Celebrating 10 years of the journal

Dear reader, this issue marks the 10-year anniversary of the European Journal for Cultural and Political Sociology. For 10 years, we have explored the contemporary world, sociology, and social theory through combined lenses of culture and politics. In this editorial, we reflect on the past 10 years, look at some of the special issues we have published, and take a look back at the very first issue – which set in motion many of the debates and research strands that we have had the pleasure to host during the decade.

For a journal titled European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, the central questions of existence are what definitions and connections exist between the cultural and the political, and what ‘European’ and ‘Europeaness’ have meant and mean in the current era of (geo)political tensions and reordering of cultural self-understandings.

Starting from the Cultural and the Political, in our very first editorial, Charles Turner, member of the journal’s first team of editors-in-chief, wrote:

Culture and politics are often intimately connected. Some of the ways in which this is articulated may be less scholarly and more impressionistic than a serious social science would demand, but this is not a strong argument for failing to follow up these mutual influences and increase the rigour with which we understand them. (Turner, 2014)

Judging post-factum, increasing the rigour in our understanding of culture and politics together has indeed been one of the key projects of the first 10 years of publication. To honour the mission statement, we have mostly steered clear from ‘pure’ cultural sociology without political elements or theorising, as well as from the narrowly defined political sociology without cultural elements. Or as we in the current editorial team put it in our first editorial, ‘How can we understand politics and culture, not as separate entities, but as intertwined and co-constituting?’ (Blokker et al., 2020).

Strong theoretical connections and contributions have been a signature feature in the journal. They have most often come in the form of path-setting stand-alone articles – such as the ones featuring among the journal’s most cited items,¹ as theoretical discussions introducing the special issues and sections, but also in more rare, programmatic shapes such as Isaac Airial Reed and Michael Weinman’s (2019) ‘Manifesto for Social Theory’ and the published responses it elicited. But at the end of the day, the most typical paper in the journal has been an empirical investigation into questions of politics through cultural tools, or into matters of culture through political understanding.

Another principle guiding the editorial line of our journal in its first decade of existence has concerned openness to a plurality of theoretical and methodological approaches, or the ‘ecumenical view’ to studying culture and politics jointly, that the journal’s very first editorial also put forth. We have not considered the multivocal nature of sociological engagements with matters of culture and politics as a problem, a sign of lack of coherence or scatteredness of the debate. Our commitment has rather been to understanding the strengths of different lines and styles of theorising and being empirical, and moreover to encouraging fruitful cross-fertilisation of what may strike as strange bedfellows in the dynamic field of political sociology sensitive to processes of cultural meaning-making or politically sensitive cultural sociology.

As a result, we have had the pleasure to host several, sometimes interconnected discussions that can be retroactively used to define how culture and politics have been understood. In our very first issue we published four regular articles, which can be revisited to understand some of the theoretical undercurrents, and central debates, relevant to the journal.

In the inaugural issue, Laurent Thévenot (2014) outlined developments in new (French) pragmatic sociology. This line of pragmatist sociology has been prominently featured in the journal, with a special issue coordinated by our former editor-in-chief Eeva Luhtakallio and Laurent Thévenot (2018), as well as numerous other papers throughout the years. This theoretical approach has been used in understanding wide-ranging issues, from urban greenspace-management to development of professions, from the ‘worth of unemployed’ to corporate volunteering. The journal has also been lucky to host papers that have been pushing the theoretical arguments further.

Two other papers in our first issue go together, and highlight another theoretical tradition where many developments have been made in the journal. Pertti Alasuutari, one of the founding figures of the journal from our publishing society European Sociological Association, together with Ali Qadir, define ‘Epistemic governance as an approach to politics and policy-making’ (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2014), and Gili Drori, Markus Höllerer and Peter Walgenbach (2014) unpacked the ‘Glocalization of organization: from term to theory to analysis’. World society/polity theory inspired analysis of epistemic governance and global development of organisation and administrative structures have been another mainstay in the journal, with a special issue on Neoinstitutionalism and world society theory edited by Ali Qadir (2016). The strength and vitality of this line of inquiry is also reflected by the current issue in which Jared Furuta, Gili Drori and John Meyer analyse the rise of the social state as a global model, not only a national phenomenon, and Julia Lerch deploye culturally-minded world society scholarship to examine the changing meanings of humanity in the globalised environment of relief action.

And finally, in our first issue, Peter Baehr (2014) analysed Hannah Arendt’s appraisal of ex-communists. Arendtian (and related) cultural and political analysis has also been present in almost every volume of the journal, with also a special issue on Arendt’s On Revolution edited by Rodrigo Cordero, Robert Fine and Wolfhart Totschnig (2014). The themes of these papers touch on Europe’s communist histories, different aspects of politics of memory – and in the current issue Gad Yair discusses trauma and constitution in a resonant way.

These efforts are a part of dealing with Europeaness, its implications, and its current state. In one early editorial, our two founding editors-in-chief who ran the journal for its first six years, Ricca Edmondson and Eeva Luhtakallio wrote: ‘Editing a European journal of cultural and political sociology at a time when so many aspects of the idea of Europe itself are facing great uncertainty is an exciting, humbling, and illuminating endeavour’ (Edmondson & Luhtakallio, 2015). The untangling of some of the European ideas mentioned has naturally been reflected, and analysed, in the journal. One cannot publish a European Journal Cultural and Political Sociology without getting tangled up in all the timely and thorny political and cultural issues. Or maybe one could, but what would be the point of such endeavour?

During the past five years, we have published extensively on populism and we currently witness a steady in-flow of manuscripts dealing with the phenomenon from varied angles and with diverse toolkits. We’ve so-far covered populism’s connection to the so-called ‘post-truth’ moment, the effects of globalisation, precarity, and the COVID-19 pandemic on populist voting, right-wing populist online practices, populist strategies of abrupting progressive policy-making in the European parliament, and an important paper by Dorit Geva (2019) on the French anti-gender political mobilisation as a means of moral distinction building on Pierre Bourdieu’s work.

Our journal has, in effect, seen its share of the interest in Bourdieusian scholarship more broadly, which has grown perhaps even more important and resonant in recent years. This stock of work is of course a major tradition when it comes to jointly scrutinising the political and cultural dimensions of social reality, although traditionally understood to be leaning on the cultural side. As many papers in our journal show, the tradition holds promise for furthering theorisation in political thinking. Reflecting this trend within our journal, the current issue includes an article by Sara Sivonen and Riie Heikkilä which asks questions of morality, taste, cultural consumption, and political preferences together.

Another commitment to questioning Europe has come in the form of researching the boundaries of Europeaness. Two special issues in particular have tackled this issue. Our latest special issue ‘Black lives Matter and the New Wave of Anti-racist Mobilizations in Europe’ takes stock of the repercussions of the killing of George Floyd in the US on the old continent. Analysing anti-racist mobilisations across the continent, from the predominantly white context of Poland, to the post-colonial Greenlandlish setting, and to the post-imperial British context the articles of the issue ask what race has meant to the idea of Europeaness, how racializing discourses and practices have influenced and continue to fashion European politics, and how understanding and employing race as a paradigm is an important corrective move to political and cultural sociology (Beaman et al., 2023). The boundaries of Europe have also been examined from the perspective of immigration. Our 2021 special issue ‘Biographies, Politics, and Culture: Analyzing Migration Politics from the Bottom Up’ (Pape et al., 2021) looks at how Europe’s (restrictive) immigration policies shape immigrants’ lives on the continent but also how immigrants’ active engagement with the policies they are targeted with reshape these tools of governing migration and diversity and cultural understandings of what it means to be and become European.

All in all, we are grateful to the European Sociological Association, previous editors (in addition to those already mentioned, our previous book reviews editor and constant collaborator Siobhan Kattago) and everyone who has worked with us in the past 10 years to produce an arena for meaningful scholarship with an aim of furthering the whole field. We are also grateful to Taylor & Francis for years of good working relationship. But as anyone who has ever run a journal – or published in one – knows, without authors and reviewers there would be no journal at all. So heartfelt thanks from the whole editorial team for everyone who has written articles, comments, and book reviews, or contributed their experience into making them their best possible versions. Here’s for another inspiring decade of tackling culture politically or taking politics culturally!

Current articles

For this issue we have hand-picked articles that exemplify the EJCPS’ guiding principles to conjointly studying culture and politics – rigour and plurality – as well as the acute challenges faced by European societies in an era that strike us as bleaker in many ways than the mid 2010’s, the timing of our very first issues. The five articles unravel on-going processes that change the face of social states, humanitarian action, constitutional institutions, labour markets, and political imaginaries by re-shaping the cultural and political conceptions of citizenship and humanity, political authority and personal worth across the globe.

Jared Furuta, Gili Driori, and John W. Meyer open the ball by a historical comparison of the processes leading to the institutionalisation of the social state as a global institutional model across 190 countries from the 19th century onwards. The authors claim that contrary to realist theories of state expansion, and their emphasis of driving forces such as technological development or democratic penetration, a more culturally-sensitive approach is needed to accurately account for the expansion of the social state globally as well as for the transformation of the very idea of the state vehicle by this process. Comparing the foundation of a set of eleven ‘social’ cabinet ministers across the globe in the period running from 1870 to 2000, the article empirically demonstrates how the transition in the post-war period from a statist and corporatist model of the state – society nexus to a more liberal conception of the state prioritising the rights of individual citizens was not only driven by factors internal to nation-state contexts but moved forth by macro-cultural shifts in the ways of imagining the state and its social responsibilities that transgress national boundaries in terms of their discursive contents and organisational setup. The article also opens for questions around which we would be delighted to see new work emerge on the pages of our journal: How do particularisms thrive amidst the overarching trend of globalisation, or more modestly, regional unification? What happens to nation-states as the ultimate warrants of the so-far seemingly ceaseless expansion of individual and minority rights in post-liberal settings? Further yet, do the alternatives necessarily come in the form of a return to traditional forms of social order and control already at play in, say, Eastern parts of Europe? Or is the triumphant progress of the vertically encompassing state challenged by altogether other forces, ones more or less quietly or contentiously operating under and/or between sovereign states? One could think of a few recent cases as particularly interesting laboratories for examining the current mutations of the conceptions of the social states. Take for instance France where the right-dominated national assembly adopted a historically restrictive and hostile set of immigration-related legislation in late December 2023, with the consequence of a third of the countries’ départements announcing non implementation of the reform based on its’ violation of the universalist and social foundations of the French Republic and its constitution. Or consider Hungary, the anti-democratic reforms and hostile migration policies of which constantly set a trial for the European constitution and European standard understandings of the operation of constitutional democracies.

Sociological analyses of national constitutions and constitutional institutions is in fact one of the newcomers among the strands of research that the EJCPS is keen on encouraging. In the current issue, Gad Yair enacts a welcome corrective move to social scientific studies of constitutions, a field dominated by legal scholars and political scientists, by examining the imprint of traumatic episodes of national history on the constitutions written and ratified in their aftermath. Writing against the rationalist spirit of the legalistic tradition, Yair argues that constitutions do not only, or primarily, result from rational interests, cognitive processes or mimicry of previous examples, but are deeply shaped by emotional responses to traumatic events and of the cultural meanings given to them. The transposition of recent theorisation of cultural trauma to the sub-field of constitutional studies allows for considering how in writing a national constitution its architects turn traumas into tools of cultural and political meaning-making that create both unique national identities and political destinies. In the current context, Yair’s analysis of the American and French constitutions as emblematic cases of the political work carried out by trauma eternalised in these legal texts makes for a particularly interesting read. If, as Yair argues, the American constitution essentially activates the trauma of British colonisation and the French one that of the inegalitarian ancien régime, and seek to preserve the liberty and equality of individual citizens, how should we debate about the current crises that democratic institutions undergo in the two countries? What can sociologists make of the anti-constitutional tendencies emanating from within the political establishment itself whether in form of the prospective candidate’s involvement in violent insurrection or in the current government’s systematic bypassing of the national assembly, the law-making authority recognised by the constitution, by means of exceptional tools of governance foreseen by the very same document? The pages of the EJCPS are hungry for ink to be spilled on the political lives of national constitutions beyond the foundational moments and initial traumas Yair’s article concentrates on. Taking the cultural meanings of the political seriously, but perhaps expanding the agenda, how could we think about, for instance, recent claims for revising the constitution in the sense of the inscription of abortion rights or the third gender in these foregrounding documents? Beyond foundational trauma, what emotions, temporalities, and power struggles might be driving these claims in their precise contexts?

The third article of the issue shifts the focus from national social states and constitutional texts to the supra-national setting of non-governmental agencies involved in humanitarian action. Julia Lerch submits her impressive dataset of 659 humanitarian resolutions adopted by the United Nations General Assembly between 1946 and 2018 to a set of questions that in a world witnessing a historical record number of forcibly displaced persons, 117 million in 2023, are more urgent than ever: How is humanity conceived? What kind of human life is at stake? And how do the definitions change over time? Drawing conjointly on world society theory and constructionist perspectives, the article calls for the need to update previous scholarship of humanitarianism, either functionalist or critical in orientation, considering actions of relief either as responses to urgent needs or as means to advance geopolitical interests. The strength of the joint reading comes, we believe, in the approach’s ability to embed these changes in the framework of a broader shift towards liberal, individualised and globalised understandings of society – in echo of the first article of this issue – in a way that remains sensitive to the precise meanings the notion of humanity has taken on across space and time, hence harkening back to the second articles sensitivity to historical moments and their contemporary legacies. Revealing remarkable expansions in humanitarian conceptions of humanity over time, the article carefully discusses three consecutive framings of human life in crisis conditions: from ‘managing displacement’ in the post WW2 era, to an approach focused on ‘survival and livelihood’ in the ensuing decades, and yet to present-day humanitarian interventions premised on a ‘multidimensional, rights-bearing, and agentic personhood’. Several ways forth can be premised on this analysis. A particularly timely and fruitful starting point may be the tension Lerch observes between the expansion of the dimensions of individual well-being nation-states are expected to cover and the simultaneous globalisation of the scale of that responsibility. What conceptions of human sanctity and global responsibility may survive or perhaps be nascent to the current conflicts from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the Israelo-Palestinian crisis? Can sociological imagination suggest ways forth in thinking of novel ways of preserving life in face of the harshest of adversities, in the crumbles of social states and in the flickering light of constitutional principles?

As noted earlier, in their paper, Sivonen and Heikkilä come to the cultural–political nexus through Pierre Bourdieu’s work. They interview Finnish people with different combinations of cultural and political preferences. Their analysis finds four articulations: highbrow left and highbrow right, narrow right – as well as a more puzzling fourth articulation they term ‘⁣⁣morality as the vehicle for cultural practices’. In the three first articulations, a homology is found between preferences in food, art and other culture, and political beliefs: the enjoyment of ‘ethnic’ food and avant-garde cultural preferences for highbrow left, value of hard work, Finnish food ‘with a twist’ and opera for highbrow right, conservative political values, popular culture and scepticism against ‘foreign food’, for narrow right. Interestingly, in the fourth articulation, moral preferences are not necessarily correlated but rather seem to dictate cultural practices: what is morally good is presented also as culturally enjoyable, culinary interesting, or otherwise valued. This seems to open an interesting line of research, which the journal would very much like to see followed further: in which order do morality and cultural preferences go? Which precedes which? Do we live in a more moralised period, where political and moral preferences penetrate taste and all aspects of life? Or, have we always lived in such a period? This would also seem to be a question where cross-pollination of various traditions in the journal would be supremely beneficial.

And finally in her paper combining themes of labour with online research, Laura Vonk investigates the aesthetic advice given by Dutch temporary work agencies. Here, aesthetic refers to the aesthetic of the temp worker in question: how to dress, how to look, how to present yourself. The agencies present this advice as an opportunity to increase employability. But the actual content of these advice articles is empty enough to lead the author to conclusion: the advice is itself little more than clickbait to increase traffic to the websites, and thus get more people to sign up in to the agency’s roster. The actual content of the advice, and the moral messages it sends, despite being secondary, are still important to analyse, being a presentation of identity, self – and a potential field of exclusion. Vonk finds that the emphasis is on ‘the importance of fit and confidence’, being authentic and not adapting too much for any given job interview/opportunity.

Rather than problematising the tendency of recruiters to select applicants who resemble them, the advice urges job seekers to make sure they resemble the people at the organisation they are applying to. Accordingly, the advice legitimises the exclusion of those that do not (and perhaps are not able to) fit in, and legitimises the reproduction of hegemonic norms regarding self-presentation.

In the end, both moral and practical messages of the websites are subservient to the main goal of attracting eyeballs and increasing signups. It is clear that these job-seekers are valuable at least as a resource for this website. EJCPS would be glad to publish even more articles with focus on online phenomena, given the degree in which we all live our lives online.

Book reviews

The book reviews in our anniversary issue span from the cultural to the political and address some of the themes which have been important for the journal. More on the cultural side, Helmut Staubmann’s book Sociology in a New Key (2022) attempts to join social theory and aesthetics on a fundamental level. According to our reviewer Eduardo de la Fuente, it is a refreshing and remarkable read, offering a ‘Classicist’ approach to a field that is dominated by ‘sociological Romanticism’. The book presents canonical authors like Simmel in a new light, discusses rather uncanonical authors like Bateson and investigates cultural phenomena like the Rolling Stones empirically. Avoiding ‘simple explanations for how aesthetics and social life are related to each other’, the book ‘challenges preconceptions regarding what we regard as sociological theory and also what we define as the sociology of the arts/literature/music/culture’. Announced by the author as the ‘beginning of a scholarly agenda with larger works to come’, de la Fuente ‘looks forward to seeing what future insights Staubmann brings to the question of how the social and the aesthetic are interwoven’.

Published in the same year, Matters of Revolution by Dominik Bartmanski (2022) investigates the urban aesthetics and symbolic politics in Berlin and Warsaw after 1989. Andrea Mubi Brighenti is full of praise for the book, which not only ‘excels’ as an empirical case study, but also through its ‘theoretically sustained discussion’. According to our reviewer, Bartmanski succeeded in developing ‘a refined vocabulary for social theory’ that accounts for the social life of ‘cultural icons’ as ‘modes of enchantment’.

Paul Lichterman’s monograph Civic Action (2021), which offers a cultural sociology of political activism and a case study of housing advocacy in Los Angeles, is discussed by Eeva Luhtakallio, an established researcher in the field and former editor-in-chief of the EJCPS. She is sympathetic to the book’s theoretical approach highlighting that civic action and social advocacy are not only about strategizing but also about ‘maintaining […] solidarity’. In Luhtakallio’s view, the theoretical introduction is ‘poignant’ and dismantles ‘the entrepreneurial, strategic actor model’ in social movement studies ‘with superbly mastered ethnographic evidence’. She discusses Lichterman’s central concept of ‘scene’, suggesting the analytical distinction between scene and situation should be topic of further inquiry. Luhtakallio further notes that the ethnographic narrative and the writing style of the book are at times laborious to follow for those not familiar with the American context. However, towards the end of the book, especially when focusing on the question of homelessness in the advocacy campaigns he followed, Lichterman ‘presents the truly tangible tools his approach provides for addressing such dilemmas’ through analytical work to unfold the processes of defining problems. Luhtakallio acknowledges that the book offers deeper insights into ‘the cultural patterns of collective engagement’ compared to other approaches.

Finally, Eva Illouz’s new book The Emotional Life of Populism (2023) tackles a political phenomenon which has been at the centre of debates in the last years and the topic of many contributions in our journal. In her review, Julia Schmid mentions that the book offers ‘an insightful, albeit painfully relevant, examination of Israel’s history, social structure, and current political situation’, but she focusses primarily on the generalisable insights into ‘the emotional machinery behind globally prevalent populist regimes’ offer by Illouz. Our reviewer stresses the continuity with earlier works, which conceive ‘emotions as socially mediated and mediating’. In the new book, Illouz investigates the political role of the ‘three emotions of fear, disgust, and resentment’, which ‘constitute an emotional matrix that gives rise to division and hostility within a society’. The fourth and final ingredient in this emotional cocktail is ‘patriotic love’, which ties individuals to the ‘imaginary collective body’ of the nation. As antidote to this toxic mix, Illouz advocates a universalistic-cosmopolitan conception of ‘fraternity’, deemed highly problematic by Schmid: Not only is it ‘dangerously naturalising the political’, but it is also ‘rooted in a patriarchal, white, bourgeois, and enlightened paradigm, which has historically excluded and still excludes a large majority of people globally’.

Notes

1 For the most cited articles of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showMostCitedArticles?journalCode=recp20.