consistently has consequences that should lead us to question the value of treating non-linguistic culture textually. Some of his most celebrated readings, though aimed at reducing the strangeness of foreign social practices, are themselves quite peculiar.

The assumption in this article is that social modernization is accompanied by such a tripartite differentiation in the cultural sphere. This article's aim is to elucidate the concept of cultural postmodernity that can be found in French theory. The neo-Nietzscheans indeed have conceived of their work in terms of social mediations, in terms of the shift towards a postindustrial capitalism, and in close conjunction with the micro-politics of the new social movements. Theoretical postmodernity has been above all a matter, for French theorists, of a divorce with structuralisms. It has proposed, in strong contradistinction to the many incarnations of the latter, an end to the primacy of discourse, the text, the word, the signifier, the demise of the hegemony of writing. The problematic centering around desire and the body, on the one hand, and codification or repression through structure on the other has also had explanatory potential for resistance to domination in the late 1960s and again in the rebourgeoning social movements of the 1980s.

This article outlines doubts about Max Weber's analysis of the Chinese economy. In summary, the author maintains that an economic and ecological explanation of China's failure to create her own industrial capitalism is possible, and that it is simpler in its assumptions, more internally consistent, and more amenable to empirical verification than the cultural and ideological analysis offered by Weber. Where political or cultural factors are important, they are not linked to characteristic Weberian themes, such as inner-wordly asceticism. Examples are China's lack of a modern science, her failure to persist in long-distance overseas exploration and trade, and her substitution of commercial-type relationships for direct management in much industrial organization. Furthermore, the Sinha-Elvin approach is effective in explaining the differential response in modern times of different parts of the Chinese culture-area to the challenge of imitative modern economic growth, while the Weberian approach is not. The explanation in terms of economic and ecological factors does not deny the general importance of cultural factors in economic life on the contrary! but suggests that late-traditional Chinese values and ideas were in most respects already suitable for modern economic growth, and that the key inhibiting constraints were not cultural. The first part of the article discusses the general issues of Weberian theory and method are looked at insofar as they bear on Weber's understanding of the historical Chinese economy. In the second part, the accuracy of Weber's appraisal of specific aspects of China's economy is subjected to scrutiny, topic by topic.

Those who search for, and see themselves as, articulators of Afro-American culture through scholarly analysis, literature, and the arts have been constantly tempted to view their activities as having broad political import. The discovery of Africanisms and the use of folk-themes become, for some, the real creation of the whole culture and so assume the proportion of a major political movement. This tendency can be seen, for example, in Harold Cruse's work on Harlem in which Afro American culture refers simultaneously to artistic and literary products and to the broader, more holistic meaning of the term. In this blown-up perception of scholarly and artistic activity, the people recede. They become merely the raw energy which the intellectuals must reshape, refine, and give voice to. A temptation for these intellectuals is to see themselves as the core formative force through which culture comes into conscious existence and through which it is returned to the people. This temptation is counteracted by a critical stance which emphasizes the creative power of the people and so requires to fundamentally reconsider the general relationship between the intellectuals and culture.

The article analyzes the television series"Mork & Mindy" in an effort to unravel the various dialectical moments of cultural hegemony. Hegemony, as defined by Raymond Williams, " is not only the articulate upper level of ideology nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as manipulation or indoctrination. It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values--constitutive and constituting--which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming." The reasons for using the television series in unraveling the dialectical moments of hegemony were, first, it provides an excellent text for illustrating the possibility of linking the study of hegemony to the study of the construction and reproduction of meanings through the acquisition of language and interpretative procedures of a language community, second, the series appears to manifest characteristics of both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural forms. The television series tells the story of an alien being (Mork) who visits Earth from a more advanced civilization. He was sent to study the Earth and its culture as punishment for persisting in humorous acts.

Cultural freedom in the arts is not simply a formalized battle between institutionalized constraints and supports. The content of the battle is art, consequently the struggle is meaningful. Constraint, be it of the marketplace, the state, or the superego, is a stimulus for symbolic liberation and this is meaningfully embodied in superior art. Culturally the chasm which separates "east" from "west" is difficult to bridge, as numerous Soviet and East European emigres attest. The chasm is not simply the consequence of the absence of cultural freedom on the one hand and its presence on the other, nor is it simply a manifestation of a stultified art world as opposed to a dynamic one. The deepness of the chasm, rather, is a consequence of the fact that cultural freedom has fundamentally different contents in the political domains of the east and west. The negative consequences of such "rationalized" art institutions relate to their highly politicized nature. These institutions are rationally administered primarily with political, not artistic ends in mind. Philosopher Max Weber's doctrine that in the modern world "art becomes a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values which exist in their own right," refers to a different world.

The necessary institution for the mass production of the New Class and its special culture of critical discourse is the historically unique system of public education, whether at the secondary or tertiary levels. This system is characterized by the fact that it is education away from the home and thus away from close parental supervision, it is education mediated by a special group of New Class, teachers, whose role requires them to take the standpoint of the collectivity as a whole, and who train students to believe that the value of their discourse does not depend upon their differing class origins, that it is not the speaker but the speech that is to be attended. All public schools, therefore, are schools for a linguistic conversion, moving their charges away from the ordinary languages of their everyday lives and moving them towards the culture of critical discourse.

In recent years cross-cultural comparison has increasingly come to be regarded as a general sociological methodology and not just a specialized sub-field. This changed perspective is partly a product of a greater awareness of the parochial nature of many generalizations in sociology, which have had to be corrected when confronted with a broader range of cases. Thus, the nuclear family is no longer considered to be a cultural universal. But it also corresponds to a greater emphasis on theory-testing in the hypothetico-deductive sense, an emphasis which carries with it the need to maximize the range of variation of social phenomena. General social science theories require general concepts which can be related to observations across societies. Such a language has to abstract from the imprecision and cultural references of everyday usage in order to serve the Scientist's theoretical purposes. In being general and deductive, the concepts used in comparative research can avoid both particularity and ethnocentrism.

The article focuses on the theories of moral development and explores the character and structure of moral reasoning in Western and non-Western cultures. In the transition from the 1960s to the 70s in the U.S., the concern with subjectivity, self-development, and personal awareness has remained a conspicuous feature of the undertow of mainstream society. In part, the growth of this "fetish of Subjectivity" can be accounted for by the continuing operation of the dialectic of scientism and subjectivism" in U.S. culture. But it must also be traced to the failure of the U.S. New Left to, on the one hand, keep itself from being caught in this dialectic and, on the other, to politicize and redirect the deeper foundations of this search for a new selfhood. Even in its present distorted forms the new subjectivity may take on new expressions and unfold new needs which cannot be satisfied within the liberal-capitalist and increasingly technocratic-corporate totality of contemporary U.S. Contemporary political events have added impetus to this public concern with the moral condition of liberal U.S.

The article presents a study which attempts to unpack the coding of television news and aims to reveal the cultural framework which underpins the production of apparently neutral news. Television news is a cultural artifact; it is a sequence of socially manufactured messages which carry many of the culturally dominant assumptions of our society. In the post-war period, television came into unchallenged dominance as the prime medium of entertainment and news communication. Television news is still regarded as an accurate and trustworthy source and the study discovered that few people were concerned about the bias in the news. The appearance of credible neutrality is crucial in the area of news. The study also indicates that professional and public faith in impartiality is misplaced. This article is a step in the systematic decoding of one centrally important element of contemporary culture. Three areas of possible analysis are distinguished to move towards a systematic explanation of whether television news help clarify and explain various events in the real world. Accounts of the real world, linguistics and visuals are considered in this regard.

This article argues that individual objects themselves can serve as material for a more inclusive sociology of culture without abandoning the particular concerns that sociologists bring to their study of cultural production. The first section of this article discusses both the advantages and limits of generic treatments of objects, and the potential of an approach that looks within genres to overcome these limits. In brief, by conceiving of genres as sets of alternative forms, the author points out that one can extract information from the production of one possibility out of this set rather than others. The author illustrates this potential with an analysis of a group of sculptures produced by a state workshop in eighty-century Japan for a temple called the Sangatsu-dõ, to show that individual objects can serve as an important source of clues and evidence for the social context in which they are produced. The particular objects discussed by the author, for example, when set in the context of a range of alternative forms, clearly reveal the importance of competing religious claims in shaping the nascent Japanese state's effort to use Buddhism to shore up its legitimacy among the peasantry.

The author says that in the methodological appendix to his counterculture book he referred to an incipient crisis in ethnography brought about by the doubts of ethnographers regarding whether they know what they claim to know, and whether those claims do any good or any harm to what people in what quantities, and who cared about the resolution of these doubts. The move away from generalization and explanation toward descriptive detail and toward historical or ethnographic or semiotic interpretation is also abetted by the fact that generalization and explanation in historical and ethnographic work are hard to come by, certainly harder than in survey research, much of which is designed from the very start to produce such conclusions. Still, analytic detachment, if one thinks about it for a moment in a detached way, is a truly bizarre ideology except in a few highly professionalized contexts. Despite the diversity of these six books, the second thing their authors share is their structuralist, or causally probabilistic, analysis of cultural variables.

The article presents a discussion on a commentary related to positive objectivity with reference to two books, namely, "Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory," by Margaret Archer and "Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis," by Robert Wuthnow. Wuthnow redefines all aspects of culture, replacing meaning with objective elements of discursive behavior. Culture consists of meanings which represent the individual's interpretations of reality. Wuthnow advocates a post-structuralist approach to culture which focuses on codes which are systematic patterns of relation and symbolic boundaries. Interpretations and intentions represent two actions in relation to the code that are essential parts of a cultural analysis. Archer rests her analysis on the existence of universal contradictions and complementarities, a world of textual ideas that is separate from people's meanings. Her book centrally conflates the cultural system with socio-cultural interaction. The key to explaining independent socio-cultural variations lies in how the social distribution of interests and power actually gel with the logic of cultural system at a given time.