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Sociological Theory 4 (ST4) - All lectures transcribed
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All 6 lectures from the course Sociological Theory 4 transcribed, from the academic year of 2019/2020.
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Sociological Theory IV: Culture and StructureBy dr. Alex van Venrooij March-May 2020
Notes by Iris van Hest
Lecture I
Theoretical debates
The basic idea of this course is that sociological theory is characterized by a number of fundamental
debates, some of which you might already have heard about in previous courses. These debates
include:
- The micro/macro debate: about the different levels of social reality. The microlevel consisting
of individuals; the macro-level consisting of greater structures and phenomenon, such as
organizations, markets, the state, world-systems and the way they interact with each other.
- The conflict/consensus debate: about whether societies are fundamentally organized around
conflicts between social groups; or whether societies function because of a broad consensus of
norms and values.
- The choice/constraint (also, agency/structure) debate: about whether people can make
choices, and how those choices lead to social outcomes/structures; or that social structures
constrain or even determine how people make choices.
→ Often a debate between different social scientists, like economists on one hand, and
sociologists on the other.
The culture/structure debate
A claim of this course is that a new debate has emerged, and subsumed some of the other debates:
the culture/structure debate. This is in essence about the question how you should understand the
role of culture in the production, reproduction and/or the change of social structures.
By culture, in this contexts, we mean processing ‘meaning making’: the way people think,
interpret, categorize, evaluate, judge, talk, narrate (i.e tell stories), et cetera. And how this
processing inform the production/reproduction social structures.
So we might ask questions about how the social plays a role in the production of social hierarchy; or
how people might become trapped in poverty; or how people develop and maintain social
relationships; or how political conflicts emerge or develop; or why some organizations succeed and
others fail.
Overview
The culture/structure debate has become one of the central debates in sociological theory, because
of something that’s called the ‘cultural turn’. This refers to the in-/resurgence of interest in the
concept of culture within sociological theory. In the next part of the lecture we will focus on some
historical context and inspirations for the cultural turn, which was the French school of
structuralism and how this has been taken up by one of the contemporary authors that we will read
in the next week, mainly the work of Jeffrey Alexander.
The ‘cultural turn’
The study of culture is nowadays one of the most popular topics within sociology. In 2012, the
largest section in scholars was the culture section. This was not always the case: the cultural
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,sociology section was only established in 1988, and it’s fair to say that before the 1980s, most
sociologists would actually actively avoid the study of culture.
‘Culture as values’ approach - Talcott Parsons
One of the reasons why sociologists avoided the study of culture, is because it had become
synonymous with the work of Talcott Parsons. His work is not read by many sociologists today, but
it has been very influential up until the 1960s. Now, the key problem that Parsons tried to solve, was
the problem of social order: what holds society together? What makes it function so that the
elements of society integrate into a coherent system?
To understand this coherence, Parsons pointed to the role of culture, which he understood as
a system of shared values that people had internalized through socialization process or the family,
and that also structured the institutional domains of society, such as the economy, the workplace and
the educational system.
For now, it is enough to understand that culture was synonymous with the idea of consensus and
coherence; but not a really useful concept to understand social conflict or social oppositions.
Conflict theories, network analysis and structural sociology approach - Wellman, Granovetter
The ‘culture as values’ approach therefore fell out of favor in the mid-60s: the idea that societies
were held together by shared moral values became increasingly unlikely, given the social unrest in
the 1960s. The rise of various (social) countermovements, such as the women’s movement and the
civil rights movement, which actually pointed towards value-conflicts in society. This was also
reflected, then, in sociology by the move away from consensus-theories like those of Talcott
Parsons towards a more conflict-oriented sociology. And along with it, the concept of culture was
actually becoming tainted and associated with the association of cohesion and consensus, and not
many sociologists were drawing upon it.
“Network analysts first seek explanations in the regularities of how people and collectives
actually behave, rather than in the regularities of their beliefs about how they ought to
behave. They interpret behavior in terms of structural constraints on activity instead of
assuming that inner forces (i.e. internalized norms) impel actors in voluntaristic, sometimes
teleological behavior towards desired goals.” (Wellman, 1988, p. 33)
This is an explicitly anti-Parsonian statement, because Wellman argues that network-sociologists
study actual patterns of behavior, rather than beliefs about how people think they need to behave, or
their internalized norms. The idea would then be that you can do sociology, without actually
referring to internalized beliefs, or culture for that matter. And network-sociology, at least had the
ambition to study these kinds of objective patterns of behavior, without actually referring to culture.
This is another example of an explicitly anti-cultural
move by network-analysts. The question here was
why certain neighborhoods were unable to resist this
particular renewal project. Some sociologists had
proposed cultural explanations for this lack of
resistance, citing for example working class
neighborhoods having a lack of culture, a lack of
leadership, which made them unable to actually resist
or mobilize these forces. Mark Granovetter proposes
a different kind of explanation, which focuses on the
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,network of relationships within these communities. He finds a correlation between the strength of
ties within communities, of patterns of interactions within these communities and the likelihood that
they would actually resist, and he proposes that that is an anti-cultural explanation that focuses on
exclusively structural explanations for this lack of resistance.
Now what we then have is a quite rapid shift from theories that place a lot of emphasis on culture as
providing cultural coherence and cohesion to society; towards theories that would emphasize
conflict and structure, and that step away from the notion of culture.
But what then happens in the 1980s is a return to culture. We call this a pendulum swing,
back towards an emphasis on culture. We’re now trying to study culture in a way that actually
avoids some of the pitfalls of the previous ways culture was being discussed and theorized in the
work of Talcott Parsons.
‘Culture as values’
approach by Talcott
Parsons
Conflict theories,
network analysis and
structural sociology.
Return of the study of
culture; ‘the cultural
turn’
French structuralism
In the same period that sociologists — especially in the United States — were abandoning the study
of culture, in Europe — and especially in France — a new intellectual movement was developing
which would eventually become the main influence for the ‘cultural turn’ and the renewed interest
in culture within sociology. This movement is known as ‘French structuralism’.
Some of the main ‘structuralists’ are philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, psycho-analyst
Jacques Lacan, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the founder of semiotics: Roland
Barthes. Also Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu are closely tied to, or inspired by this intellectual
movement.
Influence of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
Although the structuralists were active in quite different disciplines, the thing they had in common
was a shared source of inspiration in the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. One of
the key characteristics of the theory of De Saussure was that he had developed a theory of language
and meaning that emphasized the importance of ‘relationality’.
De Saussure argues that ‘symbols’, like words, don’t refer to any particular meanings because of
some inherent, essential characteristic of the symbol itself, or a direct relation between symbol and
the thing it refers to — which we sometimes find in the case of an onomatopoeia, like the bird name
‘cookoo’ where the name mimics the sound of the bird, or with the name for sneezing where there
also seems to be a relation between the word and the sound it refers to. De Saussure dismissed these
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, ‘necessary’ relations and developed a theory in which the relation between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’
was arbitrary and lacked this necessity.
According to De Saussure, ‘symbols’ take on their meaning because of their difference from other
symbols. It is these relations of difference that allow for meaning to emerge. So, for example, in the
contrast and opposition between the colors red and green lies the potential for those two colors to
acquire the meaning of ‘stop’ and ‘go’, but these meanings are according to De Saussure only
conventional, even though we might find similar meanings in other domains, whereby red signals
danger, and green signals safety. But this would be a form of redundancy whereby we use similar
meanings of the same oppositions and there would be similarities in the meaning of differences.
Signified
Signifier
This idea of relationality of meaning became central to the work of the French structuralists, and
they have applied it in various productive ways.
Claude Levi-Strauss
The cultural anthropologist Levi-Strauss used it, for example, to analyze the structural patterns of
cultural myths. He would argue that to decode the meaning of a story, such as a myth, one would
need to look at it as a kind of language that consists of elements, and then study how these elements
relate to each other. On of his best known examples is his analysis of the Oedipus myth. His method
consists of a few steps:
I. He decomposes the myth into the elements, and he calls these elements the ‘mythemes’, which
are the key scenes of the myth.
II. He then tries to find the relationships among these elements, relations of similarity and
difference. Within columns, he organizes the elements that are similar to each other.
1. Column 1 lists important scenes, such as Cadges seeking his sister; Oedipus marrying his
mother; Antigone burying her brother. These elements all have something in common, the
overrating of blood relation.
2. Column 2 lists the similarities between scenes, such as the Spartans killing each other;
Oedipus killing his father; Eteocles killing his brother. These elements all have something in
common: underrating of blood relation.
3. Column 3 denies the autochthonous origin, stating that monsters are never born, they are just
there, they have no origin.
4. Column 4 affirms the autochthonous origin, stating that we come from the earth, therefore
the limp, where we were attached to the earth.
III. He then argues that these two oppositions in Column 3 and 4 also refer to each other. This is the
point where his interpretation becomes somewhat hard to follow: he states that in the meaning
of the first two columns it becomes clear in light of the opposition in the third and fourth
column, namely that it raises the question whether we are born from people or not — are we
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