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Abstract
Contemporary sociology is saddled with a culture–structure binary but the fault for its existence lies mostly with cultural sociology. This article is devoted to four related assertions: (1) There has never been any agreement on the definition of culture, making cultural sociology a field unable to define its central concept. (2) The binary ignores the fact that the proper explanation of social behaviour requires both structure and culture; culture cannot be its own cause. (3) Cultural sociology is soft and sentimental, avoiding conflict as well as politics. (4) It neglects policy and policy-relevant research even more than the rest of sociology. Structural sociology has some shortcomings as well, however, and the culture–structure binary should be abandoned.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for helpful comments on an earlier version to Howard Becker, Merlin Chowkwanyun, Philip Kasinitz and Michael Schudson and also to Shamus Khan for an especially close reading of that version and his many wise suggestions.
Notes
1. No one knows quite why it is the largest, but only some of its members are cultural sociologists proper or devotees of the cultural turn.
2. Sometimes, Swidler's trio of habits, skills and styles is added (Swidler Citation1986). Yet, others add more macro-sociological terms such as boundaries, ideology and identity (Friedland and Mohr Citation2004) and also Zeitgeist, world view, collective memory and even institutions. For a comprehensive discussion of the several definitions of culture and of its surrogate terms, see Sewell (Citation1999), Lamont and Small (Citation2008) and Small et al. (Citation2010).
3. The analytic difficulties are increased by the jargon-ridden and opaque language often used in these discussions.
4. The claims and complaints have appeared frequently over the years in the American Sociological Association's Culture section newsletter. Newsletters are a good source for discovering what disciplinary leaders say backstage to their members but omit from their more public performances.
5. For too many cultural and structural sociologists, it is also a moral, even Manichaean dichotomy.
6. Unfortunately, sociologists too rarely study whether, when how what people practise accords with what they preach, and which adapts to which when people feel they need to be consistent.
7. But see Friedland and Mohr (Citation2004) on pursuing goals and on complications in separating means from ends.
8. Sometimes, Marxists used superstructure as a synonym for culture.
9. Patterson was criticizing what he viewed as the standard analysis of the labour market failures and deviant behaviour patterns of poor Black males, although other parts of his analyses acknowledged these structural factors alongside ‘cultural attributes … distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions’ (Patterson Citation2006).
10. I borrow this notion from William H. Sewell, Jr.’s account of his discovery long ago of cultural analysis as ‘a turn from a hard-headed, utilitarian and empiricist materialism’ and what he saw as its ‘relentless pursuit of wealth, status and power’ (Sewell Citation1999, pp. 35–36).
11. Such a discipline could easily be caricatured as expressing the world view and frames of comfortably tenured professors at affluent research universities.
12. For a spirited recent debate about this topic that emphasizes culture versus structure issues, see Darity et al. (Citation2011).
13. Cultural sociologists interested in the culture of the academy ought to study the conspiratorial framing and paranoid meaning-making that academics and other workers in bureaucratized organizations often indulge in – and justifiably so – after banging their heads against unyielding structures.