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Book Review: Sociology on Culture

Cultural studies has become used to receiving a bad press. In the early days it was the academic establishment that decried cultural studies as a trivialization, later it was the press who identified cultural (and media) studies as a vehicle for leftoriented political correctness and the dumbing down of university education. The scientific community took up the cudgels in the 1990s through the infamous science wars, attacking cultural studies for its relativism and critical approach to empirical science. In 2002, even the University of Birmingham, home of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), abolished its cultural studies department and got rid of its academic staff. Cultural studies is often at the centre of controversy, and some would say that it actively courts this. Given this, it comes as a bit of a surprise to find a social science text on culture that takes a different approach to attacking the project of cultural studies. Rather than offering an all-out assault, or a deliberate deconstruction of the aims and approaches of cultural studies, or even a sympathetic reading and the offer of an alliance, Hall et al. use a different tactic: they simply ignore cultural studies and refuse to discuss it, its main figures, its methods or its politics. Sociology on Culture is certainly useful and interesting, and will be a popular read with undergraduates, particularly given its good use of illustration and clear structure. However, one does get the feeling on reading the text that there is something missing, as if you can feel a shadowy presence in the background. The further one gets into the text, the more disconcerting this becomes, and the more the reader is prompted to ask why the authors are avoiding the subject. In particular, there seems to be almost no acknowledgement that sociology has learned anything from cultural studies. Sociology on Culture is a systematic and coherent analysis of how mainstream sociology approaches the analysis of culture, specifically the relationship between institutions of culture and the meanings that become attached to these by individuals and groups. The orientation adopted by the book is strongly sociological, drawing heavily on the methods of Durkheim and Weber. Although aimed at an undergraduate audience, the book presents a strong thesis concerning the analysis of culture: that the tools and techniques of sociological analysis, particularly the sociological imagination, are just as relevant to the analysis of culture as they ever were, and that such approaches will provide better and more concrete results than those provided by cultural studies. It is, in short, an argument calling for sociology to colonize cultural studies, thus rescuing cultural studies from its failings. The authors do this through systematic analysis, defining culture in terms that allow it to be partitioned and analysed in discrete ways. This is a useful strategy in some ways: sections on the production of culture, audiences and the construction of meaning, the emergence of mass culture through industrialization, and cultural constructions of the ‘other’ are filled with examples of sociologists who have tackled these various topics through the years. Key concepts, such as consumption, identity and class feature heavily, and the authors make clear connections between culture and forms of power and domination. In the course of doing this they provide a strong overview of sociology of culture from Parsons to the present day. E U R O P E A N J O U R N A L O F C O M M U N I C A T I O N 2 0 ( 1 )