The 'Production of Culture Perspective' in Perspective

In this chapter I discuss ‘production of culture’ as a truly sociological approach to the study of cultural life, reconstructing its intellectual gene- alogy and the impact this perspective has had on the overall development of sociology in the last quarter of the 20th century and into the 21st. I will thereby briefly consider some of the criticisms addressed to this approach by scholars coming from various circles and schools who have all in their own specific ways made a plea for a more ‘interpretivist’ and/or more ‘critical’ approach to the analysis of culture, criticizing POC for its perceived positivistic and uncritical dimensions. I will argue that the heuristic usefulness and episte- mological importance of the production of culture approach rests in the fact that it remains attuned to the specificities of cultural objects as symbolic representations and meaning structures, while still being focused on matters to do with social insti- tutions and modes of social organization, which are, after all, what sociology is primarily supposed to study, or are at least what sociology as a disci- pline cannot escape dealing with unless it were to lose its disciplinary identity altogether. Moreover, the production of culture approach stands as an important, if not in fact necessary, integration of both the more humanistic, literary, textualist and postmodernist strands of cultural analysis on the one hand, and a ‘cultural sociology’ strongly con- ceived in structuralist and hermeneutical terms on the other (Alexander, 2003; Alexander and Smith, 2001). Thus the production of culture perspective stands as a crucial resource for a truly multidimen- sional social science of cultural processes.