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 of aging. His observations and interviews demonstrate, first, that, as we noted above, age stages are cultural categories: “old age” is a “cultural category with shared characteristics, challenges, expectations, and prejudices” which shape daily life (Abramson 2015, 10). But differences in cultural beliefs, motivations, and strategies also affect how people navigate old age. For instance, some people see their goal as bodily preservation, while others focus on maximizing enjoyment. Some people understand help from their social ties as a general obligation, while others see helping in terms of specific exchanges. Individuals’ cultural resources are an important influence on how successfully they pursue their goals, too: for instance, how they navigate medical bureaucracies (Abramson 2015, 134, 143).
Justin Farrell investigates another topic which may initially seem irrelevant to culture: the environment. He explores processes of meaning-making about environmental protection, and their implications for environmental issues. His in-depth examination of persistent and interconnected conflicts surrounding Yellowstone, America’s first and most iconic national park, suggests that the disputes among different stakeholders are generated by the different “socially constructed stories that give them meaning and direct their lives” – whether those stories are about, for example, rugged individualism, old-western heritage, indigenous religion, or the intrinsic value of non-human animals. Such stories create a moral and spiritual context for environmental disputes like those at Yellowstone, yet culture is so deeply ingrained that individuals often fail to recognize the influence of the moral culture within which they are embedded, or even to be able to give a coherent account of their beliefs and behaviors – “taken for granted as fundamental to reality” (Farrell 2015, 14, 9).
To take another example, globalization is necessarily a large-scale process which often seems to happen behind our backs and beyond daily life. Yet even so, examining meaning-making processes sheds new light on how economic globalization is expressed in intimate interactions and takes on different significance in different contexts. For instance, Kimberly Hoang’s (2015) observations and interviews in four different Vietnamese hostess bars uncover links between macro-level flows of capital and trends in the informal economy around intimacy and gender performance. Hostesses in some bars oriented to elite Vietnamese businessmen, who want to display Vietnamese economic progress with conspicuous consumption and “Pan-Asian modernity,” project expensiveness and Western-influenced standards of beauty, including lighter skin and rounder eyes. By contrast, hostesses in bars oriented to Westerners stick to an earlier type of gender performance, and with their darker skin tones, smoky eye makeup, and simple clothes they reinforce ideas of Western dominance by playing into images of an exotic Vietnam in need of aid.
Attentive to the rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories embedded in their research sites, these authors contribute significant new knowledge about topics of central concern to sociologists and the general public alike. By investigating the social construction of everyday life in hiring, old age, environmental conflict, and globalizing cities, they shed light on both consensus and conflict, solidarity and power. They analyze cultural forms, like the criteria for evaluation used by hiring companies, and the stories people tell about the environment. They analyze interaction processes, like the different ways old people engage with health providers, or the negotiations between women and their clients in Vietnamese bars. And they show how institutions, organizations, and fields – from hiring organizations to global financial flows – shape meaning-making processes.
Conclusion
