ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the concept of ideology and its analytic viability, an issue thrown into sharp relief by the nature of staffroom talk at Downtown. In the context of a study of some staffroom talk, the chapter shows that the concept of ideology is fatally flawed, under all those definitions which take distortion or inaccuracy as a key criterion. It provides little basis for that analysis of contextual variation in people’s behaviour; and the very identification of an ideology is premised on the reification of current, and necessarily corrigible, findings of sociological research, and/or on the taken for granted objectivity of the sociologist’s own values. What the author is suggesting, then, is that the road taken by many sociologists in recent years from ‘culture’ to ‘ideology’, so clearly marked in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, is a cul de sac.
