mclennon (2014) sociology cultural studies and

23Sociology, Cultural Studies and the Cultural TurnGregor McLennan

Introduction

For 40 years, the relationship between sociology and cultural studies has posed central questions of self-definition and practice for both projects. By orchestrating a range of manifesto-style statements the full literature can only be gestured towards this chapter offers an analytical profile of the unfolding dealings between the two formations, starting with the prevailing discourse around sociology at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the 1970s (Birmingham). The second sketch postmodern con-juncturalism takes as background the worldwide growth of cultural studies as an undergraduate quasi-discipline, involving the active displacement of disciplinary sociology. In a third movement sociological readjustment the tables are ostensibly turned once again, but at this point the whole notion of the cultural turn, which rhetorically governs most of the debate, requires critical focus. In the years after 2000, a mood of pragmatic reflexivity emerges in cultural studies and sociology alike, in which, despite latent tensions, various balances are struck between culture and economy, theory and method, political purpose and academic professionalism. With these developments, the prospect of a more principled partnership between the warring twins (D. Inglis, 2007) could be glimpsed. However, several recent currents of thought and research are undermining the culture and society problematic that has sustained most versions of the sociology-cultural studies encounter.

Birmingham

In a series of theses that set the parameters for the 1970s Birmingham mode, Stuart Hall, the premier cultural studies figure, affirmed the need for this

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emerging discourse to break with orthodox sociology. In keeping with Halls inclusive cast of thought, these formulations were not outright rejectionist, though there were reasons to be polemical. The perception was that the local Birmingham sociologists felt miffed to be upstaged by the newcomer down the corridor, making their hostility felt in a blistering attack (Hall, 1980, p. 21). More generally, Centre thinking often revolved around themes circulating in New Left Review, including Perry Andersons well-known diagnosis that the absent centre in the national intellectual culture was partly due to Britains failure to produce a classical sociology, the outcome of which, in the current era, was a politically feeble sociological derivative of empiricism and functionalism (Anderson, 1969, pp. 2212).

Halls own approach in his teaching and writing was always carefully modulated. In one trademark mapping the field essay (CCCS, 1973), a sociology of literature line was endorsed in an effort to combat overly textualist cultural criticism. In another (Hall, 1978), the sociology of knowledge was designated as the hinterland of contemporary understandings of ideology, featuring indispensable sociological forebears Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Berger and Luckmann, even Merton. So when it came to defining the posture of cultural studies in general, in the direction of a complex Marxism, this was conceived as posing sociological questions against sociology itself (Hall, 1980, pp. 205). Certain aspects of conventional sociology were to be opposed, notably complacent notions of liberal pluralist society, the lifeless mass society reading of culture, and sociologys dominant structural-functionalist models. Yet cultural studies was sociological in a loose sense, such that lived practices, belief systems and institutions, some part of the subject matter of sociology fell within our scope. Hall perceived a kind of creative disintegration going on within the older discipline, bringing a parallel movement of recovery of questions of agency, culture and resistance. He included core selections from classical and contemporary sociology in his Masters theory course at CCCS, and he left Birmingham to become Professor of Sociology at the Open University (OU), albeit in a profoundly interdisciplinary style.

Through the 1970s, the Birmingham presence was steadily felt within the British Sociological Association, not only apparent in its 1979 volume on cultural production (Barrett et al., 1979), but also in the review of practice and progress in British sociology (Abrams et al., 1981). Richard Johnson, Halls historian colleague, gave the main overview in the former, while Halls depiction of cultural studies paradigms was used by the latters editors to frame the situation facing sociology specifically. Halls studies of encoding/decoding and deviancy amplification had already penetrated sociology of the media, while Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1977) which positioned racist perceptions of muggings in Birmingham as the epitome of an entire swelling social conjuncture of authoritarian populism, had great impact sometimes controversially upon

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512 The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain

critical criminology, political sociology, and the sociology of race and racism. Hall also shared platforms and publications with younger sociologists on issues around Marxs method and the theory of class, including a conference debate with Nicos Poulantzas and Paul Hirst in 1976, when the relative autonomy of the political was memorably thrashed out. A 1979 History Workshop conference on questions of culturalism, held in a candle-lit (power-cut) church near Ruskin College, also became rather legendary, its centrepiece though Johnson and other Birmingham people also spoke being a crackling exchange between Hall and E.P. Thompson. In 2011, Hall received one of only a handful of British Sociological Association 60th anniversary distinguished contribution awards, widely seen as richly deserved not only for his very influential sociological or sociology-related scholarship, but for his political passion and truly radiant qualities as speaker, teacher and mentor. Actually, it is doubtful that Stuart Hall felt any truly closer to sociology and sociologists as such at the end of his career than at its beginning: his priorities and loyalties were always to do with certain kinds of people and the spirit they carried, whatever their professional labels. Nevertheless, the status of sociology in relation to cultural studies undoubtedly posed productive tensions for Hall, on condition that sociologists abandoned any aspiration to academic imperialism.

In many of the topic-specific areas of study at Birmingham, engagements with sociology routinely framed how CCCS was to proceed, and Centre discussion groups and publications often included people based in sociology departments elsewhere. The most intimate liaison took place within the subcultures strand, especially in Resistance Through Rituals. Theoretically, the way was cleared by interrogating that veritable sociological trinity of ideas about post-war social change: affluence, consensus, and embourgeoisement (Clarke et al., 1976, pp. 218). Methodologically, a new deal had to be struck with appreciative and ethnographic strands of sociology. On the one hand, the young Birmingham researchers it cannot be emphasised enough that the vast majority at CCCS were post-graduate students clearly relied upon ideas deriving from symbolic interactionism and labelling theory, and they shared Stan Cohens sense of the radical sociologists dilemma finding ways of staying in without selling out (Roberts, 1976, pp. 250, 243). Yet participant observation research was ultimately deemed to be tarnished by the positivist attitudes and naturalistic methods of mainstream sociology, with its ingrained professional fear that the field of investigation will be distorted and contaminated unless the values, theories, and subjectivities of researchers are suppressed (Willis, 1980, p. 90). Even Howard Becker was held complicit in plunging us into a depoliticised and de-moralised phenomenological never-never land (Pearson and Twohig, 1976, pp. 1245), though it had to be conceded that, just possibly in such swingeing critiques, certain texts in the ethnographic tradition were being traduced (Willis, 1980, p. 89). No such concessions were offered in the

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Althusser-affected Centre manner, from which heights sociological participant observation was roundly castigated for its mystified consciousness of its own practice (Butters, 1976, p. 263). The hiatus between high-theory and locally-grounded Birmingham modes found expression in the tectonic (but originally unintended) split into two parts of Paul Williss Learning to Labour (1977), a work taken up in sociological theory as well as (massively) in sociology of education.

In the groups researching working class culture, community studies, education, and race relations, sociology was presented as producing ideal types that quickly become over-rigid abstractions: Parkins division of working-class value systems into dominant, subordinate, and radical types (Brook and Finn, 1978, p. 135); the Affluent Worker studies scheme of solidaristic versus instrumental attitudes (Critcher, 1979, p. 32); educational sociologys reification of the distinction between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged children (CCCS, 1981, pp. 1335); and the race relations sociologists contrast between the weak family culture of first and second generation West Indian youth and the strong family culture which supports Asian acculturation (Lawrence, 1982, p. 100). The problem within the subject specialisms of sociology was that they remained on the surface, hypertypifying real experience and concentrating on evidence from attitudes not material realities, rendering general sociology inadequate because its main categories were (and are) descriptive they do not deliver explanations (CCCS, 1981, pp. 1367). The unasked or partially asked questions that invalidated sociology concerned the nature of the society as a whole, especially its class nature, and about specifically cultural processes (CCCS, 1981, p. 136). And sociologys inability to ask these questions derived from two things: the petit bourgeois class interests and liberal ideology of professional sociologists, and the nature of sociology itself as a reformist project. Given their preoccupation with multiple perspectives, good sociologists could certainly entertain Marxism, but they could not rigorously follow its political imperatives. With this in mind, Critcher (1979, pp. 2833) found the Affluent Worker studies meticulous, sophisticated, substantial, and even glimpsed a skeletal Marxism in them, but this was of a confused sort. The Education Group noticed a significant attempt at structural analysis in the old sociology of education, but this was not related to the class organization of the society as a whole (1981, p. 138). The sociologists of race were acknowledged as recognising class differences, but not class determinations (Lawrence, 1982, p. 123), and therefore could be said to be espousing merely sociologistic pseudo-Marxism (Gilroy, 1982, p. 281). Sociologists of community, finally, are praised for contesting the post-industrial society thesis, but like the others they simply did not go far enough (Brook and Finn, 1978, p. 127). Ultimately, sociology is condemned as reformist and repressive (Brook and Finn 1978:130), residually prone to pathologising working class and black people (Critcher 1979, p. 34; CCCS 1981, p. 141; Lawrence, 1982, passim).

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From that review, it would clearly be wrong to insist that the Birmingham writings were sociological in any narrow disciplinary sense. As the anti-racist scholarship in the Centre particularly brought out, if existing sociology was being critiqued, this was not simply because we happen to disagree with their theories (Lawrence, 1982, p. 134). There was a fundamental political charge here that could not be captured just in terms of gaining a better perspective. Nevertheless, Centre people took their sociological benchmarks seriously, and their pattern of assessment would nowadays immediately be recognised as sociologistic in a generic sense. Each critique depicted some standard approach in the field, and exposed it as being superficially empiricist, revealing sociologys inability to understand society as a total structure (Brook and Finn, 1978, p. 130).

Even within this critical format, however, sociology and cultural studies alike were being transformed by the question of how to put gender and ethnicity fully into the theoretical, empirical and political mix. The masculinism of the Centres own post-sociological ethnography had already been noted in Resistance Through Rituals (McRobbie and Garber, 1976), and its prevailing white male politics was beginning to be reflexively deconstructed in the everyday life of the unit. The CCCS volume Women Take Issue was one of the few never to mention sociology, but its component essays perfectly encapsulated, indeed they brilliantly sought to resolve, profound dialectical tangles between left traditions and feminist radical pluralism, between emerging issues of subjectivity and the structured relations of production and reproduction (Bland et al., 1978a, p. 48; 1978b, p. 173). In Paul Gilroys neat summation in The Empire Strikes Back collection, it was all a matter of tracing the correspondences, connections, ruptures and breaks between capital, patriarchy and their racial structures, and seeking to give all the ingredients their due in any proper view of the social formation as a contradictory but complex unity (1982, p. 282). Many a sociologist from the 1970s and early 1980s would readily identify with this formulation, just as they would balk at the CCCS refusal to grant their discipline any creative plasticity. Nevertheless, quite quickly, CCCS topics and thinking were folded into the eclectic concerns of sociology, though Halls Gramscian sense of a Birmingham political project was less obviously transferable.

Postmodern Conjuncturalism

As cultural studies established a global academic identity in the 1980s and 1990s, the textbooks confirmed that a decisive break with disciplinary sociology had been required for the successor discipline to emerge (Turner, 1990, p. 112; Brantlinger, 1990, p. 61; Grossberg et al., 1992, pp. 12). In one of these statements, Simon During (1993, p. 1) instructed readers about the right way to approach culture by warning how not to do it: sociologically, for instance. This

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is because sociology proceeds by objectively describing its institutions as if they belonged to a large, regulated system. In another version, sociology was couched as being concerned with universalised sameness and whole-society integration, taking empirical objects as knowable within a flat space which makes the radicalisation of difference impossible to embrace (Stratton and Ang, 1996, p. 364).

Such formulations rather abysmally missed the fact that ever since Gouldners late 1960s diagnosis of the coming crisis in sociology, a great deal of unorthodox sociology and super-reflexivity marked the discipline. Moreover, the impression given in second-phase texts that cultural studies for its part had always been motivated by a sense of radicalised difference was seriously misleading. And the new critique was itself thoroughly modernist in logical form: sociology is presented in its essential sameness rather than by way of its contingent differences; it is assumed to be entirely knowable in its epistemic and political error by the superior cultural studies critic; and its ideological function is unthinkable without some background presumption of an empirically existing, systemic and integrative societal totality.

As the theory and politics of difference took command through the 1980s, the neo-Marxism of Birmingham, if not quite its Gramscianism, came into question, prompting more explicit recognition that the previous variant did in fact contain a strong sociological pull, this now being figured as the main obstacle to postmodernist conjuncturalism (Grossberg, 1993, p. 40). Instead of even residual nods to left-rationalist modes of social explanation and action, a kind of Deleuzian stylistics became near-compulsory, involving rhizomatic and affective theorising, in which the notion of the social subject is replaced by a nomadic subject, reshaped as a mobile situated set of vectors in a fluid context (Grossberg, 1993, p. 61). Instead of being cast as passionately interdisci-plinary, versions of the new genre posited cultural studies as post-disciplinary, or even as a kind of anti-discipline, uncategorisably open, inclusive, experimental and pluralistic (Grossberg et al., 1992, p. 2). In this second register, what needed to be stressed was the huge variety of styles of belonging, such that the individuals relation to the fields continually incorporates and shifts under the impact of contingent givens (During, 1993, p. 12). Even after the attraction of this remorseless anti-generality had passed for most serious commentators, some continued, embarrassingly, to play up its edginess in one formulation Deleuze was held to be offering advice to start in the middle of things so as to avoid looking for coherence (Jutel, 2004, p. 55); in another, cultural studies was thought to be a happening that escapes the homogenizing influence of narrative (Belghazi, 1995, p. 172). One text invitingly entitled Cultural Studies: The Basics followed up an ill-informed caricature of sociology with a definition of cultural studies as transculturalism, referring to the desire to interrogate the forming processes of meaning-making and the instabilities which characterize

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their operation. Somewhat dampening readers mounting excitement, however, the author added that transculturalism offers no guarantees; that it is a theory of perpetual exchange, and indeed that it was in fact already deeply suspicious of itself (Lewis, 2003, pp. 723, 4378).

Together with the remarkable growth in cultural studies programmes around the world, especially in the US, it was perhaps this sort of posturing, together with massification in the colleges, which led Stuart Hall to express bafflement about the expanding field in which he remained iconic (Hall, 1992a). Halls own work through first half of the 1980s was twofold, each aspect consequential for sociology, but in different ways. Down one track, his analysis of Thatcherism (Hal,l 1988a) as having real popular traction and as signalling a new kind of ideological-cultural politics triggered a considerable rethink well beyond the party-political left about the inherited verities of progressivism. In another context not completely separate given the attacks on the OU by right-wing ideologues (alleging it to be hollowed out by conspiring Marxists) Hall was heavily involved in a series of quite outstanding extra-mural OU courses, the topics of which firmly hit the notes of the times: crime and society, the state, popular culture (co-chaired with Tony Bennett), beliefs and ideologies, and two gigantic social science foundation courses. Each of these productions weighed in at around 400,000 words of specially prepared student text together with a wide array of TV and radio programmes, study cassettes, and sometimes life-changing summer school experiences. Hall must have personally written over a quarter of a million words for these programmes, even prior to the OU tactic of delivering courses chiefly through commercial publication, and he loomed large in scores of broadcasts. Leading sociologists served as (invariably admiring) external assessors, and sociologists up and down the land many acting as local OU course tutors begged, borrowed or stole the in-house OU units in order to revamp their own university courses. As at Birmingham, Hall was abetted in these projects by a whole string of social scientists who were highly esteemed in their own right, but his was always accepted as the really galvanising presence.

In the later 1980s his prodigious OU effort undiminished Halls thought became more explicitly anti-essentialist, increasingly folding in elements of post-structuralism, feminist psychoanalysis and the post-Marxist discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau (Hall, 1996a). Being still committed to a specifically Left-inflected politics of difference, however, especially in the free market onslaught of the day, he by no means deserted familiar structural understanding and critique. Perhaps it is better to say that for the central cultural studies representatives in this period, the conjuncturalism mattered more than the postmodernism. All these aspects jostled for primacy and harmony in what was for Hall becoming the paramount register for his wide-ranging notion of articulation, and for his sustained interest in the condensations of power, discourse, race and ethnicity,

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gender, and class, namely post-coloniality. In this vein Hall delivered closely followed essays such as New Ethnicities and The West and the Rest (1992a, 1992b) as well as reabsorbing the post-colonial canon (for example, Fanon) as part of his engagement with the higher flights of post-colonial cultural theory (Hall, 1996b). Into his retirement, Halls unsettling take on multiculturality and hybrid cultural identities differed significantly from both standard multi-culturalism and left-liberal critiques of it (Hall, 2000), and he became pivotal in metropolitan post-colonial artistic circles, helping establish (in 2007) a major London centre for global and cultural diversity in the visual arts, incorporating a Stuart Hall Library. Later still, in 2013, and to great public acclaim, an insightful and moving film by John Akomfrah the Stuart Hall Project was made with the subjects close involvement. Halls inextinguishable, and always subtly changing, sense of the organic intellectual in new times is evident in these wider public and institutional contributions to cultural politics, thereby overlapping at one corner with Tony Bennetts otherwise very different vision for cultural studies after postmodernism, that of a policy-making reformers science (Bennett, 1998).

Sociological Readjustment

Switching back to the loose overarching narrative, if Halls changes of theoretical idiom over the years were handled, as always, in both a fluently persuasive and also at times cleverly cagey manner, elsewhere across cultural studies and sociology ultra-deconstructionist tendencies were giving some cause for concern, perceived as representing the comeback of that other first parent of cultural studies, literary textualism. Prominent ex-Birmingham authors Angela McRobbie (1992, 1997) and David Morley (1997), long ambivalent about disciplinary sociology, now felt that there was a need to get back to reality by reasserting the properly grounded, ethnographic and sociological, dimension of cultural studies. Americans Douglas Kellner (1995, pp. 3942) and Ben Agger (1992, p. 76) proposed an even stronger recovery of sociological realism, arguing that the new rampant culturalism had betrayed the best interdisciplinary traditions. They defended an insurgent cultural studies against the fetishism of consumerism and populism that seemed to be taking hold. In the UK similar charges were made by Jim McGuigan (1992) and several of the contributors to the highly charged collection Cultural Studies in Question (Ferguson and Golding, 1997), who demanded the reinstatement of political economy.

Such responses to postmodern conjuncturalism underlined the productive overlaps inside the ongoing wrangle between sociology and cultural studies. But could it not be said by now that sociology had simply been wronged by cultural studies, and that sociologys own undervalued strengths now needed louder declarations of allegiance? This line was pursued in various ways,

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depending on whether it was Birmingham or postmodern conjuncturalism that was being targeted. David Harris held that CCCS-style work, though valuable, was only one option amongst others, and that sociology and other bourgeois disciplines could claim to have had a more open relation to empirical evidence, concluding that the revolutionary fantasies of breaking [with sociology] should have been resisted from the outset (Harris, 1992, pp. 1956). In the area of sport and leisure Chris Rojek charged that whilst theoretically Birmingham researchers may have recognised the vital interplay between work and leisure (for which read class and culture), this had been remorselessly denied when the theory is applied to concrete empirical processes (Rojek, 1985, p. 134). David Chaney (2004) found Birmingham ideology analysis disappointing, spotting resemblances with previous sociological accounts of the cultural system, neither perspective understanding that there is simply no outside to culture. Even Raymond Williamss famous idea of cultures as whole ways of life was too presumptive: for Chaney, only a culturalism couched as the piecemeal, plural and reflexive interpretive practices of everyday life would suffice.

As for second-phase cultural studies, it was superficial impressionism not deep reductionism that needed sociological rebalancing. According to Keith Tester, cultural studies had become morally cretinous, merely mimicking the media it claims to expose, and it was theoretically empty because all that ever got theorised was cultural studies itself (Tester, 1994, pp. 3, 4, 10). By contrast, sociology holds out the possibility of a lively study of culture which is informed by a seriousness of moral and cultural purpose, because if it is worth doing sociology is not happy just to describe and explore what exists. Pierre Bourdieus widely publicised attack on neo-liberalism added weight to the positioning of cultural studies as an apolitical creature of fashion (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999, p. 47).

Rojek and Bryan Turner pressed further, bewailing the faults of the decorative sociology that had emerged under the influence of cultural studies aestheticism, the privileging of culture, a lack of comparative historical perspective, capitulation to relativistic postmodernism; and political proselytising in the absence of any real political agenda (Rojek and Turner, 2000, pp. 6339). Sociology, by contrast, had a more encompassing grasp of the material base and our vulnerable existential embodiment, with the potential, going back to Parsons and interactionism, for a systematic contemporary dialectics of scarcity and solidarity (Rojek and Turner, 2000, p. 644; Turner and Rojek, 2001, p. 3 and passim).

The quality of argument in these comeback manifestos was questionable. Bourdieus charge that cultural studies practitioners were unconcerned by the ravages of neo-liberal ideology was absurd. Testers affirmation of sociologys moral superiority was patently speculative: If sociology is worth doing it holds out the possibility of both explanation and outrage. That may well be

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so, but no sociological work was actually evidenced as achievement in that regard. And Rojek and Turners polemic seemed similarly counterfactual, indeed whimsical: as if Braudel and Anderson, and historical consciousness generally, could be claimed for sociology rather than cultural studies; as if the emphasis on embodiment had long been there at the centre of the discipline, instead of only recently having emerged as an interdisciplinary concern; as if sociology ever had a clear and dynamic political agenda; and as if the opposite case for culturalism had not been advanced in Rojeks earlier critique of CCCS. Rojeks subsequent (2003) book on Hall poured more oil on troubled waters, somewhat damning with faint praise, and smearing the cult of Saint Stuart. Hardly surprising, then, when major Hall interlocutor Bill Schwarz (2005) stepped up to deliver at length an incandescent riposte, exposing Rojeks multiple factual inaccuracies and bemoaning his woefully mechanical (that is, sociological) mindset. The war, it seemed, was on again.

The debates we are instancing frequently took place in terms of the pros and cons of the cultural turn, something that almost everyone agreed had taken place through the 1980s as a combination of the rise of cultural studies, the influence of post-structuralist and postmodern ideas, and the assumed greater centrality of culture, knowledge, consumption, lifestyle, and identity in contemporary capitalist society itself. Accepting that these things were important, Larry Ray and Andrew Sayer (1999) nevertheless insisted that especially in conditions of rampant social inequality economy and culture were not after all synonymous, and that their respective logics could pull strenuously in different directions. If socio-economic relations were undoubtedly culturally embedded, in the end culture wasnt everything. Rays subsequent Theorising Society series continued this analytic readjustment (Ray, 2003, p. viii; Smart, 2003, pp. 810), and many British sociologists were exercised in trying to adequately reconcile culture, economy and society when it came to substantive studies, for example in ethnicity and gender (Bradley and Fenton, 1999).

Problematising the Turn

While the cultural turn was widely accepted to have occurred, and to signal a move beyond established sociological mindsets, its metaphorical and exhortatory character was not easily converted into stable argumentation. Take the governing trope of Stuart Hall and Paul du Gays OU 1990s sequence Culture, Media and Identities, which set that project up against the background of a traditional explanatory hierarchy of the social sciences in general and sociology in particular, in which cultural processes were deemed rather ephemeral and superficial. But now, in the contemporary turn to culture, all this has changed and the cultural has come to occupy a much enhanced position, on

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two counts. One is epistemological, because culture has not previously been recognised sufficiently as analytically central to social knowledge formation. The second is substantive, because culture is today more important in every area of our social lives (du Gay 1997, pp. 12).

The firmness of tone here masks considerable variation in the formulation and strength of the problematic. If we ask, for example, what it is that is being turned away from and towards, the answers include (du Gay, 1997; Hall, 1997a, 1997b): from political and economic processes (old) to cultural processes (new); from social practices to their discursive conditions of existence; from things in the natural and social world to language, words and meanings; from material factors to symbolic ones; from infrastructure to superstructure; and from reality to representations. None of these pairings, though, are conceptually equivalent, and it is debatable that any of them can be aligned unequivocally with a move from older conventional sociology to a new style of cultural studies. Only in Marxist discourse, for instance, does the infrastructure/superstructure logic hold, yet although a generally leftist ambience was prevalent within British sociology in the 1970s, Marxism has never been hegemonic. Moreover, while many sociologists would accept the importance of social and economic processes, or social practices, these quite loose and flexible notions are not well captured by natural and social things. Finally, the plausibility of assigning material and economic preferences to sociology probably stems from an intuition that sociologists are interested in matters of social structure, which is then assumed to be something other than cultural (Barrett, 1992, p. 209). But these are contestable associations. Whether in sociological macro systems-theorising or in micro situational alternatives, the components of social structure that are typically posited roles, institutions, norms, media of exchange, fields, organisations, interaction orders, typifications and recipes, membership, and so on constitute a lexicon palpably more communicative/normative than material/economic.

This tendency in the sociological tradition(s) towards, if anything, culturalism is worth reiterating, because even in the American setting in the 1980s the impression took hold that a renaissance of cultural analysis within sociology was badly needed, by way of entering the thicket of cultural studies (Alexander, 1988a, pp. 913; see also Alexander, 1988b; Crane, 1994). Jeffrey Alexander (2003) pushed this agenda forward under the rubric of the strong programme in the new American cultural sociology, decisively committed to appreciating cultural phenomena in their own terms, and not as any kind of reflection of socioeconomic interests, general structural roles and incentives, and so on. How exactly one was to understand cultural ideas, percepts and practices strictly in their own terms and continue to develop any kind of sociological thinking about them was a bit of a mystery (see McLennan, 2005), but the force of the turn was clearly now being felt even in the sociological

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mainline, where, arguably, nothing terribly non-cultural had preceded it. Thus, and spanning the generations from Parsons to postmodernism, Neil Smelser gave a reading of the turn fully congruent with the reality/representations motif, insisting that culture should not be treated as any kind of coherent or independently real totality of social patterns; rather it was the product of our imposed categorization (Smelser, 1992, pp. 17, 20). Norman Denzin, hailing from an alternative sociological lineage, came to a similar conclusion, proposing a merger between cultural studies and symbolic interactionism based on exposing the great myth of late capitalism, that there is after all, a real world out there (Denzin, 1992, p. 169).

What about the presumption that culture is more central these days? Here the epistemological version of the thesis rather cuts across the substantive-historical one. If the cultural turn refers to the need to see meanings, symbols, discourse, values and the like as intrinsically important, key to any adequate understanding of collective and individual life, then this must have uniform historical application. Whether it be the symbolic carvings or religious conversions of Picts and Celts, or Methodism and love of the seaside in the Victorian industrial age, cultural expressions cannot have been any less real or effective then than now; such is the very sense of culture being constitutive (Hall, 1997b, pp. 208, 220). But in that case, cultural imaginaries cannot be deemed to be somehow more important today. Rather, it is a matter of certain cultural forms and communicative technologies being differently central a fairly uncontroversial proposition.

As regards the extent of the turn, Hall warned against replacing one kind of reductionism with another by understanding culture in a reified way, or by thinking that there is nothing but discourse. Moreover, sociological classics like Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel could readily be pulled into the analytical upgrading of culture (du Gay, 2007, p. 18). So the turn was not finally a total break with previous materialist and sociological bearings. Rather, it was more of a reconfiguration of elements and even a process of recovery though, certainly, in a new key (Hall, 1997b, pp. 2236).

Michele Barrett pursued the turn slightly more vigorously than Hall (at least in his pedagogical writings), notably in essays celebrating Halls own work, style and sensibility. Author of the important 1980 socialist-feminist text Womens Oppression Today, Barrett came to urge feminists and the left fully to accept the shift From Marx to Foucault, and make the leap from things to words (Barrett, 1991, 1992). She could accept that sociologists were striving to overcome their historic deficits, just as socialist men were beginning to come to terms with feminist challenges, but a there was reluctance in each case. Even some feminists, critical of sociology, were cautious about the full turn, seeing as this signified, for Barrett, nothing less than a cultural revolution, turning away from any form of epistemological realism towards the aestheticisation

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of politics in terms of pleasure, the psyche, and the imagination (2000, p. 15). Naturally, then, rationalist, cognitive discourses such as sociology were going to be disturbed (1999, p. 15).

Barretts interventions underlined the fact that the questions in play around the turn were more deeply political than narrowly disciplinary, and stressed how much the whole terrain had been decisively shaken up by feminism. After all, no male sociologist or cultural studies professor needed to bleat about materialism to their (junior) feminist colleagues. Every woman critical thinker had been through a collective and personal minefield of issues around wages for housework, domestic violence, marriage contracts, child care regimes, dual systems exploitation, and glass ceilings. So if and when their attention turned to matters of affect and subjectivity, this could not remotely be taken as some kind of gross idealist forgetfulness of the impact of materiality on gendered experience.

Still, Barretts articulation of the turn was far from self-evident. Like the strong programmers in American cultural sociology, she complains that sociology fails to grasp in their own terms phenomena like physicality, humanity, imagination, the other, fear, the limits of control (2000, p. 19). But whilst fair enough as an observation, this appears to guilt-trip sociology and every other necessarily delimited investigative practice on the basis of the sort of (impossible) totalising or fully integrated perspective that in her more postmodernist declarations Barrett seems to rule out (1992, pp. 21415). Perhaps literature gets closer to the desired breadth and depth of appreciation (Barretts career moved from Sociology to English). But even if this is right, it does not obviously hold for the considered study of literature, which operates reflectively at a distance from both creative writing itself and from whatever the protean cultural substrate is that literature shapes. Con/textual analysis also routinely involves insights and assessments distilled from a wide range of propositional thought-styles, each of which including the sociological must then be credited with at least some specific value and truth. Indeed, Barrett expresses strenuous reservations about demotic culturalism on the basis of the need continually to receive, assess and discriminate (1999, p. 2). Finally, when Barrett and others seek to give priority to what is felt and experienced and created and repressed and compounded over what is thought and systematised and imposed and consciously intended and straightforward, they are reigniting perennial philosophical dilemmas, resolvable neither non-rationally nor by declarations about the imperatives of the current cultural turn.

Pragmatic Reflexivity

Around the Millennium, a more ecumenical rationale worked its way across cultural studies and sociology. Now that cultural studies had pluralised and

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(partially) postmodernised, and now that the cultural had to be recognised as embracing meanings and practices, high cultural products and everyday experiences, entirely whole and very partial ways of life, ideology and affect, texts and contexts, signs and economies, its conceptual specificity had to be doubted. And it had to be granted that even if the cultural turn had become an obligatory reference point, this could come in several versions (du Gay and Pryke, 2002, p. 5). Cultural studies radicalism was also freshly scrutinised, with a re-engagement with Marxism and ideology-critique being urged from the left (Smith, 2000; McGuigan, 2009). Francis Mulherns (2000) sophisticated if rather contrived corrective strategy claimed that cultural studies had turned into a variant of metaculture, that genre of elitist guardianship typified by Arnold, Eliot and Leavis. For Mulhern, the hallmark of metaculture is the substitution of moralistic talk of cultures nature and promise for truly transformative, political ideas-work. In metaculture, visions of the social as expressed in culture sclerotise by degrees into a belief in the social as constituted by cultural value, the definition and possession of which is the business of an exclusive circle. Others, less concerned to reinstate Marxism, entertained reflexive liberalism as an appropriate stance for cultural studies (Barker, 2003, p. 433), and moves were made to re-position Halls social-reformist predecessor Richard Hoggart as the true head and heart of the tradition (F. Inglis, 2004, p. 96).

Predictably, in this climate, Kuhn-speak circulated about a paradigm crisis (Storey, 2001, p. 171), and the need for a new cultural studies after the cultural studies paradigm (Baetens, 2005). In line with its multi-paradigm spread, student textbooks were covering an ever larger number of origins, founders, theorists, themes, and topics, never mind the politics. Undergraduate recruitment had been pushing cultural studies for years towards self-presentation as a fully-fledged discipline, but it was a discipline lacking obvious cohesion and unity (White and Schwock, 2006, p. 1), even if those very inconsistencies served to keep the discipline fresh, energize it (During, 2005, p. 214). Interdisciplinarity was still favoured by those with Birmingham roots (Johnson, 1997; Morley, 2000, p. 245), Willis preferring a formula for cultural studies sometimes also used in sociology about itself: discipline of the disciplines (Willis, 2003, p. xxi). More lavish expressions included quasi-discipline, anti-discipline, interdiscursive space, plural field, fluid project, border zone, and the current that washes the shores of the islands of discipline. But none of this mattered like it did in the 1970s, because inter- and post-disciplinarity were by this time being actively promoted in many subjects, and in the research funding bodies. Reflecting geographys striking intellectual expansion in this period, its own signature generality, space, was soon incorporated as a core cultural studies dimension too (Barker, 2003, Part 4; During, 2005, Part 3).

With its political, substantive, disciplinary and theoretical distinctive-ness difficult to pinpoint, cultural studies authors underlined its practical and

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methodological features. This could come in epistemologically modest form (Gray, 2003, p. 190), concentrating on inculcating empirical skills that might serve as a kind of management template for marshalling the burgeoning batches of cultural studies questions (White and Schwoch, 2006, p. 5). Just like sociology students, cultural studies trainees were advised to let the research question guide the selection of methods, to be flexible about the use and mix of quantitative/qualitative procedures, and to think carefully about whatever evidenced generalities emerge from the produced data (Alasuutari, 1995). A more normative version of methodologism stressed the necessity of ongoing argument about the path of reasoning involved in enquiry, partly to avoid all those dubious positivist aspects of methods still gesturally associated with sociology (Gray, 2003, pp. 2, 16; Johnson et al., 2004, p. 1; Couldry, 2000, p. 143, 2005b, p. 30). The emphasis on practice was occasionally uplifted into an association with philosophical pragmatism, with Richard Rorty starting to be referenced (Barker, 2003, p. 27), and Rorty-esque nominalism entering the range of self-definitions, as in: cultural studies is what cultural studies does (During, 2005, p. 8).

More determined theoretical approaches to the uses of cultural studies included Angela McRobbies (2005) book of that title, which showed readers how the difficult work of Hall, Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, and Judith Butler offered insight into phenomena as diverse as Blairism, rap, postmodern film, and TV makeover programmes. This contribution kept alive something of the Birmingham ideas-driven, politically selective habit, whilst registering in the choice and fulsome affirmation of her theorists how primary the words now barely suffice post-colonial and post-structuralist-feminist thought had become. McRobbie also further fuelled the cultural studies-sociology encounter, first by including Bourdieu amongst the notables, then by criticising him for various sociologistic lapses. With cultural studies in the Hall line anyway so thoroughly reworking itself in terms of the post-colonial and the multicultural, these have become the major domains in which disciplinary questions and skirmishes reappear. On the one hand, sociology has been slower to take on board the post-colonial challenge, owing to its deeper embeddedness in the European Enlightenment heritage and its tendency to delineate society in terms of the stages of modernity. Thus, when the issue became not just what culture was but also whose culture we were talking about, and in what ways disciplines themselves reproduced modernist-Westernist thought-styles, the complicity of sociology with historic global injustices seemed apparent to post-colonial radicals. On the other hand, post-colonial studies quickly developed its own resume of familiar meta-theoretical antinomies, and post-colonial strands committed to ideology-critique (including critique of sociology as ideology) could not fail to be markedly sociologistic (McLennan, 2013).

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As with McRobbie, feminist sociologists ploughed increasingly fertile ground between post-structuralism and sociological theory, Butler and Bourdieu, in further negotiations of material versus cultural feminisms, frequently couched in Nancy Frasers (2000) locution of redistribution versus recognition. On the whole, British sociological feminists stood up for the primacy of social relations. Thus, scepticism was expressed around the supposed inclination of Butler and followers towards discursive/symbolic reductionism (McNay, 2004a, p. 173) and a new feminist materialism was pronounced (Adkins, 2004a, p. 4), or at least the inescapability of the material (Evans, 2003, p. 6). But these were highly nuanced discussions, because the continuing feminist politics of interrogation of sociology was pushing for a much more inclusive understanding of the social itself (Witz and Marshall, 2004, p. 33). It was therefore not a matter of returning to the already known social but of seeking to pin down the new elements of the post-structural social (Adkins, 2004a, p. 5, 2004b) and of building emotionality and physicality into an expanded sense of the material itself. New phrases were tried out, seeking to overcome sociologys premature separation of different forms of knowledge and experience (Evans, 2003, pp. 356) lived relations, situated intersubjectivity (McNay, 2004a, 2004b), symbolic economies (Skeggs, 2005), and the ubiquitous intersectionality.

Such inventive feminist theorising ensured that when, in the light of the cultural turn, the quintessential sociological notion of class came to be reassessed, a vigorous mix of views would be aired. In an emblematic volume, the editorial quartet paired off and squared up, with Fiona Devine and Mike Savage (2005, pp. 1112) drawing ideas from the cultural turn in order to break with traditional stratification research, pressing that identities conceived as recognition and stigma go well beyond previous thoughts about structurally given positionalities. Rosemary Crompton and John Scott (2005, pp. 191, 200) responded by espying a worrying individualism lying behind all that subjectivity, signalling again the dangers lurking in taking culture (too) seriously. Bev Skeggs (2005) followed up her (2004) writings on class, self and culture by arguing that feelings and dispositions could never be taken too seriously, adding that cultural values and stigmatised norms were always materially inscribed, in bodies. In a related move, Andrew Sayer (2005) sought to show why class experience was inextricably and even primarily moral, an innovative discussion somewhat hampered, like Skeggss work, by its slight treatment of the very terms class and working class.

These developments from the 2000s, then, reworked some familiar polarisations, but made dialectical advances too. Partly, this was a matter of institutional politics: at Birmingham University, most notably, the stand-alone department of cultural studies which succeeded the post-graduate-only CCCS was fused with Sociology only for the new joint enterprise to be closed down in starkly managerialist top-down fashion. The protest from sociologists and

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cultural studies people alike, up and down the land, was loud and unanimous, but to no avail. More generally in pedagogical terms, cultural studies started to appear in the sociological introductions as necessary for sociology students to know about, and considered as a natural part of the discipline broadly conceived (for example, Macionis and Plummer 2005, pp. 1236; Fulcher and Scott, 2004, pp. 637). Texts announcing their wholehearted commitment to the cultural turn within sociology (Alexander and Thompson, 2008) did not, in truth, greatly differ from those that did not. In parallel, cultural studies primers more closely resembled those in sociology by way of topic coverage and conceptual themes, especially when couched in sociology of knowledge mould (Baldwin et al., 2004). And the showcase volume British Cultural Studies (Morley and Robins, 2001) was notable both for the number of sociologists involved and for the absence of intellectual differences among the variety of specialist contributors. Altogether, there seemed to be a good case building for something like sociological cultural studies (McLennan, 2006), or at least for considering the two discourses to be (still) densely intertwined with one another, in spite of residual temperamental differences (Wolff, 1999). Texts and courses in social theory in particular seemed to be offering a menu of blended insights and concepts (for example, Elliott, 1999, 2009). These gathering trends received a scathing reaction, and a sociological explanation, from those who felt that vague, puffed-up general theory had by this time over-run proper analyti-cal-empirical sociological theory (Abell and Reyniers, 2000). A path-dependent, takeover process had occurred, it was ruefully observed, whereby children of the welfare state heyday, who went to university to study broadly Humanities subjects, came to steadily colonise jobs in the social sciences, thereafter drawing into their sphere of influence new cohorts of like-minded students, colleagues and publishers. Pretend sociology was the result, these stalwarts felt, with the remnants of real sociology to be found, rather beleaguered, in parts of the specialised, semi-autonomous research centres (Goldthorpe, 2004, pp. 1245).

The Knot Unravels

If such sociological specialists will regard the topic of this chapter as exemplifying exactly what should have been avoided, others will approve the state of reflexive coalescence described in the last section. The overarching figure of the cultural turn may turn fuzzy under examination, but productive combinations have organised themselves around its terms, leaving headroom for sparks to fly as and when necessary. One indicative approach in this climate is the cultural political economy perspective of Bob Jessop and colleagues, which directly responds to the turn by building detailed attention to semiosis into the analysis of contemporary capitalist dynamics (for example, Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008). In this outlook, economic directions are understood

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as secured and regulated, just as sociopolitical identities are confirmed or contested, by specifically rhetorical mechanisms. But a critical realist connotation remains, because texts, categories and imaginaries are causally effective orderings within a real, multidimensional first-order system. Another fertile furrow has been ploughed by material cultural studies, the Oxford Handbook of which registers a new kind of material turn, on the basis that the previous cultural turn rather was, paradoxically perhaps, too sociologistic (anthropologists and archaeologists predominate in this school). That is to say, social meanings, too easily arrived at, were too transparently read into too many things, which have an ontological profile of their own. Overall, though, the basic message is again conciliatory, since talk of too many turns just becomes a matter of spin (Hicks and Beaudry, 2010, p. 20), and because the sociocultural and the material should never be taken in isolation from one another (Hicks, 2010, p. 69).

Such initiatives, however, are not merely conciliatory; they offer fresh formulations and new objects of enquiry, thus accentuating the process whereby past locutions come to feel dated, allegiances weaken, perspectives multiply, and more disruptive lines of thinking push forward. This process is evident in the discourse of the Economic and Social Research Councils Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC), co-directed by Tony Bennett for several years after he followed Stuart Hall as the chair of Sociology at the OU. This significant programme sustains the legacies of both disciplinary sociology and cultural studies, cements the class-culture-Bourdieu-feminism loop, and helps rebuff specialist claims that no serious empirical work gets done when social-and-cultural talk is gushing forth. But on inspection, the CRESC frame, whilst eminently inclusive, is not well captured in terms even of pragmatic reflexivity. For instance, in the blurb of the CRESC book series Culture, Economy and the Social, and in the volume extending debates around Bourdieu (Silva and Warde, 2010), notice is given that the days of epochal theory are over, that another kind of descriptive turn is under way, and that there are new critical agendas to attend to. All of which signal serious trouble for the culture and society matrix that one way or another has steered the sociology-cultural studies interface.

The logic of the epochalism charge (see, for example, Osborne, 2008; Osborne et al., 2008) is that both sociology and cultural studies have striven to out-do each other (or reach the right sort of accommodation) in articulating a coherent overall approach to the phases and nature of contemporary society (whether construed as modern, capitalist, patriarchal, post-colonial, or even de-differentiated and fragmented), in light of which particular cultural expressions and aspects of subjective life are identified as merely symptomatic expressions. Despite many differences of emphasis, the common commitment is to large-scale culturology, and an accompanying temperamental romanticism

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the compulsion critical scholars feel to somehow speak politically on behalf of society, and for radical progressive change. The descriptive-cum-ethical alternative resists these impossibly broad constructions and the moralistic tone that accompanies them, looking instead at the way in which quite specific sorts of accounts, data, and methods construct or problematise social facts and forces. Instead of constantly probing for deep determinants, it is more interesting to dwell on this labile, complex surface.

Another CRESC leader, Mike Savage, has been particularly active in conveying these challenges, including the one that mass digital data poses for sociologys standard methodological procedures. In one of several such pieces, Savage notes how contemporary theorising influenced by the cultural turn is also pushing beyond it (Savage, 2012, p. 178). Non-representational theory is a case in point. Its chief proponent, geographer Nigel Thrift, has consistently argued that, substantively, contemporary capitalism is a thinking, knowing and culturally creative formation, and therefore not amenable to older-style political-economy treatment (Thrift, 2005). Thrifts meta-discourse, accordingly, makes much of sensibilities and sensoria, impulses and intuitions, aesthetic apprehension and the poetics of encounter. So far, so completely turned, we might think. But Thrifts plea for ensoulment and invocation of the affective swash of the present is personalised beyond any precedent in either cultural studies or cultural sociology, and he disavows mammoth statements of any sort concerning the cultural, the material, or even the cultural-material. In that sense the rather cloying hegemony of the cultural turn (Thrift, 2008, pp. vii, 26, 148) is just as unproductive as what it sought to replace, because ultimately its conceptual logic is just as cognitive (= inadequate).

Thrift gains his distance from the intoxicating culture of immediacy (Tomlinson, 2011, p. 192) by urging a fusion of social theory with the new biology, and by drawing the line at neo-religious appeals for a total makeover of standard ways of thinking (Thrift, 2008, pp. 1318). No such wimpish hesitancy for Scott Lash (2010), however, who boldly promotes a messianic will to grasp the utterly singular intensities of cultural experience and anticipation. Standard forms of theory are thereby condemned as lifeless extensive understandings. Lash therefore advises that if cultural studies wishes to depart from the tedious epistemological tropes so characteristic of sociology itself, then every vestige of the concept that gave it definition, namely hegemony, needs to be ditched.

Actor Network Theory (ANT) is omnipresent across this range of conceptual revision. ANT picked up the drive of earlier Science, Technology and Society (STS) currents to surpass 1970s sociology of scientific knowledge by modestly and empirically investigating science as practice and culture (Pickering, 1992). Since that time ANT has moved from the margins to the centre of social theory and research. Quite a few sociologists find this disturbing, given ANTs strident

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anti-epochalism, its anti-romanticism including scepticism about post-colonial epochal-romanticism, we should note (Latour, 2005, p. 187) and its renunciation of explanation in favour of description. In fact, it is slightly unclear whether ANT does entirely foreclose on explanation, the key formulations often being cryptic, as in if description remains in need of an explanation, it means that it is a bad description (Latour, 2005, p. 137). The point is more emphatically that explanation by reference to the social or society or social interests needs to be abandoned (Joyce, 2002). These all-purpose inventions are, for ANT-ers, the outcomes and effects not causes or factors of delimited associations in which assemblages of human and non-human actors variously bind and disperse. For ANT, the social circulates within the world of things, not the other way round. At a pinch, we could say that ANT remains interested in pinning down, and being politically engaged in, the structuration process, and that it is still concerned to lay down (heterodox) rules of sociological method. Thus, every science is sociological says Latour (2002, p. 121), following Gabriel Tarde, whose monadology of mutual relations and proximate influences makes him the superior founding figure for ANT-ers (see Candea, 2010). But if ANT is (nowadays) pushing an alternative sociology rather than completely rejecting all things sociological, its prohibitions are strict. Not only must the quintessential modernist binary nature/society be dismantled, so must all those other polar codings that sociology and cultural studies tend to share: structure/agency, macro/micro, the social/the cultural, the cultural/the material. Thus, whilst ANT could be said to having been party to the cultural turn, it has also been very uneasy about it, because ANT is more roundly about relational material practices, opposing the reification of culture just as much as it opposes old-style materialism and social-structuralism (Law, 1999, p. 4, 2002, pp. 212; Latour, 2005, p. 168).

With such surpassing perspectives coming to the fore, sober deliberations on social research after the cultural turn (Roseneil and Frosh, 2012) have a moving on rather than a behold the turn feel, including a feminist moving on. An American collection on historical sociology beyond the cultural turn (Bonnell and Hunt, 1999) had also raised thorny issues about explanation and the social, minus the ANT argot. Other recent discussions on both sides of the Atlantic have been weaker (Back et al., 2012; Reed and Alexander, 2009), oddly presenting the turn as something very new, and unconvincingly still intent on forcing a stand-off between something called sociology of culture and something called cultural sociology. Overall, our constituent conceptual problems need further perspicuous and rigorous treatment before we can decide whether they have yet more running in them, and a satisfying solution, or whether they have in effect drifted to a close. As for the sociology-cultural studies dialectic, much will depend on whether they survive as academic subjects in British universities, which at time of writing is uncertain. And much will depend on the quality

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and personality of the standard bearers who might push any possible synthesis further. The size of that task was hugely accentuated in February 2014 on the death of Stuart Hall, the indisputably major and charismatic personality at the heart of all these reconsiderations.

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