Cultural Sociology, History of
Matthias Revers, Department of Sociology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract
Cultural sociology reaches back to classical thinkers in sociology. In the wake of the ‘cultural turn,’ cultural sociology
constitutes itself drawing on various theoretical resources from the social sciences and humanities: critical theory, cultural
anthropology, phenomenology, structuralism, and poststructuralism among others. After its institutionalization in major
associations during the 1980s, cultural sociology today represents a vibrant subfield and in some ways a paradigm that
permeates other areas of sociological inquiry.
This article looks at cultural sociology in two ways: as
a history of thought and process of institutionalization.
Cultural sociology will be traced from its early precursors
in classical social theory, to its more immediate but still
preconscious theoretical foundations of the twentieth
century and to the differentiated field it has become since
the late 1980s. It discusses some of its central structural
characteristics and the final section focuses on how cultural
sociology was established as a subfield and explains why
this occurred in the 1980s.
Classical Precursors of Cultural Sociology
Karl Marx is certainly not on the forefront of our minds when
we think about precursors of cultural sociology. Particularly his
early writings, however, were influential for later cultural
theorists, most notably Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School,
and British cultural studies (subsumed as Cultural Marxists).
With the younger Marx (especially German Ideology and The
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts), these later thinkers
share a concern for demystifying ideas (or: ideologies) as
expressions and veneers of dominant interests. In other words,
this understanding led to analyses of culture as a means of
domination.
Emile Durkheim, particularly in his later, less positivist
incarnation in Elementary Forms of Religious Life, was more
directly influential for one particular strand of contemporary
cultural sociologists who adopted a structuralist theoretical
framework. But even earlier than that, one reading of
Durkheim’s idea of solidarity in Division of Labor in Society
suggests that society is the collective conscience of shared moral
commitments. More central to recent cultural sociological
thinking is his theory of religion in Elementary Forms, which is
defined by ideas about sacred and profane. Profane refers to the
everyday whereas the sacred means matters connoted with awe
or fear. The sacred is separated from the profane by taboos and
draws power from rituals. Rituals, in turn, create solidarity and
thus integrate societies. Although Durkheim mainly talked
about religion, he believed that this moral foundation also
applies to secular societies. In his earlier book Primitive Classi-
fication, which he co-authored with Marcel Mauss, he argued
that classification is not only cognitive but most importantly
moral and emotional.
498 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 5
Max Weber is important for cultural sociology especially
(but not exclusively) for his interpretive method of ‘ver-
stehende Soziologie’ and his emphasis on value-rational
(‘wertrational’) forms of social action. Furthermore, Weber
assigned culture a key role in social change but less for social
reproduction and stability. His notion of charismatic authority,
for instance, which is based on the collective belief in excep-
tional qualities and powers of a leader, is transitory and rele-
vant for changes of power structures. Although he spent almost
the entire book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism on
arguing how specific ideas of salvation in Protestantism
fostered a capitalist ethos, in essence, religion becomes irrele-
vant once capitalism is in place and organized by rational
systems of authority. Weber’s theory of stratification, which
distinguished material/economic class from symbolic status,
would become central for later cultural sociologists, particu-
larly Pierre Bourdieu. Of the classical thinkers Weber was the
greatest inspiration for multidimensional explanations of
historical conditions, accounting for material, social, and ideal
factors.
Georg Simmel is certainly the ‘most cultural’ founding
father of the discipline with his detailed and diverse analyses of
modern life. However, for lack of a systematic theory he is less
important for macro-oriented cultural sociologists than for
symbolic interactionists, particularly the Chicago School.
Another important precursor, especially for poststructuralist
thinkers like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, was Friedrich
Nietzsche; especially, his emphasis on cultural differentiation
and cultural relativism as well as an early theory of embodiment.
Of course, none of these thinkers were ‘cultural sociolo-
gists,’ nor did they refer to cultural sociology as an intellectual
endeavor. The first sociologist to use the term (i.e., ‘Kulturso-
ziologie’) was Max Weber’s younger brother, Alfred Weber. In
contemporary cultural sociology beyond the German-speaking
world he is irrelevant, however. Another important thinker for
later cultural theorizing in sociology is Talcott Parsons, even
though he may be indirectly responsible for a temporary
culture-averseness of sociology, at least in the United States.
Parson’s theory opposed a rational actor model and perceived
the cultural system as one subsystem that integrates society. To
Parsons, the cultural system was a realm of communicative
exchange and coordination of action through stable role
expectations that are based on general values. These values and
the assumption of a consensus about them were the central
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03059-2

features of his theory and a major point of the critique that
followed and culminated in the 1960s. The response of the
sociological mainstream in the United States for the better part
of two decades had been not to consider culture worth paying
attention to at all.
Theoretical Foundations of Cultural Sociology
There are at least six intellectual currents in the twentieth
century, which would become important for cultural sociology
subsequently. These are (1) a particular reading of Marx
(termed Western/Cultural/Humanist/neo-Marxism); (2) (late)
Durkheimian social theory; (3) semiotics and French structur-
alism; (4) poststructuralism; (5) cultural anthropology; and (6)
phenomenological sociology:
1. Two scholars were instrumental for promoting Marxist
thinking beyond historical materialism and toward a more
important role of culture in capitalist domination: Georg
Lukács with his work on commodification (and his recon-
sideration of Marx’ Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)
and Antonio Gramsci with his theory of hegemony, which
emphasized that domination is conditioned by control of
ideas and beliefs in society. This Marxian thinking was taken
up by the first generation of the Frankfurt School, most
notably Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Walter
Benjamin. One of their concerns was the reproduction of
popular culture through new technological means and its
impact on mass society, which is to impede critical thinking
and purvey capitalist ideology. While it played on values of
individuality and freedom of choice, popular culture was in
fact standardized by capitalist logic, they argued. Louis
Althusser established a more cultural reading of Marx’ later
writings. He focused on how the constituent parts of the
superstructure – ideology, state, and the legal system –
interact to reproduce capitalism, arguing that they have
a ‘relative autonomy’ from their economic base. Ideas and
institutions take shape according to their own logic but the
economy defines their boundaries. What unites these
theorists is that they assign importance to culture as an
object of investigation, though only in terms of ideology.
From this viewpoint, culture prevents us from critically
assessing circumstances of our lives and traps us in false
consciousness.
2. The scholar who directly continued the legacy of
Durkheim’s later work is his nephew, Marcel Mauss. In his
best-known work The Gift he argued that gift exchange is
central in all societies around the world. Although the
exchange often involves commodities, their material worth
is secondary to the symbolic value and normative obliga-
tions they imply. Maurice Halbwachs would be another
Durkheimian scholar of this generation whose work shows
that collective memory is a central source of solidarity in
societies. In the second half of the twentieth century, the
most important intellectual figures advancing Durkheimian
cultural theory were cultural anthropologists, particularly
Mary Douglas and Victor Turner, as well as sociologist
Robert Bellah. Turner offered a theory of cultural change
with his concept of liminality, which is a transitional state
Cultural Sociology, History of 499
characterized by a low degree of structuration. As opposed
to Durkheim’s notion of anomie, the liminal state is defined
by the weakening of social distinctions and fostering of
creativity. During these moments, Turner argued, commu-
nities defined by equality and solidarity are formed
(communitas). Mary Douglas was interested in cultural
classification and took up Durkheim and Mauss’ work on
this issue to study symbolic purification and pollution as
foundations of social order. What is considered dirty and
disgusting may vary across cultures but is not random, she
argued. Instead, beliefs about pollution are based on rules
of classification and are enforced by rituals of separation of
pure and impure. Robert Bellah argued in his famous essay
‘Civil Religion in America’ that all collective beliefs have
a religious dimension, even though they may concern
secular issues. Public life, according to Bellah, is structured
by religious-like beliefs, which refer not only to Judeo-
Christian ideas but national symbols imbued with sacral
meaning (e.g., Statute of Liberty in the United States,
Brandenburger Tor in Germany, and Marianne in France).
3. Structuralism contends that human experience is rooted in
foundational mechanisms, which are patterned by language
and call for objective study. Cultural analysis based on
structuralism studies culture ‘like language.’ Human agency,
which actualizes language through speech, is irrelevant in
such analyses. Structuralism is particularly indebted to
structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. He distin-
guished langue (language) from parole (speech), focusing
exclusively on the former, and further differentiated
between signified (that which is referred to by language)
and signifier (that which refers). His central argument is that
the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary but
conventional. The task is, therefore, to understand these
conventions of signification, which are always structured by
opposition. Building on Saussure’s structural linguistics, the
main reference point for structuralism strictly speaking is
Claude Lévi-Strauss. His main objects of study were myth-
ical thought and rituals, which he decoded as cultural
classification systems, structured by similarity and differ-
ence. Lévi-Strauss’ theory of culture thus has resemblance
with that of Durkheim, although he hardly referred to him
in writing.
Roland Barthes completed the intellectual move of
structuralism to use semiotics for the study of culture. He
insisted that the basic linguistic distinctions between langue
and parole, signifier and signified, can be applied to all
cultural systems. Fixing one often criticized weakness of
Lévi-Strauss’ theory, which is that it is static, Barthes added
a diachronic (he called it syntagmatic) element to the anal-
ysis of signs, namely by examining narratives. Furthermore,
he argued that signifiers do not just denote signifieds but
also other signifiers. As opposed to denotation (first order
signification), Barthes referred to higher orders of signifi-
cation as connotation. By layering connotative meanings on
top of each other, signifiers get a life of their own. To
Barthes, signs are not innocuous but part of ideological
systems, which he showed most forcefully in Mythologies. He
stressed that semiotics must be combined with sociological
analysis to examine how sign systems, such as myths, help
to justify and reproduce social orders. Thus, besides his
500 Cultural Sociology, History of
many other contributions, Barthes added a critical dimen-
sion to structuralist analysis.
4. Partly pioneered by Barthes, poststructuralism is a diverse
intellectual movement seeking to refine structuralist
thinking. Like structuralism, poststructuralism is concerned
with language and symbolic forms, such as narratives,
myths, and cultural codes. It is not concerned with the
sovereign individual but how subjectivities are affected by
semiotic systems under certain historical circumstances
(in contrast to structuralism). In opposition to Saussure
and continuing Barthes’ concept of connotation, post-
structuralism rejects the separation between signifier and
signified, arguing that signifieds are themselves always
signifiers. In contrast to structuralism, poststructuralism is
more critical about its own conditions of knowledge
production and the notion of the analyst as an objective
observer. Related to this, poststructuralism is more sensitive
to how cultural systems are affected by power. On the one
hand, power is examined as the ability to prise cultural
systems open. On the other hand, it asks how power closes
cultural orders and makes them appear natural. This is what
Foucault’s idea of ‘dispositif’ is concerned with, for example,
which subsumes the entanglement of institutional and
discursive orders that limit and predetermine what is
considered normal and abnormal. A fundamental analytical
move of poststructuralism is that it looks at symbolic orders
as distinguished from an outside ‘Other,’ which is necessary
to define and sustain its boundaries.
Michel Foucault made the transition from structuralism to
poststructuralism in his own work by increasingly focusing
on the power formations generated by expert discourse. In
his theory, discourse controls thought and practice and, as in
structuralism, human agency is extraneous. Aside from his
growing interest in power relationships, his attentiveness to
historical processes always distinguished his work from the
structuralist tradition. Foucault’s analysis of discourse traces
the underlying epistemic assumptions and truth claims as
well as institutional formations and practices that followed
from it. One element that unites his claims about history and
power is that there is a transition in modernity from sover-
eign power (based on hierarchy, physical, public, and ritu-
alized forms of punishment) to disciplinary power (based on
surveillance and rationality), which is more profound by
altering and controlling behavior, thinking, and bodily
functions from within. In contrast to Marxist thinking of
ideology, Foucault’s theory is free from taken-for-granted
assumptions about the basis of discourses and allows more
analytic autonomy, which makes it a central reference point
for cultural sociology.
Another central figure in poststructuralism is Jacques
Derrida whose work tackled the act of interpretation of texts.
In the first instance and in accordance with de Saussure,
meanings are always generated through contrast with absent
signs (‘silences’). Derrida insisted on the multiplicity, con-
textuality, and endless proliferation of meanings of texts
rather than ultimate, fixated meanings asserted by the
(structuralist) analyst. Derrida demonstrated that even the
most canonical texts can be interpreted in ways that accrue
not only alternative but contradictory readings. Texts thus
have certain autonomy from their authors’ intentions and
are always ridden with ambiguity. A search for ‘truth’ in texts
is thus pointless and instead the analyst should engage in
deconstruction, that is, in playful hermeneutic interpretation
that screens texts from many different angles. Furthermore,
the goal of this undertaking is to examine the ways
(different) people make sense of texts (in different ways).
5. Besides Mary Douglas and Victor Turner, another cultural
anthropologist had significant influence on the cultural turn
of the social sciences in general and cultural sociology in
particular: Clifford Geertz. Influenced by Max Weber’s
interpretive method as well as Talcott Parsons emphasis on
cultural values and norms, Geertz advanced a hermeneutic
approach to culture. During his extensive ethnographic
explorations in Indonesia and Morocco, he developed
a perspective that considered culture as permeating every
aspect of our lives and as worthy of study in its own terms
and in an interpretive fashion. The result is a ‘thick
description,’ a densely textured and ethnographic depiction
of meanings and experience in local settings, which draws
larger conclusions about the culture in question. Geertz,
however, shied away from broader theoretical claims
beyond the cultural contexts of his studies. Later cultural
sociologists would take up this challenge.
6. Phenomenological approaches, such as symbolic inter-
actionism and ethnomethodology, are further influences of
cultural sociology. Thinkers associated with these intellec-
tual movements insist on the situational construction of
meaning by human agents. For cultural sociologists inter-
ested in semiotics, the influence of these works is limited.
For others, Alfred Schütz, Peter Berger, and Thomas
Luckmann, as also Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, and
Harvey Sacks stand as important influences (this is partic-
ularly visible in certain strands of science and technology
studies, for instance).
Cultural sociologists draw on these intellectual resources
with varying degrees. They take from cultural Marxism
a concern with critical theory of how culture helps reproduce
capitalist orders. They take from Durkheimian thinking a
concern with culture as a basis of social cohesion, with rituals
as practices to reinvigorate it and a conception of society as a
moral accomplishment. They also focus on the binary logic of
systems of cultural classification, quite similar to structuralism,
which provides more concrete guidelines regarding as to how
to go about studying culture. Durkheimian, structuralist and
poststructuralist thinking as well as Geertz’ cultural anthro-
pology emphasizes culture as an autonomous object of study.
Poststructural thinking inspired cultural sociologists to engage
in rigorous hermeneutic inquiry and critique of discourses that
claim closure and classification (which would become partic-
ularly fruitful in queer, gender, ethnic, and postcolonial
studies). Phenomenological approaches, finally, have been
important to those who focus on cultural practice.
Contemporary Variants of Cultural Sociology
An immediate reference point in cultural sociology is the work
of Pierre Bourdieu, which had global impact during the past
20 years of his life and is even more influential now, more than

a decade after his demise. Especially his books Distinction and
Rules of Art as well as the essay collection The Field of Cultural
Production had a remarkable influence on cultural sociology.
His theory provides a comprehensive conceptual repertoire,
which lends itself for operationalization in empirical research
and examination of culture on different levels of analysis. For
cultural sociology, especially helpful are (1) his theory of social
stratification and the importance of cultural capital for the
attainment and reproduction of social status, (2) his concept of
habitus, particularly for ethnography that seeks to make argu-
ments beyond the micro-social and relate structure and agency,
and (3) his notion of field as a way to examine the logic of
cultural institutions.
British cultural studies are a preceding and parallel intel-
lectual movement, which cultural sociology seeks to distin-
guish itself from by demonstrative ideological agnosticism and
more social scientific empirical methods. Aside from intellec-
tual specificities, cultural studies are defined by a different
institutional configuration: it is a more interdisciplinary
subfield; it has a higher degree of autonomy (e.g., there are
departments of cultural studies); it used to have an organiza-
tional center until 2002, namely The Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS, founded in 1964).
Cultural studies were influenced by cultural Marxism and the
New Left, later structuralism and poststructuralism. Important
early thinkers were literary critics Raymond Williams and
Richard Hoggart (who founded CCCS). The central intellectual
figure from the 1970s onward was Stuart Hall. Arguments for
the autonomy of culture and interest in power formations
promoted by culture are central concerns for cultural studies.
Scholars focused on the textual study of political ideology,
popular culture, and mass mediation of ideologies as well as
ethnographic studies of subcultures. Cultural studies spread
from the United Kingdom all over the Anglophone world
during the 1980s.
In US cultural sociology, there are two contrary under-
standings (bracketing ‘sociology of culture’ for now) of the
purpose of culture in sociological analysis, which had wider
impact. We may call the first a pragmatist theory of culture and
contrast it with a structuralist/semiotic approach.
The paradigmatic formulation of the pragmatist approach
to culture is by Ann Swidler who, building on Max Weber,
conceptualized culture in an early and often-cited article as
a repertoire for constructing strategies of action (also known
as the ‘tool-kit’ approach to culture). In her understanding,
symbolic systems are especially important at times of transi-
tion and instability (‘unsettled times’). Similarly to this
conception of culture as a resource, works inspired by
Bourdieu treat culture as a means in struggles for power.
Works concerned with framing (in David Snow’s adaptation
of Goffman’s original conception of frame analysis) examine
social mobilization and claims-making in the public sphere
through the strategic construction of meaning (frames). New
institutional theory would also belong to this category as it
treats culture as a source for legitimacy for organizations,
which are competing for market share and state funding.
Hence, this approach has wide resonance with works that
attribute analytic value but no real explanatory power to
culture. One epistemological root for this understanding of
culture is a principal division of human experience in social
Cultural Sociology, History of 501
and cultural domains, which is also a common feature of
cultural studies.
One key reference point for the structuralist/semiotic
approach to cultural sociology is the ‘strong program in
cultural sociology’ (subtitled ‘structural hermeneutics’) by
Jeffrey Alexander, his former students and collaborators. This
approach is exemplary for its centrality in the field and
programmatic expansiveness. It is institutionally located at the
Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Its main
theoretical foundations are Clifford Geertz, Max Weber, French
structuralism, and late Durkheimian social theory. The strong
program is not only a critique of cultural sociology but soci-
ology altogether by arguing that culture is an important
constituent of all social relations and that a meaning-centered
analysis is thus necessary in all areas of sociological inquiry.
The strong program emphasizes cultural autonomy, which
requires analytically bracketing out the nonsymbolic, at least in
the first instance and before discerning how culture relates to
other efficacies. The object of empirical research is typically
public discourse, which is subjected to a kind of textual
ethnography aiming at thick description of the social realm in
question. In accordance with structuralism and Durkheim, this
style of cultural sociology emphasizes the binary logic of
meaning. It is not static, furthermore, but stresses that meaning
is generated sequentially by considering narrative as one key
analytical component. Other important theoretical interven-
tions by the strong program were a cultural theory of collective
memory (cultural trauma), an approach to study cultural
pragmatics (cultural performance) and, most recently, visual
culture and iconicity.
The Institutionalization of Cultural Sociology
In the 1980s, the first sections for cultural sociology were
founded in disciplinary associations. The cultural sociology
section in the German Sociological Society, for instance, was
established in 1984 under the name ‘Kultursoziologie in der
Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie.’ At its inception, it was
defined by political conservatism and an aspiration to
strengthen the German geisteswissenschaftliche tradition in
sociology. The sociology of culture section in the American
Sociological Association followed suit in 1987. Why at that
time? The simple answer is that institutional differentiation of
the discipline within associations really began only in the
1970s. Besides these associational reasons, differentiation and
self-awareness of cultural sociologists occurred in opposition to
the sociological mainstream, which was perceived as too
scientistic and materialist at the time. In particular, the emer-
gence of cultural sociology was a response to anti-Parsonianism
in the sociological mainstream, which prevailed from the late
1960s until the 1980s, not only in the United States but also in
Germany. This posture rejected not only the abstract and
consensual values envisioned by Parsons but culture in general.
Another important current for the rise of cultural sociology
was the ‘cultural turn,’ which began to take hold in the social
sciences in the 1960s. During that turn, disciplines became
more susceptible to theorizing in other social scientific fields
and especially the humanities. The cultural turn was itself
enabled by the ‘linguistic turn,’ rooted in structural linguistics
502 Cultural Sociology, History of
of Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later
philosophy of language, which led scholars in the social
sciences and humanities to take language and symbols more
seriously.
Besides intellectual developments (but certainly related to
them), the historical context for the growing importance of
culture as a subject matter of social science was the ascendant
postindustrial logic in Western societies of the second half of
the twentieth century as well as the counter-cultural and social
movements that arose in the 1960s. Although cultural thinking
in sociology started much earlier, it seems that it could only
really thrive under these historical circumstances, in which we
see a rise of ‘expressive individualism’ (Bellah), an emphasis on
consumption and experience and a growing emphasis of
identity and symbolic representation in public debate. The
perceived dissolution of formerly rigid social categories and
a growing sense of ambivalence and contingency necessitated
new analytic tools to examine this new condition.
In the United States, the emergent field was structured by
internal discussions about the object(s) of study from the
beginning. Some sociologists, most notably Howard Becker,
Diane Crane, Paul DiMaggio, Wendy Griswold, and Richard
Peterson studied culture as an object of production and
consumption, which is shaped (and explained!) by other social
conditions. This became known as the sociology of culture
approach. Howard Becker’s book Art Worlds, for example,
argues that art is conditioned by previously reached conven-
tions (and their calculated breach), which shape both the
aesthetics of artifacts and the cooperative arrangements neces-
sary for producing them. Many works in this field are influ-
enced by Pierre Bourdieu, focusing on class and status
hierarchies in the production and consumption of culture. A
well-known exemplar is Richard Peterson’s research, which
showed that people in privileged positions are better conceived
as ‘cultural omnivores’ than mere snobs, as Bourdieu’s
homology argument suggests (higher strata exclusively
consume high-brow culture). Omnivorousness is not under-
stood as a liberal attitude but a new mode of distinction, which
is based on cultural relativism and the ability to criticize a wide
spectrum of cultural forms based on knowledge about them.
Opposite sociologists of culture, other scholars considered
themselves cultural sociologists. They share a more expansive
vision of the field, both in terms of intellectual influences and
subject areas of study. They read cultural anthropology, cultural
history, cultural studies, and (post)structuralism and seek to
make interventions in other areas of sociology from a cultural
perspective. Viviana Zelizer is considered as one of the founders
of this sociological approach with her early research on the
importance of cultural meanings in the insurance business and
money economy (published in the 1970s and 1980s). Eviatar
Zerubavel published on the temporal structuring of everyday
experience as a powerful collective representation around the
same time.
The intellectual dynamics of the new subdiscipline in the
United States was defined by debates between those two
camps, sociology of culture and cultural sociology, which were
particularly intense during the 1990s. A central issue of debate
was the role of culture in sociological analysis, essentially
causality and autonomy of culture. Sociologists of culture treat
culture as a dependent variable to be explained by other social
or material forces. In cultural sociology, it is the opposite; that
is, culture does the explaining or at least a significant part of it.
In Germany, in comparison, the broader understanding of
cultural sociology was dominant from the beginning. One
reason is that the leading figures, most notably Friedrich
Tenbruck and Wolfgang Lipp, set the direction more forcefully
in a special issue of the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und
Sozialpsychologie where they defined ‘Kultursoziologie’ as con-
cerned with “general patterns of meaning, which give action
stability and significance, explicitly and implicitly, as precon-
ditions and intentions across all areas of life and institutions”
(Lipp and Tenbruck, 1979: 395; my translation). Such
a defining intervention has not occurred at the inception of the
subfield in the United States, or rather: there were multiple
interventions, which were subjected to controversy with no
immediate resolution. From the 2000s onward, however,
cultural sociology became dominant in numbers and direc-
tions of the subfield.
Sociology of culture and cultural sociology are now some-
what divided into different journals, Poetics preferred by the
former, Cultural Sociology – an official journal of the British
Sociological Association – and the more recent American Journal
of Cultural Sociology by the latter. Although a cultural studies
venue, Theory, Culture & Society is also an important outlet for
cultural sociological thinking. The field, especially sociology of
culture, also enjoys some visibility in flagship journals in US
sociology, American Journal of Sociology, and American Sociolog-
ical Review. Important theoretical interventions in cultural
sociology appeared in Sociological Theory and Theory & Society.
Cultural sociologists have been successful publishing their
work with top university presses from the beginning, above all
Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and the
University of Chicago Press, which have remained important
publishing venues for the field. Oxford University Press and
Routledge have recently published handbooks on cultural
sociology and Blackwell published one on the sociology of
culture.
Cultural sociology as it is constituted today is engaged
almost in all subfields of sociology, even in subject areas that
are most ‘material’ by definition (economic sociology, crimi-
nology, and so on). Disciplinary boundaries are typically rigid
in the United States. In Germany, for instance, cultural
sociology is embedded in the broad field of ‘Kulturwissen-
schaften,’ which takes institutional form in intra- and extra-
academic research institutes (similar to cultural studies but
less politically oriented). German cultural sociologists are thus
subjected to a more interdisciplinary debate to begin with.
Cultural sociology in the Anglophone and international
context, although it is infused by ideas from other disciplines
(as mentioned above), still lacks such branching-out efforts,
which could be a direction of the field in the future.
See also: Culture and Actor Network Theory; Culture and
Economy; Culture and Institutional Logics; Culture and
Networks; Culture, Cognition and Embodiment; Culture,
Production of: Prospects for the Twenty-First Century;
Embodiment and Culture; Epistemic Cultures; Formal Methods
of Cultural Analysis; Organizations and Culture; Symbolic
Boundaries.
 Cultural Sociology, History of 503

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