ABSTRACT
The late 1960s and the 1970s brought about both a substantial increase in and new forms of scholarly interest in popular culture. New approaches were marked by an interdisciplinary and ‘totalizing’ conception of socio-cultural research, transcending traditional boundaries between economics, politics, and aesthetics. Research was supposed to contribute to a general critique of (capitalist) society-as-a-whole, in theoretical and methodological matters openly guided by what Habermas (1968) once called an ‘emancipatory knowledge-interest’.
