Culture as Object and Approach in Sociology

Culture is increasingly important to American sociology, ¹ but in what way? At least twenty years on from the (latest) “cultural turn,” ² can we specify what it means that so many sociologists “study culture”? A lot of work has been done to define cultural history and a lot of postmodern ink spilled over the epistemic status of cultural anthropology; this book is intended to reflexively comprehend what is going on in cultural sociology. It is about, in particular, how the consideration of culture—and its accompanying term, meaning—reforms and reframes the nature of sociological inquiry as a whole. It is thus concerned with method in both the broad, conceptual sense of the concepts that define and frame inquiry, and in the technical sense of what sociologists who study culture do in their everyday research practices. In this introductory chapter, I want to set out a schema for thinking about culture in sociology that puts into perspective the purpose and scope of the chapters that follow.