Cultural Sociology

An Introduction

Les Back, Andy Bennett, Laura Desfor Edles, Margaret Gibson, David Inglis, Ron Jacobs, Ian Woodward

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781444362244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cultural Sociology: An Introduction is the first dedicated student textbook to address cultural sociology as a legitimate model for sociological thinking and research. Highly renowned authors present a rich overview of major sociological themes and the various empirical applications of cultural sociology.

• A timely introductory overview to this increasingly significant field which provides invaluable summaries of key studies and approaches within cultural sociology
• Clearly written and designed, with accessible summaries of thematic topics, covering race, class, politics, religion, media, fashion, and music
• International experts contribute chapters in their field of research, including a chapter by David Chaney, a founder of cultural sociology
• Offers a unified set of theoretical and methodological tools for those wishing to apply a cultural sociological approach in their work

Part I

Theory and Method

1

Starting to Write a History of the Present Day: Culture and Sociology

David Chaney

The ‘problem’ of culture

In the second half of the twentieth century, a major innovation in the syllabus of academic sociology was the study of culture. The new theme was not exclusive to sociology, so it was also explored and caused major revisions in a number of fields within the human studies, such as philosophy, art history and English literature, among others. The topic also spawned its own distinctive field of cultural studies (Chaney 1994).1 The idea that all this was an innovation might seem paradoxical, as culture had been central to the human sciences and particularly anthropology for at least a century. Thus we need to consider how and why the sociological syllabus was reshaped by a turn to culture. I suggest that in turning to culture sociologists revised and developed the fundamental sociological project of the characterization of modernity. It can now be seen that these revisions amounted to the beginning of writing a history of the present day.

An initial suggestion could be that a particular distinctiveness of the new perspectives lay in their concern with the culture of contemporary post-industrial societies. This is in itself insufficient, however. More broadly, we need to consider how culture was changing in later modernity, the social relationships between those who made and/or commentated upon culture and those who consumed it, and whether traditional distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture were being changed.

In this chapter, I explore how and why culture was ‘discovered’ in Britain as a topic after a century of sociological work. I will use this particular episode in cultural history to begin a more general discussion of universal sociological questions that must be posed in the study of culture. These are:

• What is the culture being seen as problematic?
• And by whom and how is it being discovered?

Answers to these questions will help us to understand the reasons why and the ways in which cultural sociology has become so central to the sociological syllabus at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In effect, this means looking at how sociological work has adapted to the cultural changes of late modernity. These are clearly major issues, and ones that this collection is intended to address. In this chapter, I say something about how culture came to be seen as distinctively problematic in the 1950s and 1960s in Britain – not just as academic study but in the broader politics of cultural and social change, as well as in terms of relationships between the heterogeneous discourses of cultural studies and the broader discourses of academic sociology.

As an introductory point, it is important to recognize that in certain respects the culture of the ‘masses’ had been seen as a problem by certain members of the intelligentsia and opinion-leaders since a new urban popular culture came into existence. To go back only to the first half of the twentieth century, culture was often considered as an element in wider concerns with ideological knowledge and the ways in which rationality could be defended and sustained in an era of mass demagoguery, particularly Nazism.

A central element in these fears over mass ideologies was the idea that new forms of mass entertainment and information (principally films and radio at the time) could easily subvert traditional forms of moral and political order. In the United States, for example, such a concern was focused by research known as the Payne Fund Studies on the effects of mass cinema attendance, particularly on the young. In Britain, an influential version of this concern was a book written on the dangers of popular literature by a Cambridge intellectual, Q.D. Leavis (1932; see also Eliot 1948).

These examples illustrate some of the ways in which sets of fears around ‘culture’ were being expressed at this time. In the immediate aftermath of the cataclysmic World War I, it was widely felt that a new society was emerging or would have to be made. In the process, there were concerns that much of what was romanticized as a shared culture between the ruling class and the lower orders was being undermined. It could be said, then, that culture was being seen as a problem because it was being threatened by mass audiences and mass tastes. These fears over the implications of cultural change persisted in the latter half of the twentieth century, although much of the work of cultural studies was to celebrate popular experience and cultural forms. To assume that fear was glibly replaced by celebration would be to miss much about the way the ‘problem’ of culture has more organically adapted in both academic discourses and the discourses of the wider society.

In part, this is because even those most dismayed by modernity have had to recognize that the culture of traditional pre-industrial society had been disappearing for a long time. As an often nationalist response, there had been a movement in several countries to collect and record the folk songs and traditions of a disappearing world (Storey 2003). This sense of a distinctive national culture under threat was further exacerbated by the early forms of a global mass culture such as the Hollywood film industry in the first half of the century. A concern to ‘civilize’ the new urban masses of industrial class society had been a recurrent theme in public discourse at least since the first popular national festival – the Great Exhibition of 1851. However, it was given new forms and a distinctive emphasis by the strength and vitality of a popular culture largely focused around forms of mass entertainment – radio, cinema and popular literature, and so on – that developed from 1900 onwards. In the British context, the perceived need to improve the culture of the masses was seen as the central role of the institution of public service broadcasting. This was an institutional arrangement in which the possibility of commercial gain was sacrificed for ideological ends (Briggs 1970; Scannell 1991).

The complex of political forces that sustained the founding and hegemony of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) throughout this period is too complex to be summarized adequately here. It was, however, a central aspect of the meaning of public service that an ‘improving’ culture had to be made available to – and was indeed insisted upon for – the national audience. The stratification of radio into audience segments and the early introduction of commercial television based on regional producers modified but did not seriously challenge the authority of cultural elites to shape a hierarchy of taste (McDonnell 1991). And to the institutional power of the BBC should be added the influence of the Arts Council, founded immediately after the war to spread culture outside elite bastions. In this setting, the role of intellectuals – not just those working directly for the BBC but also in universities and working for broadsheet newspapers and magazines – was of central importance: first, as shapers of how the national culture understood itself; and second, as articulators of how that culture was, more or less effectively, to be made accessible to mass audiences. It follows that, as an initial step, our understanding of the ‘discovery’ of a problem of culture must begin with the power and character of the intelligentsia. That is, a grasp of changes in the meaning and forms of culture in the contemporary era must be grounded in changes in the status, authority, recruitment and institutional hegemony of this intellectual class.

A number of relevant factors can briefly be mentioned. Some indication of the characteristic outlook of elites is provided by the training of those who constituted the influential intelligentsia of British culture. Looking back from today’s vantage point, we might be surprised by the significance of departments of English literature. Even now a training in reading English literature has been the foundation for the careers of many cultural commentators, critics, producers and directors. This has been particularly relevant to a discussion of the policies around both the provision of culture and the sorts of culture that were appropriate because of the influence of the teaching of F.R. Leavis and his school (Leavis 1977). Leavis was understood to be concerned by a betrayal of cultural standards in public life, and emphasized the centrality of quality and the ways in which good literature is able to reflect imaginative experience truthfully. Although a Leavisite emphasis upon the significance and power of the greatest literature came to be rather excoriated in the more populist and wide-ranging emphases of cultural studies, it is significant that two books published in the late 1950s, and subsequently seen to have had an important role in redirecting concerns around the provision of culture (Hoggart 1957; Williams 1958), were both written firmly within Leavisite perspectives. It is also significant that both authors wrote from a self-consciously working-class background, and saw themselves as marginal to the institutionalized centres of cultural power in Britain.

In this opening section of the chapter, a two-part theme is introduced that resonates throughout the whole: (i) the idea that the ‘discovery’ of culture stemmed from fears about the implications of changes to a mass culture; and (ii) the importance of the relationship of cultural elites to mass audiences. Leavisite influences remained significant on cultural policies and the terms of culture debate, particularly in relation to a continuing commitment to the defence of ‘quality’ (Thompson 1964). There was in the 1960s, however, a realization that the values of ‘high culture’ were felt to be indefensible and inappropriate in an increasingly commercialized and consumer-driven culture. There is an interesting contrast, for example, in how fine artists in the late 1950s and 1960s increasingly turned away from the rather drab conventions of English fine art and began to explore for the first time the iconography of advertising and popular culture more generally in the movement known as Pop Art.

It could not escape the attention of even the most serious literary scholar that an explosive burst in creative energy occurred in fields such as advertising, fashion and mass media. From the late 1950s onwards, there was what George Melly (1970) later characterized as a ‘revolt into style’ – particularly among the young – which above all involved the pioneering of new sounds and movements associated with a mass, youth-oriented popular music (Frith 1992). It changed the cultural landscape. This shift in cultural hierarchies and agendas was also matched by an extraordinary pouring of creative energy into the making of popular television for both the BBC and commercial companies. For the first time in the era of modern life, it became fashionable for ‘the brightest and the best’ of cultural elites to work in the mass media. This meant that in the second half of the twentieth century, mass television was the most innovative and rewarding field of cultural production for both creative intellectuals and popular audiences (Corner 1991).

Confronting cultural divisions

For many, it was within this context of rapid cultural change that it became necessary to re-examine intellectual presuppositions about the role and nature of culture in the lives of ordinary people. Before discussing some of the ways in which that re-examination was undertaken in Britain, it is necessary to look briefly at the dominant hierarchy of cultural value during the first half of the twentieth century. Despite many intellectuals’ commitment to an idea of a common culture in pre-industrial society, it is in fact clear that one effect of the massive changes of industrialization and urbanization was the development of distinct and separate class cultures. Considerable effort was put into segregating the spaces inhabited by different classes, such as the parts of a seaside resort visited (and the transport used to reach it), or the parts of a theatre if they were sharing a common entertainment. In the first half of the twentieth century, new forms of mass entertainment such as the cinema transcended these class divisions to some extent, although there were attempts – particularly in the early years of cinema – to segregate the social levels of the audience. In general, however, it is important to note that patterns of cultural activity were clearly differentiated by class and locality.

Sport had been promoted by Victorian and later reformers as a way of transcending aspects of these segregated and generally mutually antagonistic cultures, but where members of different classes might play on the same team they were given different titles – for example, gentlemen and players in cricket, who used separate entrances to the playing field. In general, though, sports did not overlap class boundaries so that the sport you played was a clear indication of your class affiliation (identifications which to some extent survive to the present day), although it is important to recognize regional differences in this. Association football remained a thoroughly working-class game in terms of both who played it and who watched it, and it was really only in the 1960s, facilitated by television and the popularity of the World Cup in 1966, that it started to become glamorized and to attract middle-class audiences (Mason 1989). Within this context, it becomes more comprehensible that where culture did figure in the sociological discourse it was generally as a way of describing community life, so that culture was being used to refer to a whole way of life rather than a set of cultural activities or tastes (Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter 1969; see also Williams 1958).

It is relevant in this context to note that one of the indices of cultural change in the 1960s was an attempt to represent the reality of working-class life in several cultural forms (for example, film, literature and television). Previously, members of the working class had been portrayed through comic or menacing stereotypes, so that they were effectively bowdlerized through patronizing portrayals as in the stock characters played by George Formby or Gracie Fields. Although these figures were often very popular and were important stars, they sentimentalized the realities of working-class life and were in stark contrast to the films, books, television and plays of the 1960s that garnered a generic label of social realist or kitchen sink dramas (see Hill 1986; Elsom 1976; Stead 1989).

The discovery of culture that is our theme thus has at least two distinct but related strands. The first is a gradual appreciation by cultural elites that popular culture was not coarsely vulgar and lacking in merit; the second is that the semi-autonomous and largely hidden domains of popular experience had to be experienced on their own terms. It is significant that this feeling of discovery was being undertaken at a time when the fundamental structures of working-class communities – the industries of coal, steel, shipbuilding, rail and dock work – were beginning their rapid contraction or even destruction. If we also consider massive programmes of rehousing and new town development, as well as suburban migration, then the frameworks of cultural communities were changing at the same time as new forms of youth culture and consumerism, and forms of mass entertainment, were emerging (Hebdige 1979).

For the intelligentsia, it must have seemed that everything that was solid was melting into air. Although recruitment to cultural elites was still predominantly from the ranks of the middle and upper classes, this was changing in response to a step-change expansion in the numbers of people attending universities and associated changes in degree structures and themes. At least partly as a consequence of these developments, the nature of politics was also changing – driven by new forms of radicalism. New single-issue political movements emerged to mobilize new political constituencies, most strikingly in relation to opposition to nuclear weapons and subsequently the US neo-colonial war in Vietnam. These campaigns also pioneered distinctive forms of protest, such as marches, mass demonstrations and non-violent civil disobedience (Gitlin 1993; Roszak 1971).

A new political culture was therefore developing in opposition to institutionalized authority, and this to some extent complemented new predominantly working-class youth cultures. There was then a more middle-class counter-culture in which there was an aspiration to emulate the avant-garde European art movements from earlier in the century, combined with a romantic Bohemianism from the United States fuelled by new forms of drug use (more accurately, drugs became common among middle-class youth rather than being confined to metropolitan ghettoes). Although inspired in part by innovations in modern art, this counter-culture engaged very strongly with contemporary popular culture, not least in the blues groups that came to symbolize an alternative lifestyle later in the 1960s (Sandbrook 2006).

The political culture was in these ways going through a process of rapid and fundamental change. This process was very significant for the discovery of culture. This is because, rather than culture being understood purel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Notes on Authors
• Preface
• Glossary of Terms
• Part I: Theory and Method
• Part II: New Cultural Identities
• Part III: Fragmented Ideology
• Part IV: Leisure and Lifestyle
• References
• Index