ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relations between sociology and cultural policy. Such an exercise requires some careful de-lineation, not least because, at a distance, these objects might both appear to be more 'solid' than they actually are close up. Both sociology and cultural policy have histories that reveal much about the shifting intellectual landscape of the 'advanced' democracies of the global North, in which the development of academic disciplines and their institutional location on university teaching curricula are bound up with the development of the state itself. If questions of 'culture' were always implicit in the development of the discipline of sociology and its commitment to explaining modernity, the emergence of more identifiable 'sociology of culture' was bound up with specific anxieties about mass society and mass culture and their consequences. The last decades of twentieth century were a period in which discipline of sociology and the technocratic states of the global North were both re-imagining the nature of social life.
