Synopses & Reviews
Since sociologists returned to the study of culture in the past several decades, a pursuit all but anathema for a generation, cultural sociology has emerged as a vibrant field. Edited by three leading cultural sociologists,
The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology presents the full theoretical and methodological vitality of this critically significant new area.The
Handbook gathers together works by authors confronting the crucial choices all cultural sociologists face today: about analytic priorities, methods, topics, epistemologies, ideologies, and even modes of writing. It is a vital collection of preeminent thinkers studying the ways in which culture, society, politics, and economy interact in the world.
Organized by empirical areas of study rather than particular theories or competing intellectual strands, the Handbook addresses power, politics, and states; economics and organization; mass media; social movements; religion; aesthetics; knowledge; and health. Allowing the reader to observe tensions as well as convergences, the collection displays the value of cultural sociology not as a niche discipline but as a way to view and understand the many facets of contemporary society. The first of its kind, The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology offers comprehensive and immediate access to the real developments and disagreements taking place in the field, and deftly exemplifies how cultural sociology provides a new way of seeing and modeling social facts.
"This groundbreaking, readable handbook [is] the first single volume to attempt to unify its diverse contemporary applications in a wide range of traditional genres of sociology...Valuable for college universities and libraries supporting undergraduate and graduate degree programs in sociology and history."-CHOICE
About the Author
Jeffrey Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Ronald Jacobs is Professor of Sociology at SUNY-Albany. Philip Smith is Professor of Sociology at Yale.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Cultural Sociology Today
Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald Jacobs, and Philip Smith
PART I The Cultural Method in Sociology
2. Cultural Sociology as a Research Program: Post-Positivism, Meaning, and Causality
Isaac Ariail Reed
3. Rationalization Processes inside Cultural Sociology
Richard Biernacki
4. Four Ways to Measure Culture: Social Science, Hermeneutics, and the Cultural Turn
John Mohr and Craig Rawlings
PART II The Economic as Culture
5. Culture and the Economy
Carlo Tognato
6. Culture and Economic Life
Lyn Spillman
PART III The Political as Culture
7. From Moral Sentiments to Civic Engagement: Sociological Analysis as Responsible Spectatorship
Robin Wagner-Pacifici
8. Reinventing the Concept of Civic Culture
Paul Lichterman
9. Cultural Sociology and Civil Society in a World of Flows: Recapturing Ambiguity, Hybridity and the Political
Gianpaolo Biaocchi
PART IV The Media as Culture
10. Mediatized Disasters in the Global