However, all investigations begin with presuppositions, and it is helpful to make them explicit. The major presuppositions of cultural sociology are captured in the foundational concept of meaning. Cultural sociologists assume that humans are meaning-making creatures and that meaning is an essential component of all human groups and human action. Meaning is understood as distinct from biological processes: although meaning-making is certainly an emergent natural capacity of humans as biological creatures, and biology and culture can influence each other, meaning is not reducible to biological processes. Meaning is also understood as fundamentally public: although individual, subjective experience is certainly essential in meaning-making, meaning is not reducible to that experience. Rather, collective meaning-making processes create the conditions for individual, subjective experience. These presuppositions – that humans are meaning-making creatures, that culture is irreducible to biology, and that meaning is irreducible to private, subjective experience – have formed a firm foundation for research, and also guide the development of cultural theory (Spillman 2016).
Three lenses on meaning-making processes
Cultural sociologists explore meaning-making processes based on these conceptual foundations. Given these foundations, what do you need to know to do cultural sociology? This book examines three lines of research in the field.
First, cultural sociologists focus on cultural objects and their properties. Unlike most other sociologists, they analyze in some depth what Berger and Luckmann called the “signs” mediating “the social construction of reality.” For instance, how can different ways the same story is told generate different meanings? Or how does the weathering of billboards affect what they communicate? Rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories all express meaning through signs, and rather than taking this for granted, or assuming that signs can be ignored because they are transparent and simple, cultural sociologists consider how the cultural forms of signs influence processes of meaning-making. This is the most distinctive added value of cultural sociology compared to other perspectives in sociology.
Second, cultural sociologists analyze interaction as a meaning-making process. Frequently building on sociology’s long interest in symbolic interaction, they focus on how interaction between individuals and within smaller groups influences meaning-making. For instance, how do childhood interactions create long-lasting musical or political tastes, and how do those tastes affect an individual’s subsequent interactions and prospects? Or how do subcultures demonstrate their differences from the mainstream? Processes of action and interaction shape the expression and interpretation of the meaning of even widely shared signs.
Third, cultural sociologists analyze how culture is produced in large organizations, institutions, or fields of action. Frequently building on sociology’s long interest in social structure and in large organizations, they focus on how meaning-making is influenced by large-scale patterns of social relations and organizational constraints. For instance, how does the mass production of music in large corporations affect the sort of music produced, compared to music performed in smaller and more informal settings? Or how does the pattern of relations among journalists, government officials, and non-profit providers all interested in humanitarian aid affect how mass violence is viewed? While any given individual may be unaware of the larger patterns of social relations affecting their meaning-making, cultural sociologists demonstrate many ways in which patterns of relations in the larger society are a critical influence on cultural production.
So cultural sociologists use three different lenses when they examine processes of meaning-making. They explore cultural forms, interaction, and the organization of production. The perspectives offered by these three angles of vision are irreducible, but compatible. Certainly, cultural theorists sometimes debate which lens is best, or question the significance of one aspect or another of meaning-making. As we will see, many investigations highlight one or another. However, since each lens offers different insights about culture, they can and often should be fruitfully combined for a fuller picture.
This framework is built primarily around concepts, rather than people. For this reason, it should be possible to follow it through to apply it flexibly to different authors, works, and research projects beyond those mentioned here. The overall schema can be used to think about different thematic emphases and significant authors, and to identify similarities and differences in different scholarly contexts, including different national contexts.
The critical element shared by all three approaches is their examination of processes of meaning-making. This focus distinguishes cultural sociology from other lines of investigation in sociology. Not only is culture irreducible to biology, as noted above, it is also irreducible to social structure, so sociological analysis with a restricted focus on large social structures and patterns of social relations (ignoring their meaning) is distinct from what cultural sociologists do. In the same way, cultural sociology is not restricted to a focus on individuals. That means that analysis centrally focused on individuals or individual processes, such as in social psychology, or even in the aggregations of individual opinions found in surveys, is not enough for cultural sociology. Instead, by establishing culture as a distinct level of analysis, not restricted to social structures or individuals, cultural sociology offers the advantage of linking social structures and individual subjectivity, which the earlier Berger and Luckmann concept of “the social construction of reality” also attempted.
These foundations have proven strong and the three angles of investigation highly productive for learning about culture from a sociological point of view (Alexander et al. 2012; Hall et al. 2010). The range of new knowledge cultural sociologists have produced is exciting; many examples will be offered in the following chapters.
This new knowledge about processes of meaning-making is important for several reasons. First, since meaning-making is important to everyone, understanding more about meaning, rather than sidelining it, should be important to sociologists. Second, understanding the meanings people share helps us understand how social groups cohere, and how complex social organization is accomplished. Third, understanding more about cultural difference offers important insights into how power and inequality are maintained. Fourth, understanding more about cultural conflict offers important insights into some of the most pressing social problems we face. To take a few recent examples, research in cultural sociology has shed light on bias in hiring processes, on health and aging, on environmental issues, and on processes of globalization.
Lauren Rivera expands on an important stream of cultural sociology which demonstrates how meaning-making processes affect inequality. She investigates how cultural assumptions influence the hiring process for elite jobs. Her observations and interviews show that bias was unconsciously imported into hiring decisions by employers’ use of metrics and standards for qualities more accessible to candidates with more privileged backgrounds. Throughout the hiring process – in eligibility criteria, on-campus recruiting, interview training, résumé screening, face-to-face interviews, and hiring committee deliberations – she identifies ways in which the “seemingly economically neutral” decisions and measurements involved in the hiring process are in fact tied to cultural indicators and “pedigree.” For example, interviewers worked with an informal criterion of “cultural fit” biased towards privileged experiences and lifestyle (Rivera 2015, 26–7, 3).
The topic of age and health may seem fundamentally biological, but Corey Abramson explores the cultural context