cultural studies

cultural studies A developing area of academic interest, sometimes taught as a distinctive university or college qualification, which lies at the interface between the social sciences (notably sociology) and humanities (most obviously literature). It is principally concerned with the nature of mass culture and the workings of culture industries. Among other things, therefore, it embraces the study of popular culture, communication, consumer society, the mass media, leisure, post-modernism, and aspects of literary and sociological theory which address the construction of identity and ideology. Typical of those whose writings are considered central to the field (although they themselves might deny the applicability of this label to their work) would be Jürgen Habermas, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard.

As a field of interest, cultural studies seems to lack a distinctive or coherent disciplinary core, and over the years it has borrowed both its substantive topics and theoretical orientations increasingly freely from other areas of scholarship. Recently, some critics have claimed that it now exerts a pernicious influence on teaching and research in sociology, political science, and social history, by encouraging practitioners of these subjects both to abandon systematic empirical work in favour of what, at least in extreme cases, is largely ‘data-free’ social science (that is, unsubstantiated speculation intermittently illustrated by only casual empirical observation), and to underestimate the importance of social structure in everyday life. However, proponents argue that cultural studies has revitalized sociology: first, by exposing its obsession with moribund concepts related to the world of production, and deriving from its nineteenth-century origins; and, second, by alerting researchers to the real concerns of ordinary people in the advanced societies of the late twentieth century.

It is clear that British (and to a lesser extent American) sociology took a pronounced ‘cultural turn’ in the early 1990s. However, it remains to be seen whether this reflects a lasting move towards greater individualism in advanced societies, or is merely part of a larger (but temporary) end-of-century mood of introspection in Western civilizations. A good overview of some of the key issues and debates in this arena will be found in The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory (1993). See also CONSUMPTION, SOCIOLOGY OF; KNOWLEDGE, SOCIOLOGY OF.