Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis

University of California Press

The founders of sociology all recognized the importance of culture in social life. Emile Durkheim spent nearly fifteen years at the peak of his career investigating the beliefs and rituals of primitive religion in an effort to grasp the symbolic bases of moral community. Max Weber was concerned with problems of culture to an even greater extent. From the Protestant ethic thesis to contributions on rationalization and comparative religions, his work was prominently oriented toward the values and norms that regulate and legitimate social institutions. From a quite different perspective, Karl Marx dealt extensively with ideology and class consciousness, with religion and legitimation, and with the bases of social knowledge. Other contributors—Toennies, Troeltsch, Tocqueville, Spencer, to name a few—were also deeply concerned with the role of culture in society.

The legacy of the classical period has been, carried forward in the work of more recent sociologists and social scientists whose interests have also given special consideration to the patterning and functioning of culture. In Talcott Parsons one finds a clear emphasis, deriving particularly from Durkheim and Weber, on the importance of values and norms. Similar interests are prominent in the work of sociologists who came under Parsons's influence: for example, in Neil Smelser's work on collective behavior, in Robert Bellah's sociology of religion, and in Clifford Geertz's essays on the interpretation of cultures. Durkheim's legacy is evident in Kai Erikson's studies of ritual and deviance, in Guy E. Swanson's investigations of the social bases of belief, and in Mary Doug-

las's work on symbolic boundaries and moral order. All these examples demonstrate the importance of culture as an object of sociological inquiry. Weber's legacy has included a number of significant extensions of the Protestant ethic thesis, such as Robert Merton's work on Puritanism and science, Bellah's monograph on Tokugawa religion, and studies of English history such as those of David Little and Michael Walzer, as well as broader applications such as Ernst Troeltsch's work on the varieties of religion and Benjamin Nelson's study of usury. Marx's considerations on culture have been greatly expanded in the work of writers such as Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Jürgen Habermas. In each instance the fundamental role of culture in society has been recognized. To say this without qualification, however, is clearly to misrepresent the field.

Although it is possible to point out specific studies in sociology that have contributed greatly to the understanding of culture, the discipline as a whole has not given particular prominence to the importance of culture. In fact, culture often appears in empirical studies as a vague concept to which relatively superficial attention is given or as an outmoded form of explanation that must be superseded by factors of greater objectivity and significance. Other studies ignore it entirely. These tendencies, of course, are not nearly as pronounced in European sociology, where the linkages between philosophy, social theory, and sociology remain stronger. In American sociology, though, the general tendency toward de-emphasizing culture is well in evidence. Several indications of this tendency are particularly apparent. For example, the once flourishing subfield known as culture and personality has largely receded as a legitimate area of concentration. The personality component has shifted increasingly into the discipline of psychology, while the idea of culture, especially national culture, having a decisive impact on personality has become widely regarded as an arcane concept. Or to take a different example, the sociology of religion—one area in which cultural factors are given much attention—appears to have become increasingly removed from the rest of the discipline. This separation is evident not only in the existence of separate journals and scholarly organizations but also in an obvious dissimilarity between the major concepts and theories that guide research. Major contributions in the sociology of religion dealing with dimensions of belief, sources of conversion, the functioning of rituals and symbols, and modes of religious organization appear to have had virtually no impact on the discipline at large. Other examples could also be mentioned, from the shifting of many of the more cultural aspects of social psychology such as

cognition and attitude formation into psychology and away from sociology, to the tendency evident in recent years in political sociology to de-emphasize the role of political culture.

It is perhaps arguable that political science as a discipline has continued to display greater interest in cultural phenomena than has the discipline of sociology. It is far more apparent that anthropology has retained culture as a more central concept than has sociology. History as well, perhaps as a result of the influence of anthropology, has demonstrated a continuing, if not increasing, interest in culture. Sociology, in contrast, appears to have moved decisively in other directions. Topics such as social stratification, social networks, labor markets, ecological models of organizations, and structural theories of the state have animated the discipline in recent years far more than issues of ritual and symbol, belief and ideology, or meaning and moral order.

To some extent, it has perhaps become an accepted tenet of the discipline that the study of culture should be relegated to that of a rather marginal subspecialty (perhaps called sociology of culture) while the core of the discipline should be concerned with topics that are more genuinely sociological, such as stratification and organizations. Nevertheless, it remains surprising that the study of culture is so little emphasized in American sociology, for in virtually every discipline to which sociology is related culture is regarded with considerable seriousness. Anthropology, in which the study of ritual, symbolism, and even cognition and language continue to have high priority, is again the most obvious example, but the same is true in other related disciplines as well. Work on organizations done outside of sociology has paid increasing attention to the importance of corporate cultures; political science has incorporated a number of new ideas about language and discourse as dramatizations of power; meanwhile, studies of language and discourse have moved in directions that make them much more relevant to the social sciences.

It is of course possible to accentuate general tendencies in the discipline to the point of overlooking major exceptions or underestimating significant countertendencies. The purpose of accentuating these tendencies is neither to disparage the discipline nor to devalue the contributions that have been made, but simply to permit raising the question of what may be needed to advance the sociological study of culture. If all that is acknowledged is that cultural analysis no longer occupies as[aś] prominent a place in sociology as it did in the work of Weber or Durkheim, or even of Marx, then the possible reasons for this state of affairs can be explored.

One such possibility is that the changing place...