Contesting culture: Bourdieu and the strong program in cultural sociology

Notwithstanding Pierre Bourdieu’s influential oeuvre and dominant status in the social sciences, bourdieusian theory has almost no currency in the “strong program” in cultural sociology aggressively advanced by Jeffrey Alexander and his “school” since the late nineties as a claim for a more central place for culture in sociological analysis – and as a strategic label in the intellectual game of position-taking. According to Alexander’s “strong” program, Bourdieu’s should be identified as a paradigmatically “weak” example of cultural analysis, thus serving also as a foil to the strong program itself. This paper argues that the field of cultural sociology/sociology of culture is more dialogical than some practitioners argue, and there is room even for integration among supposedly opposed perspectives. Offering a critical reconstruction of the development of the “strong program” in the sociological field through a bourdieusian reading of its major concepts (e.g. relative autonomy of culture, culture structure, codes, narratives, performance, iconicity), and recognizing the “fractal” nature of intellectual life, in which the same distinctions cyclically reproduce themselves, this chapter uncovers the points of departure and distinction but also the spaces of potential convergence and mutual strengthening between Bourdieu’s social theory of culture and Alexander’s “strong program” in cultural sociology.