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Recent debates about qualitative methods have discussed the relative limitations and contributions of interviews in comparison to surveys and participant observation. These discussions have rarely considered how ethnographers themselves use interviews as part of their work. We suggest that Lizardo's discussion of three modes of culture (declarative, nondeclarative, and public) help us to understand the separate contributions of observation and interviews, with ethnographic interviews an especially helpful means of accessing different cultural modes. We also argue that Lizardo's conception of public culture should be divided into meso- and macrolevels and that this division helps to show the differing contributions of interviews within and without an ethnographic context. Developing our argument with data from the second author's ethnographic research and analysis of other scholars' ethnographies, we show how research that uses ethnographic interviews can help sociologists better understand how these four cultural modes interact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socialization is a key mechanism of social reproduction. Yet, like the functionalists who introduced the concept, socialization has fallen out of favor, critiqued for ignoring power and agency, for its teleology and incoherence, and for a misguided link to "culture of poverty" arguments. In this review, we argue for a renewed, postfunctionalist use of socialization. We review the concept's history, its high point under Parsons, the reasons for its demise, its continued use in some subfields (e.g., gender, race and ethnicity, education), and alternative concepts used to explain social reproduction. We then suggest that something is lost when socialization is avoided or isolated in particular subfields. Without socialization, conceptions of social reproduction face problems of history, power, and transferability. We close by outlining a postfunctionalist agenda for socialization research, providing a framework for a new theory of socialization, one that builds off of cognitive science, pragmatism, the study of language, the reinterrogation of values, and the development of ideology in political socialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • The Evangelical use of a prayer as a cultural tool seems to solve problems and create them. • "Normative frames" establish how actors perform, experience, and evaluate a cultural tool. • The normative frame of sincerity is the source of both problems and possibilities in Evangelical prayer. • The normative frame of sincerity is important for other cultural tools like marriage and celebrity. • The same cultural tools can look and feel radically different with different normative frames. Abstract Based on ethnographies of two Evangelical Christian contexts in the U.S., this article investigates how Evangelicals' expectation that prayer be sincere – i.e., an honest reflection of the praying subject's true thoughts, feelings, and desires – enabled prayer to do particular kinds of cultural work for Evangelicals at the same time it created a series of troubling dilemmas surrounding the practice itself. Through this empirical analysis, we develop the more general theoretical concept of normative frames to draw broader sociological attention to how groups' normative expectations regarding how cultural tools should (and should not) work interact with and influence the pragmatics of culture in action. We discuss how future sociological scholarship on the possibilities and problems of culture in action can benefit from further study of the complex and sometimes paradoxical interplay between cultural tools and their normative frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author argues that North American sociologists of education have generally been motivated by a «consequentialist» morality that focuses on individual achievement measured in the aggregate rather than a teleological morality focused on communal achievement measured in the virtue of the individual. As such, the subdiscipline has generally avoided discussion of morality in schools except inasmuch as it can be used to explain stratification. The author provides data from two prominent moral education movements and suggests a reading of contemporary moral philosophy and Durkheim's Moral Education to develop a «cultural sociology of education». [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of religion is not well known for exporting theory to other subdisciplines, for which the author suggests three causes: a lack of interest in religion from other sociologists, a focus on “normal science” rather than exportable theory, and an insistence that religion is a sui generis analytic category. The author then suggests how this third cause can be remedied by no longer thinking of religion as an analytic category but rather as a site though which religious actors can be studied. Doing so would shift religion to a pragmatic, native category, thereby allowing an easier export of concepts discovered while studying religious groups, in the tradition of sociological classics like taboo and charismatic authority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines three discussions in the American public sphere between 1998 and 2008 about whether irony is good for America: the response to a 1999 book against irony, the declared ‘death of irony’ after the events of September 11, 2001, and concerns about the ironic nature of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. After reviewing the literature on irony from various academic disciplines, the author shows how ‘knockers’ worried that irony was a counter-narrative that would distract from romantic progress, while ‘boosters’ claimed irony was a trope that could only strengthen the romantic story of the nation. Rather than answering the title question, the author uses the evidence of these ‘ironic crises’ to show how such questions reveal the cultural forms and reflexivity that structure the American public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]