The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science current issue

Introduction: The Diversity of Culture

Binder, A., Blair-Loy, M., Evans, J., Ng, K., Schudson, M. — 2008-08-20

Culture and Organization Theory

Morrill, C. — 2008-08-20

Culture has become a legitimate concern and part of the basic conceptual toolkit in much of contemporary organization theory. This article historically traces the contested place of culture in organization theory—from acultural rationalist theorizing at the turn of the twentieth century; to the accidental "discovery" of shop floor culture by human relations scholars in the 1920s; to mid-twentieth-century explorations of informal and institutionalized relations in organizations; to present-day approaches that blend concepts from organizational culture frameworks, neoinstitutional analysis, sociology of culture, and social movement theory. This historical backdrop provides a context for raising several research questions relevant to organizational change, boundaries, and deviance. In closing, the author suggests that an analytic nexus between culture, power, and agency is emerging in contemporary organization theory that ultimately may yield a theory of society.

Culture and Inequality: Identity, Ideology, and Difference in "Postascriptive Society"

Charles, M. — 2008-08-20

How have conceptualizations of "culture" been incorporated into sociological studies of class, racial/ethnic, and gender inequality? This article first reviews the development of American scholarship on social inequalities during the past half century and the role of cultural analysis in this development. It goes on to consider culture-related responses to three central questions in the subdiscipline and closes with an examination of currently contentious issues. Likely future developments include movement toward more fluid, contextually contingent conceptualizations of class, race, and gender and an increasing prominence of analyses that explore the dynamic interplay between individual, interactional, and institutional processes of inequality.

Culture and Race/Ethnicity: Bolder, Deeper, and Broader

Skrentny, J. D. — 2008-08-20

The role of cultural analysis in the sociology of race, ethnicity, and immigration varies across subject matter. Primarily for political reasons, it has been marginalized in the study of ethnic/racial inequality, though new work is reclaiming culture in this important context. It has an unacknowledged presence in studies of discrimination and domination, but is explicit in macro and historical studies. This article surveys these subfields and makes a call for bolder, deeper, and broader cultural analysis in the field. More work is needed on cultural assimilation, how inequality and discrimination produce racial and ethnic meanings, how ethnic and racial cultures affect interests through variations in conceptions of the meaning of life, how sending state cultures affect immigrant and ethnic cultures in the United States, and how globalization is Americanizing immigrants before they even leave their homelands.

Culture and Movements

Polletta, F. — 2008-08-20

Thirty years ago, social movement scholars treated culture as just so much noise in structuralist theories of mobilization. Since then, they have become highly attuned to cultural processes, probing how people come to interpret their grievances as political, how culture sets the terms of strategic action, and when movements succeed in changing the rules of the institutional game. The result has been better theories of movements' emergence and impacts but also important insights into culture. In particular, movement analyses have shed light on two questions that have long exercised sociologists of culture. How does culture constrain practical action? Under what conditions does culture serve not to reproduce the status quo but to challenge it? After a brief review of movement scholars' evolving perspectives on culture, the article focuses on movement studies that have contributed to theorizing broader dynamics of cultural innovation and constraint.

Culture and Education

Stevens, M. L. — 2008-08-20

The author reviews the primary frameworks through which North American sociologists have conceived of the relation between formal education and culture and explains how sociologists' preponderant conception of formal schooling as an individual-level phenomenon and a metrical quantity has come to constrain intellectual progress in much of the subfield. The author offers two analytic strategies that might help loosen this constraint.

Culture and Markets: How Economic Sociology Conceptualizes Culture

Levin, P. — 2008-08-20

Current ways of addressing culture in the sociology of markets are incomplete. One approach treats culture as constitutive of markets (markets are culture), while the other treats culture as something affecting markets (markets have culture). This division corresponds to markets that are more or less "settled." The author outlines the history and shortcomings of this duality and proposes a more dimensional approach to culture and markets that more fully integrates culture into economic sociology.

Culture and Microsociology: The Anthill and the Veldt

Fine, G. A., Fields, C. D. — 2008-08-20

The authors argue that sociologists must use the investigation of interpersonal situations as a strategy through which "culture" can be understood in practice. Culture includes a broad range of social processes, institutions, and value systems. In contrast to perspectives that treat groups and individuals as units to be shaped by powerful cultural forces, the authors contend that culture is established, manipulated, and promoted by individuals and groups. Microsituations serve as arenas of action in their own right, locations where culture is both produced and experienced. Drawing examples from five areas of microsociology—groups, cognition, identity/ self, performance, and emotion—the authors demonstrate how a distinctively microsociological perspective allows sociologists to examine how culture, across its various conceptions, has an effect on actors and, in turn, is affected by actors. By exposing the workings of culture in situ, microsociology forces us to theorize the connections between meaning, behavior, and structure.

Culture and Law: Beyond a Paradigm of Cause and Effect

Saguy, A. C., Stuart, F. — 2008-08-20

This article examines a variety of ways in which social scientists make cultural argument about the law, including (1) holding culture as the independent variable to explain variations in law, (2) taking law as an independent variable to explain culture, or (3) considering law as culture. The authors explore each general strategy and its advantages and disadvantages in turn and argue that the law as culture perspective is one of the most interesting recent developments in sociolegal thought.

Culture and Science/Technology: Rethinking Knowledge, Power, Materiality, and Nature

Epstein, S. — 2008-08-20

Sociologists of science and technology mostly have not engaged directly with the sociology of culture, and most sociologists of culture have been slow to extract the implications for their own work of studies of scientific authority and technological production. In this article, the author analyzes how sociologists of science and technology in fact have performed cultural analyses. The author argues that recent moves to extend studies of science and technology "outward" beyond formal scientific settings have created new possibilities for interchange with the sociology of culture, particularly around studies of material culture, classification, cultural cartography, scientific citizenship, epistemic cultures, and civic epistemologies. The author concludes that the sociology of science and technology holds important lessons for sociologists of culture because of its focus on a key source of cultural authority, its attention to material objects, and its commitment to rethinking divides between the instrumental and the expressive and between nature and culture.

Culture and the Sociology of Sexuality: It's Only Natural?

Moon, D. — 2008-08-20

This article locates six themes in the overlap between the sociology of culture and the sociology of sexuality, highlighting both institutionalized and discursive forms of power. These themes include (1) works that develop or problematize economic metaphors in the study of sexuality; (2) studies of commercial sex that problematize cultural assumptions about sex, money, and morality; (3) explorations of "nonsexual"-seeming institutions, which can reproduce or challenge hierarchies of race and gender as they transmit sexual norms; (4) considerations of the sexual underpinnings of citizenship and personhood; (5) analyses of mass-mediated discourses of sexual personhood; and (6) critiques of sociology itself, as reproducing discursive power by neglecting to problematize certain assumptions about sexuality. The article ends by considering sociology's relationship to humanities-based queer theory, arguing that sociologists should bring analyses of emotions and feelings rules into our considerations of how people develop a sense of self through social interactions.

Culture and Popular Culture: A Case for Sociology

Grindstaff, L. — 2008-08-20

The study of popular culture has a long and intimate relationship to the field of cultural sociology, being both a subcategory of the field and a separate arena of inquiry taken up by other disciplines. This article examines the intellectual traditions that have shaped the sociology of popular culture, traces the points of connection and difference between sociologists and other scholars studying popular culture, and argues for the continued relevance of cultural sociology for addressing key issues and concerns within the realm of "the popular," broadly conceived. These developments include the rise of new media/communication technologies and the increasing interdependence between popular culture and other arenas of social life.

Culture and the Arts: From Art Worlds to Arts-in-Action

Acord, S. K., DeNora, T. — 2008-08-20

Through its embrace of the "cultural turn" and the "practice turn" in cultural sociology, recent work in the subfield of arts sociology has helped to advance our understanding of the role of culture in social life through its focus on arts-in-action. Empirically, this focus grew out of earlier work in the production and consumption of the arts, while, theoretically, it resonates with traditions within ethnomethodology, cognitive sociology, and the sociology of science and technology. The authors describe how new work in arts sociology unearths and develops our understanding of aesthetic consciousness, the tacit and often embodied bases of action, cognition, and engagement with cultural forms. This recent emphasis on materials and actions in turn permits critique of rule-based and more overtly cognitive models of agency structure. It also leads some of its proponents into areas that would not normally be viewed as topics for the field.

Quick Read Synopsis

2008-08-20