In the 1960s, a sociological best-seller encapsulated a fundamental cultural insight in its title – the central idea of “the social construction of reality.” Authors Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann aimed to provide a “sociological analysis of the reality of everyday life” (1966, 19). They applied insights from the twentieth-century sociology of knowledge, formerly devoted to what they called “theoretical thought,” to mundane settings – “what people ‘know’ as ‘reality’ in their everyday non- or pre-theoretical lives” (1966, 15). For this they drew on the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz for insight on common sense; they followed Weber’s emphasis on subjective meanings; they adopted some of Durkheim’s ideas about the impact of “social facts” for the individual; they modified Durkheim’s view with a more dynamic idea of dialectical influence between individual and society that they attributed to Marx; and they used George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionist understanding of socialization (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 16–17). Even though they avoided developing the concept of culture, their well-known work provided an undisputed position statement for sociologists interested in culture, cultural difference, and cultural conflict. The platform they offered for understanding meaning-making was widely adopted in sociology, and, as a result, what came to be called “social constructionism” came to be taken as sociological common ground (Vera 2016; for an extended critical assessment see Smith 2010, 119–206).
For Berger and Luckmann, structured patterns of social relations in groups are internalized by individuals in everyday life, and individuals then reproduce and sometimes change those patterns. For instance, an individual might internalize hierarchical family relations and then go on to live them out anew. Internalization is mediated by “signs” generated by surrounding social relations. So a child might understand family hierarchy through practical signs of interactional deference or explicit symbols of authority. This perspective on “the social construction of reality” synthesized disparate strands of social theory, from the macro to the micro – theories of objective social structure, theories of interaction, and phenomenological theories of subjective experience. Essentially, Berger and Luckmann offered a distinctively sociological vocabulary for understanding processes of meaning-making – in other words, for understanding “culture.”
So although sociologists were often vague about the concept of culture through the mid-twentieth century, they came to view what were essentially cultural processes through the lens of concepts like “ideology,” “collective conscience,” “interpretation,” and “the social construction of reality.” For some sociologists, the widespread acceptance of these ideas resolved uncertainties about analyzing culture. For many others, though, ideas like “the social construction of reality” were useful as signposts but opened more issues than they resolved. How does the dialectical social construction of reality operate in practice? What does this idea suggest about how to do sociological research on culture?
One intransigent issue was a theoretical impasse between conflict and consensus views of culture, between an emphasis on power and conflict, captured in the concept of ideology, and an emphasis on solidarity and consensus, as in the concept of collective conscience. Another recurring tension surrounded whether to focus on the influence of social structures (recurrent patterns of social relations) or on interactional processes (in which human agency and creativity might sometimes be seen). A third issue revolved around whether to highlight the interpretation of meanings themselves (as Weber did, for example, in his famous study of the Protestant Ethic [1998 (1904–5)]) or whether a genuinely sociological approach should minimize extended, thick interpretation of rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories and focus instead on external social forces which might explain them. These persistent issues – conflict vs. consensus, structure vs. agency, and interpretation vs. explanation – were all the more intransigent for sociologists interested in culture because “culture” was understood in broad, abstract terms as reflecting whole societies. Inquiries into such broad, abstract topics as “American culture” make it hard to even begin to answer specific questions about meaning-making.
From the 1970s, though, and in the process of dealing with these questions, sociologists stopped treating the idea of culture as vague and residual, as an abstract thing, and explicitly specified concepts and approaches to understanding culture, cultural difference, and cultural conflict. The thriving field of cultural sociology emerged.
Cultural sociology and processes of meaning-making
So several sources of confusion can make the idea of culture seem unclear, especially in sociology. Not only is there extreme real-world variation in particular rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories we may encounter, there are also many options and debates about how to analyze them. Moreover, the historical genealogy of the idea of culture still generates two distinct connotations: culture as a separate institutional sphere within modern societies (highlighting differences with economics and politics); and culture as a property of whole social groups (highlighting social differences). And beyond that, disputes within sociology about whether to emphasize cultural conflict or consensus, social structure or agency, and interpretation or explanation added a further layer of complexity to thinking about culture, including different vocabularies to understand cultural elements. As a result, sociologists have occasionally complained that culture is so complicated and confusing that it is impossible to analyze. But this complaint makes little sense: any topic can be complex and ambiguous when we start to dig deep, even topics that some would consider easier to study, like politics or economics. What is needed is a sociological concept of culture which offers coherence in complexity. Since the seventies, cultural sociologists have been working with just such a concept.
All cultural sociology shares a central focus on processes of meaning-making. Cultural sociologists investigate puzzles and questions about meanings, and in doing so they account for the various rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories that people may share, and take for granted as natural. They also offer a fresh understanding of how taken-for-granted ideas may generate power, inequality, and conflict. Meaning-making processes generate both pattern and variation.
This concept of culture, referring to processes of meaning-making, actually returns to and extends what Raymond Williams found to be the first uses of the concept as a noun of process, before “culture” was reified as a unitary, abstract thing. Since the term is now understood to refer to a process, it can encompass various elements, because meaning may be generated and expressed in ritual, symbolization, evaluation, normative action, and categorization (and numerous other cultural processes).
The concept of culture as meaning-making process also works well to include both historical connotations of the term: meaning-making processes are involved whether our analytic focus is on culture as a distinct set of social institutions producing symbolic objects (arts, popular culture, mass culture, etc.) or on culture as a property of groups (and characterizing group differences).
Within sociology, considering culture as meaning-making process highlights what