CULTURE
set of signals used by members of a particular social group in order to
strengthen its internal bonds and jnaintain its superiority over others.
This operated within social classes, and not just between them. In
music, for example, Bourdieu showed that upper-class people who had
been educated in the elite Grandes Ecoles had a marked preference for
Bach, while workers with no qualifications had an equally strong hking
for Petula Clark.
As these names suggest, Bourdieu’s fieldwork was largely conducted
in the 1960s, and he has been accused of assuming that the superiority
of a particular high bourgeois culture was more enduring than it has
turned out to be. The highly plurahstic cultural industries of the early
twenty-first century compete in a relatively open marketplace, and taste
is often intentionally socially ambiguous, allowing people — particularly
the young - to play and experiment with a variety of cultural identities.
Bourdieu also tended to portray workers as somewhat passive, in their
cultural dispositions as in their educational orientations, leading to the
accusation of determinism. He is also accused of ignoring gender,
though equally a sizeable bqdy of feminist analysis draws heavily on his
work to help explain the role of cultural capital in the reproduction of
patriarchy. For some contemporary sociologists, Bourdieu’s entire
project is tied to a dated neo-Marxist conception of class as the basis of
social order. Yet he will certainly be remembered as a major influence
on the sociology of education in the 1970s and 1980s, and many critical
sociologists stiU acknowledge his lasting contribution to the analysis of
culture as a material force.
Further reading
Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
London: Routiedge.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Passeron, Jean-Claude (1973) Reproduction in Education,
Society and Culture. London: Sage.
Lane, Jeremy F. (2000) Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto
Press.
Robbins, Derek (2000) Bourdieu and Culture. London: Sage.
John Field
CULTURE
‘Culture’ is a term that, hke ‘community’, is much used but for which
it is impossible to point to a single definition beyond general formu­
lations hke ‘the social realm in which shared meanings are produced’.
CULTURE
ven this is potentially controversial: one of the areas of disagreement
bout ‘culture’ is whether a given society (however defined) has one or
any. If many, is it defensible to claim that some are more valuable that
Withers? Or are these kinds of claims simply a weapon in the struggle for
societal power and influence? Contemporary definitions of‘culture’, in
bther words, are always based in an implicit theory of society.
Historically, however, culture was defined in opposition to nature.
Just as skills in cultivation have been applied to make the plant and
animal world more productive so, metaphorically, human intellect and
creativity has cultivated a ‘civilisation’ in the realm of ideas. This narrow
{ concept of ‘culture’ as high-status symboUc production in areas hke
I painting, sculpture and hterature meant that, from the mid-nineteenth
I century to the mid-twentieth century, there was little interchange
I between scholars in the humanities and the rapidly developing social
I sciences. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) Matthew Arnold, English
I educationahst and writer, argued that pursuing and disseminating the
I highest forms of aesthetic culture was vital to countering the social
I turmoil of rapid industriaHsation and urbanisation, and the consequent
Idemands from ordinary people for greater citizenship rights. This
I‘civilising’ mission, of social improvement and benign pacification,
I would axiomatically be the responsibility of an elite of the most
I educated.
!' By contrast, Marx’s account of the same social world does not
I recognise ‘culture’ as a separate sphere because, in his analysis, the
I central dynamic of capitaHsm is the inevitable conflict between those
I who live by seUing their labour power and those who exploit that
I labour power for profit. This ‘base’ generates both individual conscious-
I ness and shared ideas. Together with social institutions (for example the
■ family and the law), these form the ‘superstructure’, which can be
understood only through its function of sustaining the base.
The period between the 1890s and 1930s was as turbulent in the
symbolic realm as the previous sixty years had been demographically
and pohtically. New printing and distribution technologies made
newspapers, magazines and novels widely available and affordable, and
this was followed by radio and then cinema. In response, the literary
critics and controversialists Frank and Queenie Leavis argued that
schooling should include exphcit instruction aimed at making people
more critical of this profit-driven mass production of entertainment for
mass consumption. An educated pubhc, they beheved, would grasp the
debased nature of this supposedly ‘popular’ culture and understand
the value of authentic ‘organic’ culture ranging from skilled country
crafts to sophisticated drama.
47
CULTURE
The Leavises’ desire to reinstate what they beheved to be the proper,
pre-industrial, cultural order was not deliberately inegalitarian. Their
Romantic vision, however, certainly had no place for the emancipation
of the working class. It is ironic that, contemporaneously, much of the
same distaste for and despair about the impact of mass-consumed
culture was being expressed by key figures in the ‘Frankfurt School’ of
social critique. In the 1940s this multidisciplinary group of social
scientists was based in the United States, having fled from Germany in
the 1930s because of Nazi persecution of the Jews. Their explicit
purpose was to pursue praxis in the Marxian tradition: that is, to use
intellectual work to bring about real change in social conditions for
working people. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that,
as with aU industrialised products, commercial entertainments such as
the cinema, recorded music and radio were bound to work to stand­
ardised formulae. (At this time television was not widely available.)
Not only would this bring economies in the production process, but
predictable film plots and musical structures were more likely to satisfy
a passive audience lacking the background knowledge, time, or energy
to enjoy more challenging cultural forms. This was not, however,
merely a response to audience demand. It was the culture industries
acting as an active means of social control; providing emotional catharsis
and relief firom boredom to tranquillise the masses. Or worse: Adorno
suggested that the rhythms of popular music could induce the same
obedience as military marches.
The Frankfurt School’s pessimism about the public response to mass
culture can be understood as following logically from their Marxian
position, particularly in the context of a still-continuing world war
fuelled by political mass movements. By the early 1950s the United
States’ prosperity and position in the world provided a compelling
context for social theories that put the mechanisms that deliver and
sustain social order, rather than endemic conflict, in the foreground.
In this optimistic intellectual world, Talcott Parsons, pre-eminent
American sociologist of the era, embarked with colleagues on the
project of integrating the social sciences, incorporating psychology,
sociology, economics, politics and insights from anthropology.
In his writings Parsons assigns ‘culture’ a pivotal role as the domain
of shared symboHc meanings. Such meanings enable us to'move from
the particular to the general, which makes communication — and thus
society itself — possible. Parsons clearly did not regard culture as a
residual category: his triadic model of social action gave it the same
status as ‘personahty’ and ‘the social system’. In his writings, however,
culture is discussed only in relation to the social formations in which
48
CULTURE
^he shared meanings operate, for example religion, the family or the
doctor/patient relationship. Given his theoretical emphasis on society
existing in a moving equilibrium, culture becomes, paradoxically,
impossible to isolate for separate analysis. As Parsons put it ‘A cultural
• system does not “function” except as part of a concrete action system,
it just “is”.’
Thus during the rapid expansion of sociology in the United States
and Europe in the 1950s and 1960s ‘the cultural level’ was regarded as
not capable of fruitful study in its own right either by conservative
or radical thinkers. Consequently little scholarly attention was paid to
the production and consumption of mass popular culture. The impetus
for this came (again) firom the humanities: fi-om historians and literary
critics, though this time from an explicitly socialist perspective.
Raymond Williams, Welsh educator and social commentator, took the
famously anti-elitist stance that ‘culture is ordinary’, meaning that
the everyday experiences, ideas and customs of the mass of the popu­
lation should not be dismissed as worthless beside ‘high’ culture.
Even so, Williams was worried about mass-consumed culture because
it is ‘produced for conscious political and commercial advantage’.
IJnderstanding how this ‘advantage’ works was the impetus, at last, for
the methods of sociology (for example, ethnography and content
analysis) and the objects of study of the humanities (texts, both print
and visual) to converge in ‘cultural studies’. Much of the early work
was carried out at the University of Birmingham (UK) Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies. Stuart HaU, Jamaican-born sociologist
and one of the key figures in the development of cultural studies,
has written of the importance of the Marxist scholar Gramsci’s concept
of ‘hegemony’ (see ideology and hegemony) for the work of the
Centre. Gramsci argued that in the modern world ideas are as much
a force of repression as crude economic domination. This defence of
culture as ‘semi-autonomous’ - that is, capable of generating social
effects in its own right — stimulated the study of many dimensions of
cultural production (for example, HaU et alls Policing the Crisis on the
naming and reporting of the new crime of‘mugging’, and the emphasis
on romance as the most important thing in life in comics for teenage
girls in Angela McRobbie’s Jackie: Ideology ofAdolescent Femininity) and
cultural reproduction (Paul WiUis’s Learning to Labour on the complex
relationship between the economy, mascuUnity and the official values
^ of schooHng).
The same question — how does culture sustain the existing power
structure? — was at the same time being addressed in France by Pierre
Bourdieu, using a classic technique of sociology: the large-scale social
49
CULTURE
survey. Despite the avowedly meritocratic values of the republic,
Bourdieu argued that those with an already privileged home back­
ground are best placed to take advantage of the education system. From
the interplay of both they acquire the set of tastes and preferences
bound up in ‘legitimate culture’ (as opposed to ‘middle-brow’ or
‘working-class’ culture). Crucially, this cultural capital can be con­
verted into economic advantage and transmitted from one generation
to another. But the mechanisms of the class system are obscured: having
high status aesthetic tastes is socially constructed as being ‘naturally
cultivated’.
The importance of Bourdieu’s work is his demonstrarion that judge­
ments over aesthetics are not self-evident absolutes, as Arnold and the
Leavises believed and many still believe, but are a direct expression of
class struggle. He does, though, presuppose that the hierarchy of taste is
widely, if resentfully, recognised and accepted. Similarly, early cultural
studies work on texts took their meaning, and thus their ideological
impact, as self-evident. Since the early 1980s the text/audience rela­
tionship has been radically questioned. Both in the humanities and the
social sciences the concept of‘polysemy’ has taken hold: a text, whether
a novel, TV programme, or item of clothing, can be given several mean­
ings — even an infinite number. In some senses this ‘semiotic democracy’
is indeed a challenge to the assumed authority of the producer (and the
institutional order that produces producers) over the reader/consumer.
On this basis many scholars have celebrated ‘cultural populism’, arguing
that ‘readings’ of mass-produced popular culture can be ‘oppositional’,
for instance that standardised items of clothing can be customised or
popular newspapers treated as a joke.
Just as the real democratic significance of consumerism is increasingly
in question, however, some writers on culture, particularly those from
a sociological background, are restating the long-standing questions
about the relationship between the hierarchies of value in the symbohc
realm and their actual impact on people’s life chances. If mass culture
is commercially produced, is it not bound to reflect the interests of the
producers? Can those who argue for ‘oppositional readings’ of mass
culture demonstrate that these practices make any difference to the
distribution of life chances? Even if the boundaries of what is seen as
‘legitimate’ taste have been flexed to include, for example, soccer and
some popular music, is there not stiU an elite that polices that boundary?
And, not least, there is the intractable political and methodological
problem: are we, the audience, restricted to cultural preferences that
have already been provided for us?
DEFINITION OF THE SITUATION
Further reading
During, Simon (ed.) (1999) The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd edn. London;
Roudedge.
Storey, John (ed.) (1998) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2nd
edn. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education/Prentice Hall Europe.
Storey, John (2000) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 3rd
edn. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education/Prendce Hall Europe.
Tudor, Andrew (1999) Decoding Culture: Theory and Method in Cultural
Studies. London: Sage.
Meryl Aldridge
DEFINITION OF THE SITUATION
The term derives from symbolic interactionism and the Chicago School
of sociology, with its focus on the way people make sense of their
encounters with others in everyday life, and how these interactions
between knowledgeable social actors can be built up into more stable
routines that give the appearance of social order. From this perspective,
society is an ongoing, dynamic process of individuals interacting and
giving meaning to their actions, albeit in an ad hoc, provisional manner.
William Thomas coined the definition of the situation in The
Unadjusted Girl by claiming that, ‘if men [sic] define situations as real,
they are real in their consequences’. By this he meant that regardless of
any claims we might try to make about the ‘objective’ conditions under
which people live, it is also important to consider how the individuals
themselves perceive their situation subjectively. An example of this
would be Townsend’s discussion of the difference between absolute and
relative poverty, the latter being a subjective interpretation of the
objective state. In the longer term, Thomas argued, moral codes and
norms are established through successive definitions of the situation.
He pointed to the significance of local communities as ‘defining
agencies’ that estabhshed codes of socially desirable behaviour that could
be enforced informally through practices like gossip, which served to
deter people from deviant behaviour through the fear of social judge­
ment. It was through collective mechanisms like this that social order
was maintained.
At the level of face-to-face interaction, Thomas suggested that
people always go through an initial stage of examination and
deliberation, which allows them to take stock of who else is present,
what they are doing and how we might best align our own action with
theirs. This was not merely a psychological process but, rather, a
51
CONVERSATION
purely and simply, questions get asked and answers given. Through the
medium of questions and answers certain figures - institutional repre­
sentatives such as attorneys or journahsts, for instance — may seek to
challenge other participants (witnesses, interviewees) while those others
may, in turn, seek to resist such challenges. In short they are domains
of contestation in which the contest is played out through the exchange
of turns which are at least minimally recognisable as questions and
answers.
The category of formal institutional interaction incorporates only a
small number of institutional settings. Far more widespread are the
‘non-formal’ types which occur in medical, psychiatric, social service,
business and other similar environments. In such settings, much less
uniformity in the patterning of conduct is evident. But the interaction
may be more or less explicitly directed towards carrying out ‘official’
tasks such as diagnosing illness or assessing a chent’s financial or welfare
needs. As a result there may emerge noticeable asymmetries between
role incumbents. For instance doctors may be seen to ask far more
questions than patients, even though there is no normative constraint
restricting patients from questioning doctors.
For this reason, non-formal types of institutional interaction can be
said to have a ‘quasi-conversational’ character. Any observable asym­
metries in turn-taking are not provided for on the basis of normative
constraints on participation opportunities for speakers in given insti­
tutional roles (as in formal systems), but rather seem to emerge out
of patterns of interaction that participants ‘settle into’ on the basis of a
tacit mutual orientation to specific activities associated with the
situation’s task-oriented work. Nevertheless, as in studies of other types
of talk-in-interaction, the aim of analysis is not simply to describe
distinctive turn-taking patterns. Rather CA typically begins firom such
structural descriptions to reveal complex patterns and connections
between interaction practices, social relations and social order, while
always keeping in view the fact that talk-in-interaction is central to the
achieved organisation of such phenomena.
Beginning from an interest in the orderly features of everyday
conversation, therefore, CA has developed a" distinctive approach to the
relevance of social context which emphasises the participants’ displayed
orientations to context. This illustrates a central methodological pohcy
that distinguishes CA from many other perspectives within sociology:
an insistence that is it is more important to expHcate the ways that the
participants in any interaction display their understanding of what they
are doing than to begin from theoretically driven assumptions about
what might be going on.
44
CULTURAL CAPITAL
Further reading
Atkinson, J. Maxwell and Heritage, John (eds) (1984) Structures of Social
Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Drew, Paul and Heritage, John (eds) (1992) Talk At Work: Interaction in
Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hutchby, Ian and Wooffitt, Robin (1998) Conversation Analysis. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Sacks, Harvey (1992) Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sacks, Harvey, Schegloff, Emanuel A. and Jefferson, Gad (1974) ‘A simplest
systematics for the organisation of turn-taking for conversation’. Language,
50: 696-735.
Ian Hutchby
CULTURAL CAPITAL
Pierre Bourdieu coined the concept of cultural capital, along with that
of social capital, as a way of theorising the role of cultural know­
ledge and tastes in relation to the processes of class formation. During
the 1960s he became interested in the ways that members of the
bourgeoisie — that is, the middle and upper strata of French society —
were able to call on material and non-material resources to maintain
their power and privileges, and to transmit them to their children. In
a key theoretical statement, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passerson
argued that as capitalism became more corporate, and thus ‘de­
personalised’, direct property inheritance declined in importance as
a means of passing economic wealth and social status on to one’s
offspring; among the other mechanisms that elite groups started to
deploy, the most important was the capacity to negotiate the education
system successfully. Parental cultural capital, according to Bourdieu,
meant that children both valued school (and university), and were in a
position to understand the unwritten ‘rules of the game’, enabHng them
to leave with credentials that would win them good jobs.
Initially, then, Bourdieu saw cultural capital as largely important in
the transmission of power and privileges between generations.
However, he also used the concept as a way of explaining the distribu­
tion of power and status within the middle and upper classes. As with
educational achievement, moreover, cultural capital worked precisely
because it appeared neutral, simply the manifestation of natural abiHties
and taste. Enjoyment of Bach, post-impressionism or skiing, for
example, was not a sign of intrinsic superiority but formed part of a
45
CULTURE
set of signals used by members of a particular social group in order to
strengthen its internal bonds and maintain its superiority over others.
This operated within social classes, and not just between them. In
music, for example, Bourdieu showed that upper-class people who had
been educated in the elite Grandes Ecoles had a marked preference for
Bach, while workers with no quahfications had an equally strong liking
for Petula Clark.
As these names suggest, Bourdieu’s fieldwork was largely conducted
in the 1960s, and he has been accused of assuming that the superiority
of a particular high bourgeois culture was more enduring than it has
turned out to be. The highly plurahstic cultural industries of the early
twenty-first century compete in a relatively open marketplace, and taste
is often intentionally socially ambiguous, allowing people — particularly
the young — to play and experiment with a variety of cultural identities.
Bourdieu also tended to portray workers as somewhat passive, in their
cultural dispositions as in their educational orientations, leading to the
accusation of determinism. He is also accused of ignoring gender,
though equally a sizeable body of feminist analysis draws heavily on his
work to help explain the role of cultural capital in the reproduction of
patriarchy. For some contemporary sociologists, Bourdieu’s entire
project is tied to a dated neo-Marxist conception of class as the basis of
social order. Yet he will certainly be remembered as a major influence
on the sociology of education in the 1970s and 1980s, and many critical
sociologists still acknowledge his lasting contribution to the analysis of
culture as a material force.
Further reading
Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
London: Routiedge.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Passeron, Jean-Claude (1973) Reproduction in Education,
Society and Culture. London: Sage.
Lane, Jeremy F. (2000) Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto
Press.
Robbins, Derek (2000) Bourdieu and Culture. London: Sage.
John Field
CULTURE
‘Culture’ is a term that, Hke ‘community’, is much used but for which
it is impossible to point to a single definition beyond general formu­
lations hke ‘the social realm in which shared meanings are produced’.
CULTURE
Even this is potentially controversial: one of the areas of disagreement
about ‘culture’ is whether a given society (however defined) has one or
many. If many, is it defensible to claim that some are more valuable that
others? Or are these kinds of claims simply a weapon in the struggle for
societal power and influence? Contemporary definitions of‘culture’, in
other words, are always based in an imphcit theory of society.
Historically, however, culture was defined in opposition to nature.
Just as skills in cultivation have been applied to make the plant and
animal world more productive so, metaphorically, human intellect and
creativity has cultivated a ‘civflisation’ in the realm of ideas. This narrow
concept of ‘culture’ as high-status symbolic production in areas like
painting, sculpture and hterature meant that, from the mid-nineteenth
century to the mid-twentieth century, there was little interchange
between scholars in the humanities and the rapidly developing social
sciences. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) Matthew Arnold, English
educationalist and writer, argued that pursuing and disseminating the
highest forms of aesthetic culture was vital to countering the social
turmoil of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, and the consequent
demands from ordinary people for greater citizenship rights. This
‘civilising’ mission, of social improvement and benign pacification,
would axiomatically be the responsibility of an elite of the most
educated.
By contrast, Marx’s account of the same social world does not
recognise ‘culture’ as a separate sphere because, in his analysis, the
central dynamic of capitalism is the inevitable conflict between those
who hve by seUing their labour power and those who exploit that
labour power for profit. This ‘base’ generates both individual conscious­
ness and shared ideas. Together with social institutions (for example the
' family and the law), these form the ‘superstructure’, which can be
understood only through its function of sustaining the base.
The period between the 1890s and 1930s was as turbulent in the
symbohc realm as the previous sixty years had been demographically
and pohticaUy. New printing and distribution technologies made
newspapers, magazines and novels widely available and affordable, and
this was followed by radio and then cinema. In response, the Hterary
critics and controversiahsts Frank and Queenie Leavis argued that
schooHng should include exphcit instruction aimed at making people
more critical of this profit-driven mass production of entertainment for
mass consumption. An educated pubhc, they beheved, would grasp the
debased nature of this supposedly ‘popular’ culture and understand
the value of authentic ‘organic’ culture ranging from skilled country
crafts to sophisticated drama.
47