The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture

This collection of original, state–of–the–art essays by prominent international scholars covers the most important issues comprising the sociology of culture. Heightened recognition of the ways culture inflects politics and economics, social relations and personal identities has transformed scholarship in the social sciences and humanities.

The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture reflects on this cultural turn by providing an invaluable reference resource to all interested in the cultural structures and processes that animate contemporary life. The book includes such topics as art, science, religion, race, class, gender, collective memory, institutions, and citizenship. This is the first–ever collection of original, synthetic essays that forms a comprehensive overview of the sociology of culture.

List of Contributors x

Introduction 1
Mark D. Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan

PART I PROBLEMS OF THEORY AND METHOD 15

1 Structure, Culture and Agency 17
Margaret S. Archer

2 Culture and Cognition 35
Albert J. Bergesen

3 Difference and Cultural Systems: Dissonance in Three Parts 48
Nancy Weiss Hanrahan

PART II CULTURAL SYSTEMS 63

4 Culture in Global Knowledge Societies: Knowledge Cultures and Epistemic Cultures 65
Karin Knorr Cetina

5 Media Culture(s) and Public Life 80
Ronald N. Jacobs

6 "Religion as a Cultural System": Theoretical and Empirical Developments Since Geertz 97
Rhys H. Williams

7 Aesthetic Uncertainty: The New Canon? 114
Vera L. Zolberg

8 Pragmatics of Taste 131
Antoine Hennion

PART III EVERYDAY LIFE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING 145

9 Music and Social Experience 147
Tia DeNora

10 Consumer Culture 160
Daniel Thomas Cook

11 Fame and Everyday Life: The "Lottery Celebrities" of Reality TV 176
Andrea L. Press and Bruce A. Williams

12 Labor for Love: Rethinking Class and Culture in the Case of Single Motherhood 190
Maria Kefalas

PART IV IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 205

13 New Developments in Class and Culture 207
David Halle and L. Frank Weyher

14 Sexuality and Religion: Negotiating Identity Differences 220
Michele Dillon

15 Race after the Cultural Turn 234
Orville Lee

PART V COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA 251

16 Collective Memory: Why Culture Matters 253
Barry Schwartz, Kazuya Fukuoka, and Sachiko Takita–Ishii

17 Counter–Memories of Terrorism: The Public Inscription of a Dramatic Past 272
Anna Lisa Tota

18 Museums and the Constitution of Culture 286
Jan Marontate

19 Dilemmas of the Witness 302
Robin Wagner–Pacifici

PART VI THE CULTURE OF INSTITUTIONS 315

20 Professions as Disciplinary Cultures 317
Magali Sarfatti Larson

21 Everyday Life and the Constitution of Legality 332
Susan S. Silbey

22 The Discourses of Welfare and Welfare Reform 346
John W. Mohr

23 The Culture of Savings and Loan Scandal in the No–Fault Society 364
Mark D. Jacobs

PART VII THE CULTURE OF CITIZENSHIP: LOCAL, NATIONAL, GLOBAL 381

24 Civic Culture at the Grass Roots 383
Paul Lichterman

25 Public Vocabularies of Religious Belief: Explicit and Implicit Religious Discourse in the American Public Sphere 398
John H. Evans

26 Democracy and Globalization in the Global Economy 412
Diana Crane

27 The Autonomy of Culture and the Invention of the Politics of Small Things: 1968 Revisited 428
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

28 Toward a Nonculturalist Sociology of Culture: On Class and Status in Globalizing Capitalism 444
Nancy Fraser

Bibliography 460

Index 500

Mark D. Jacobs is Associate Professor of Sociology at George Mason University. He is the author of Screwing the System and Making It Work: Juvenile Justice in the No–Fault Society (1990), as well as articles in such journals as Administration and Society and The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society. He served from 1994 to 1998 on the Executive Council of RC37 of the International Sociological Association. He has co–organized two international conferences at George Mason University for the Section on the Sociology of Culture of the American Sociological Association, and has edited Culture for that section since 2000.

Nancy Weiss Hanrahan is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Women s Studies Research and Resource Center at George Mason University. Her scholarly work, which addresses issues in cultural theory and criticism, is informed by her professional experience in the music business. She is the author of Difference in Time: A Critical Theory of Culture (2000) and a contributor to Critical Theory: Diverse Objects, Diverse Subjects (2003) and Rethinking Social Transformation (2001).