ABSTRACT
As pointed out in the introduction to Part One of the Reader, the concept of culture has – in very general terms – moved from a descriptor of the outcomes of certain environmental or social processes to an increasingly central variable explaining social phenomena. One consequence of this increasing “centrality of culture,” as Stuart Hall (see also p. 264) calls it, is the fact that there has been a marriage of culture with fields of study, such as economics, that were previously thought to have little if anything to do with culture.1 It has thus become common to hear about such things as “management culture,” “enterprise culture,” “commercial culture,” and so on, among the many other expanded uses of the term. In analyzing this expansion, Hall points out that one should not necessarily take this expansion of culture to mean that economic or business activities are now more cultural than before. As will be discussed below, it may be true that capitalist development today values “cultural” (that is, symbolic, meaning-oriented) resources more than in the past, but the more fundamental point is that culture serves as an analytical resource today in ways that it did not in the past. The traditional field of political economy, in which economic relations are understood in terms of their political implications, has been increasingly infiltrated by culture, such that today we speak more and more of investigating a cultural economy.
