This article displaces the terrain upon which the question of power in modern societies has been framed by reference to the concept of hegemony. It presents a genealogy of power which pays attention to what has been at stake in the shifts in the effectivity of the concept of hegemony for cultural theory from the 1960s, correlating the mutations in the analyses of power to shifts in the analysis of the relations of culture, politics and the economy. Questions (...) of the relation of internality or externality of power with regard to the governed, and issues of counter-conducts and 'counter-hegemonic' struggles will guide the development of this genealogy. The article brings to bear on the issues the point of view of hybrid forms of sovereignty, such as imperial governmentality and implications relating to the emergence of biopolitics in the 19th century. It is argued that the situation today regarding global governance and new forms of rule compels us to re-examine the problem of consent and consensus by turning to the apparatuses for constituting hybrid publics that work through biomedia and new strategies of securitization and insecuritization. (shrink)

This article deals with cultural theory in the version of Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky. Cultural theory is important for research in the area of political and policy science because this theory has the pretension of pinning down endogenous preference formation. Using Durkheim's dimensions, ‘social integration’ and ‘regulation of the actions of individuals’, cultural theory distinguishes five ways of life or cultures, namely individualism, hierarchy, egalitarianism, fatalism and autonomy. The statement that there are only five ways of (...) life is, however, the result of a selective interpretation of the dimension, ‘regulation of the actions of individuals’. A broad perspective on this dimension — including the ‘horizontal’ aspects of human relations — will lead to the conclusion that there is a sixth culture existent that has been neglected by current cultural theory. This sixth culture is essentially ‘mutualism-driven’. In this mutualist way of life, people hold highly specialized positions and are closely associated. The production of goods and services within this culture is based on cooperation and mutual adjustment. Power is widely spread, but not because equal rights and duties are considered a good thing. Knowledge and skills are primary in mutualist settings, and power follows knowledge and skills. (shrink)

In his article, ‘Social constructionism and climate science denial’, Hansson claims to present empirical evidence that the cultural theory developed by Dame Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky and ourselves leads to science denial. In this reply, we show that there is no validity to these claims. First, we show that Hansson’s empirical evidence that cultural theory has led to climate science denial falls apart under closer inspection. Contrary to Hansson’s claims, cultural theory has made significant contributions to understanding (...) and addressing climate change. Second, we discuss various features of Douglas’ cultural theory that differentiate it from other constructivist approaches and make it compatible with the scientific method. Thus, we also demonstrate that cultural theory cannot be accused of epistemic relativism. (shrink)

This introduction surveys a number of problems for contemporary cultural theory, which arise from the transformations in culture that have been produced by developments ranging from the globalization of third wave capitalism to the emergence of tele-technologies. It summarizes arguments presented by Lash, Thoburn, Johnson, Terranova and Venn, as well as a number of reflections on the state of cultural studies outside Euro-America, to present alternative genealogies of cultural studies and open up new sites for theoretical elaboration.

This article deals with cultural theory in the version of Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky. Cultural theory is important for research in the area of political and policy science because this theory has the pretension of pinning down endogenous preference formation. Using Durkheim's dimensions, ‘social integration’ and ‘regulation of the actions of individuals’, cultural theory distinguishes five ways of life or cultures, namely individualism, hierarchy, egalitarianism, fatalism and autonomy. The statement that there are only five ways of (...) life is, however, the result of a selective interpretation of the dimension, ‘regulation of the actions of individuals’. A broad perspective on this dimension — including the ‘horizontal’ aspects of human relations — will lead to the conclusion that there is a sixth culture existent that has been neglected by current cultural theory. This sixth culture is essentially ‘mutualism-driven’. In this mutualist way of life, people hold highly specialized positions and are closely associated. The production of goods and services within this culture is based on cooperation and mutual adjustment. Power is widely spread, but not because equal rights and duties are considered a good thing. Knowledge and skills are primary in mutualist settings, and power follows knowledge and skills. (shrink)

This article approaches the topics of invention and innovation by way of cultural theory. Building on the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and John Austin, the article offers definitions of invention and innovation in semiotic and performative terms. It conceptualizes invention as a process of resignification, and frames innovation as a felicitous performative. Structuralist theory appears to foreclose the potential for these two terms to exist in the empirical world. This article explores these barriers but also locates conceptual (...) spaces for invention and innovation, and identifies these phenomena as they occur in contemporary empirical sites. (shrink)

This article argues that from a territorial perspective a certain coherence and continuity can be identified in the Estonian cultural-theoretical tradition – a discursive body based on common sources of influence and similar fundamental attitudes. We understand Estonian theory as a local episteme – a territorialized web of epistemological associations and rules for making sense of the world, which favours some premises while discouraging others. The article focuses on the older layers of Estonian theory, discussing the work of (...) Karl Ernst von Baer, Victor Hehn, Gustav Teichmüller, Jakob von Uexküll, Hermann Keyserling, Johannes Gabriel Granö, Juri Lotman a.o. We examine the philosophical foundations of Estonian theory as well as its main epistemic facets. The article concludes that the conceptualization of Estonian theory could contribute to a general transformation of contemporary (cultural) theory, a redefining of the relations between the centre and the peripheries. (shrink)

Takes some of the most prominent theoretical approaches used in Cultural Studies and demonstrates the ways in which they are used to evaluate, analyse and interpret recent events, debates, topics and texts in contemporary society. N. Anderson, Macquarie University; K. Schlunke, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

_Philosophy in Cultural Theory_ boldly crosses disciplinary boundaries to offer a philosophical critique of cultural theory today. Drawing on the legacy of Walter Benjamin, Peter Osborne looks critically at central philosophical debates in cultural theory, such as: * the relationship between sign and image * the technological basis of cultural form * the conceptuality of art * the place of fantasy in human affairs. It will appeal to those in philosophy, cultural studies and art theory.

Introduction In September of 1973, I defended my doctoral thesis in the field of European cultural history. I was two months shy of my twenty-seventh ...

In this 4th edition of his successful Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, John Storey has extensively revised the text throughout.

Political culture theory enjoyed a revival during the 1980s despite its alleged inability to account for change, values, conflict, and differences within nations. A new school of thought attempts to remedy the shortfalls of Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture. The grid-group cultural theory, propounded by Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky, proposes a typology of ways of life as the missing link in a cultural-functional analysis of the formation of preferences. This essay assesses cultural theory as (...) a methodology and a substantive theory or sociology of knowledge. Cultural theory claims that there are only five possible ways of life: Hierarchy, egalitarianism, fatalism, individualism, and autonomy. Yet it fails to address questions of universal values, ethics, power, or human rights and freedoms. There are inherent problems in applying cultural theory as a mode of political analysis. In the absence of exogenous, non-systemic ethical criteria, cultural theory as a social construction of reality begs the question of ethical conduct. (shrink)

Various proponents of Cultural Theory have claimed that CT's Impossibility Theorem, namely that there are precisely five viable ways of life, has been formally proved. In this paper, I show that the Impossibility Theorem has not been formally proved and present a refutation of the Impossibility Theorem. With regard to, the problem areas identified include a failure to take into account the analogical nature of their theory and also a failure to carefully consider the nature of the relationship (...) between mathematical models and the empirical phenomena that they are supposed to model. With regard to, an empirically grounded description of a distinct, sixth viable way of life, here called the Philosophical way of life, is presented. Second, a general argument is presented that demonstrates the necessity of positing a sixth form of rationality and a sixth viable way of life in addition to the five rationalities and five ways of life recognized by CT. (shrink)

Designing broad public deliberation is challenging. In addition, participants of public deliberation are guided by their cultural norms, values, and rules. This creates a tension between the goal of practical approaches to broad public deliberation and how individuals perceive issues and relate to others in the world. Despite such challenges, we must continue to create opportunities for the public to deliberate about and provide input into the regulation of emerging technologies. Therefore, previously imagined approaches to broad public deliberation should be (...) reevaluated to better utilize the information gained during the process and expand the range of ideas incorporated into decision‐making. To do this, institutions must consider how the public makes sense of complex issues concerning cultural conflict. This article introduces a framework that demonstrates how cultural theory can be used for rethinking previous approaches to public deliberation. In doing so, it offers guidelines for designing public deliberation involving distinct public participation venues based on different worldviews. (shrink)

The question of stakeholder salience has recently resurfaced in the suggestion that the ethical foundations of corporate cultures result in stakeholder cultures that largely explain how firms allocate resources among stakeholders. The present article seeks to complement this novel approach to understanding stakeholder management by adding insights from the multilevel influences that create the corporate culture in the first place, and ultimately affect managers in their stakeholder decisions. This article draws on cultural theory to examine how the individuals (...) who compose firms present group and grid solidarity that results in cultural biases in the corporate culture. These cultural biases—individualism, hierarchy, fatalism, and egalitarianism—are then paired with the stakeholder cultures they enable, and inferences are extracted concerning the salience managers are likely to accord to various classes of stakeholders as a result. Future research and managerial implications stemming from this new view on stakeholder management conclude this article. (shrink)

This article explores the continuities and discontinuities of pre-Revolutionary intellectual traditions in 1920s Soviet culture and the Stalin-era cultural revolution. Through examination of the pre-revolutionary philosophical legacy underpinning Soviet musicological theory, I demonstrate that there are decisive features, such asSoviet Prometheanism, that characterize the musicology of the 1920s that both underline and differ from the pre-revolutionary philosophy of music and the musicology of the 1930s. I offer the basic outlines of aSoviet cultural theory of musicformulated by Russian (...) music critic, historian, composer and musicologist Boris Asafiev (1884–1949) in the 1920s. Explaining and describing what I mean by a particular cultural theory of music in the Soviet context forms the core issue of my article. (shrink)

Media are surely central to Western societies of the past several centuries and to the emerging global societies of the contemporary era and the future. There is a thickening, an intensification and an increasing complexity to the use of information machines, technologies that are necessary in the production, reproduction, storing and distribution of texts, images and sounds, the constituent elements of culture. The phenomenon has been termed a “media ecology,” adding a new layer to the ecologies of animal, vegetable (...) and mineral. It behooves anyone engaged in critical discourse to take serious account of media. I argue they offer a key to understanding the process of globalization in relation to a new configuration of interaction between humans and machines. (shrink)

Addressing both the humanities and the social sciences, this volume aims to explore the enduring significance of the work of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) in the field of cultural theory. It assembles a variety of articles by internationally renowned scholars from different academic disciplines and traditions. Contrary to recent commemorative publications on Derrida¿s oeuvre, this volume proposes to critically evaluate and rethink key concepts in Derrida¿s work within the present state of affairs in cultural theory. Centred around four main (...) topics (manoeuvres, societies, images and fictions), the sections propose a creative and contemporary reading of `Derrida¿ and its openings to new work in cultural theory. Ce livre qui se destine à la fois aux humanités et aux études sociales tente d¿explorer la signification durable de l¿¿uvre de Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) dans le champ de la théorie culturelle. Il rassemble un ensemble d¿articles variés écrits par des chercheurs de renommée internationale provenant de différentes disciplines et traditions académiques. S¿opposant par là à la majorité du flot de publications récentes sur l¿¿uvre de Derrida ce volume se propose d¿évaluer et de repenser d¿un point de vue critique les concepts clé de Derrida tenant compte de l¿état actuel de la recherche en études culturelles. Centrées autour de quatre domaines majeurs (man¿uvres ¿ sociétés ¿ images ¿ fictions), les sections offrent une lecture créatrice et actuelle de `Derrida¿ et des ouvertures que sa pensée permet vers une nouvelle idée de la théorie culturelle. (shrink)

The philosophy of “presence” seeks to challenge current understandings of meaning and understanding. One can trace its origins back to Vico, Dilthey, and Heidegger, though its more immediate exponents include Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and such contemporary philosophers of history as Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia. The theoretical paradigm of presence conveys how the past is literally with us in the present in significant and material ways: Things we cannot touch nonetheless touch us. This makes presence a post-linguistic or (...) post-discursive theory that challenges current understandings of “meaning” and “interpretation.” Presence provides an overview of the concept and surveys both its weaknesses and its possible uses. In this book, Ethan Kleinberg and Ranjan Ghosh bring together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to explore the possibilities and limitations of presence from a variety of perspectives—history, sociology, literature, cultural theory, media studies, photography, memory, and political theory. The book features critical engagements with the presence paradigm within intellectual history, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history. In three original case studies, presence illuminates the relationships among photography, the past, memory, and the Other. What these diverse but overlapping essays have in common is a shared commitment to investigate the attempt to reconnect meaning with something “real” and to push the paradigm of presence beyond its current uses. The volume is thus an important intervention in the most fundamental debates within the humanities today. Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, University of New South Wales; Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley; Susan A. Crane, University of Arizona; Ranjan Ghosh, University of North Bengal; Suman Gupta, Open University Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University; John Michael, University of Rochester; Vincent P. Pecora, University of Utah; Roger I. Simon. (shrink)

This symposium highlighted the relevance of the cultural theory pioneered by anthropologists Mary Douglas, Steve Rayner, and Michael Thompson and political scientists Aaron Wildavsky and Richard Ellis for explaining political phenomena. In this concluding article, we suggest ways in which CT can be further tested and developed. First, we describe how the theory has been applied thus far and some of the achievements of these applications. Then, we examine some of the challenges revealed by this research. Finally, we (...) discuss ways of applying CT that promise to help meet these challenges. These methods include nesting case studies and combining case study and survey research, simulations, experiments, and approaches from social neuroscience. (shrink)

Posthuman ethics -- Great ephemeral tattooed skin -- Art: inhuman ecstasy -- Animalities: ethics and absolute abolition -- Wonder of Teras -- Mystic queer -- Vitalistic ethics: an end to necrophilosophy -- After life.

Introduction BEVERLEY SKEGGS By asking a group of feminist cultural theorists who have produced exemplary interdisciplinary scholarship in the to reflect ...

This introduction charts several of rhythm's various returns as a way of laying out the theoretical and methodological field in which the articles of this special issue find their place. While Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis is perhaps familiar to many, rhythm has appeared in a wide repertoire of guises, in many disciplines over the decades and indeed the centuries. This introduction attends to the particular roles of rhythm in the formation of modernity ranging from the processes of industrialization and the proliferation (...) of new media technologies to film and literary aesthetics as well as conceptualizations of human psychology, social behaviour and physiology. These are some of the historical antecedents to the contemporary understandings of rhythm within body studies to which most of the contributions to this issue are devoted. In this respect, the introduction outlines recent approaches to rhythm as vibration, a force of the virtual, and an intensive excess outside consciousness. (shrink)

New to this edition: 4 new readings Stuart Hall The rediscovery of 'ideology': return of the repressed in media studies Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe Post ...

In this book Shepherd and Wicke make a bold and original contribution to the understanding of music as a form of human expression. They argue that music is fundamental to social life. Music is not merely a form of leisure or entertainment: it is central to the very formation and reproduction of human societies. The authors pursue this argument through a wide-ranging assessment of some of the major cultural theoretical contributions to understanding music. Theories of culture, linguistic theories, structuralist (...) and post-structuralist theories and psychoanalytic theories of music are carefully explained and critically examined. The authors then develop their own account of music as a non-referential yet material form of human expression which embodies and conveys principles of symbolic structuring. They emphasize the human body as a principal site for the musical mediation of social and symbolic processes. Music and Cultural Theory establishes new links between musicology and cultural studies, showing how each discipline can inform and enrich the other. It will be recommended reading for students and professionals in musicology, media and communication studies, cultural studies and the sociology of culture. (shrink)

Everyday Life and Cultural Theory provides a unique critical and historical introduction to theories of everyday life. Ben Highmore traces the development of conceptions of everyday life, from the Mass Observation project of the 1930s to contemporary theorists. Individual chapters examine: * Theories of the everyday * Fragments of everyday life * Surrealism: the marvelous in the everyday * Walter Benjamin's Trash Aesthetics * Mass Observation: the science of everyday life * Henri Lefebvre's Dialectics of Everyday Life * Michel (...) de Certeau's Poetics of Everyday Life * Everyday life and the future of cultural studies. (shrink)

Liberalism sanctifies the values chosen by the sovereign individual. This tends to rule out criticisms of an individual's “preference” for one value over another by, ironically, establishing a deterministic view of the self that protects the self's desires from scrutiny. Similarly, rational choice approaches to social theory begin with previously determined individual preferences and focus on the means by which they are pursued, concentrating on the results rather than the sources of people's values.A striking new attempt to go behind (...) the liberal and rational‐choice starting point in order to understand political preferences is found in Aaron Wildavsky's Cultural Theory. Yet Cultural Theory does not facilitate the criticism of preferences, because its understanding of them is fundamentally liberal. Even while rejecting methodological individualism, Cultural Theory's monocausally social theory of preference formation retains in a new guise the liberal preservation of preferences from criticism by reestablishing a deterministic view of the formation of values, leading it to share with liberalism an a historical view of their origins. (shrink)

Cultural Theory is breathtaking in its comprehensiveness and in its simplicity. With regard to CT’s comprehensiveness, it is entirely characteristic that when the three authors of Cultural Theory get around to asking themselves “What does cultural theory leave out?”, their answer turns out to be a hearty “Not much!” In a single work, Michael Thompson manages to credit CT with shedding light on everything from environmental policies and Kondratiev waves, to Everest expeditions, the literary preferences of Benjamin (...) Disraeli, and Aristotle’s four causes. (shrink)

_Ideology_ draws on the social, political and cultural theory of Jurgen Habermas, Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Žižek in order to explore the possibility of developing a 'critical conception of ideology'. The book is concerned with two main themes: the relationship of ideology to the 'real' and the relationship between ideology and the 'ethical'. Although these three writers are often assumed to have little in common, Porter demonstrates a formal homology between them by showing that they all offer an idea (...) of critique that pivots around two central intuitions. Firstly, they insist that a substantive critical distinction can be drawn between the ideological and the real. And, secondly, Habermas, Deleuze and Žižek all offer an image of ideology critique that is importantly grounded on ethical terms. By engaging, among other things, with Habermas's sociological work on the public sphere, Žižek’s forays into popular culture, and Deleuze's analysis of political cinema, Ideology strives to concretely animate how each of these figures provide the critical tools necessary to challenge the kinds of ideological practice that pervade the contemporary social world. (shrink)

이 글은 “프랑스의 관전(官展) 아카데미즘 속에서 예술가는 어떻게 구성되는가?”라는 질의로부터 출발하였다. 이를 위해 부르디외가 『예술의 규칙』(1992)에서 언급한 ‘장에서의 경쟁논리’를 ‘관전 對 反관전’에 대입해 살펴보았고, 연구를 통해 지배자들의 권력기제와 신참자들의 도전논리가 새로운 예술을 창출하는 동력임을 확인하였다. 주된 연구대상은 양식투쟁을 향한 미술가 집단의 위계구조이다. 연구자는 이 문제의식을 풀어내기 위해 행위자와 제도/양식논쟁과 미술장 사이의 관계분석을 시도하였다. 미술장의 주된 권력으로 기능해온 관전 아카데미즘에 주목함으로써, 프랑스 관전의 계보를 부르디외의 문화이론을 통해 재해석한 것이다. 이를 전제하는 포괄적 조건이 ‘아비투스’와 ‘장’ 개념이며, 예술작품과 예술가 사이에는 이들을 움직이는 객관적 (...) 요소들(언론·비평가·미술시장·미술관·전람회 등)이 존재한다고 본 것이다. 관전의 시작을 알린 살롱전은 프랑스 작가들이 대중과 만나는 유일한 통로였고 포상과 장려로서 국가의 영향력을 결집한 제도였다. 아카데미의 특권은 수상자에게 과시와 명예를 안겨줬지만, 19세기에 이르러 미술중개상에 따른 수요자의 변화, 마네를 축으로 한 졸라와 플로베르 등의 비평, 국가의 미술시장 개입과 이에 대응해 나타난 인상주의의 출현 등으로 권력의 힘을 신참자에게 내주게 되었다. 이렇듯 새로운 장 속에서는 독점을 옹호하려는 지배자들과 빗장을 부수려는 신참자들의 투쟁이 항상 존재하며, 부르디외의 해석을 통해 관전 아카데미즘에 가려진 ‘상대적 자율성’을 발견할 수 있었다. 결과적으로 장에서의 경쟁논리는 ‘구조화되고 구조화시키는 역동적 행위’로 치환됨으로써 새로운 예술을 창출하는 원동력이 된 것이다. (shrink)

Sociocultural diversity is notoriously challenging to study. Sociocultural viability theory has proven influential in research and practice positing that 1) consists of four primary ways of perceiving, organizing and justifying social relations; and, 2) complex problems are likely to be solved by harnessing all ways of life, whereas attempts based on fewer are doomed to fail. However, the theory lacks elaboration of its philosophical underpinnings, leading to misunderstandings and confusion. This paper offers a pragmatic account of the (...) class='Hi'>theory. Based on a philosophical ontology, the argument exposes the theory’s pragmatic wagers (mind-world monism and phenomenalism). Moreover, it also shows how the theory’s overall project can be undergirded by pragmatism’s focus on practical consequences, provisionality of knowledge, plurality, and public participation. (shrink)

In an essay in these pages, Jeffrey Friedman charged that Cultural Theory obscures the unity and uniqueness of modern egalitarian individualism; reduces culture to society; ignores history; is only applicable to contemporary, Western politics; provides an unsatisfactory account of preference formation and preference change; and leaves no place for the vitally important debate over what we should prefer. Although some of Friedman's criticisms stem from a misreading or strained reading of Cultural Theory, others raise vitally important questions (...) not only about Cultural Theory but social theory generally. My reply to Friedman offers not just a defense of the particular categorization of cultures used in Cultural Theory, but a defense of the entire enterprise of constructing general social theories that seek to discern transhistorical patterns in the all too evident diversity and contingency of history. (shrink)

The publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971 coincided with a complex set of changes in the political situation of the west, the role of intellectuals, the state of the social sciences and humanities, and in the development of the welfare state itself. These changes provided the conditions for the creation of a body of thought quite different from the one the sixties had produced, and a significant change from the discipline-dominated thinking of the period after (...) the Second World War. The immediately relevant events included the effective demise of Parsons’ systems theory, the waning of the passions of 1968, and an enrollment crisis in universities’ humanities and social science departments as economic fear drove students into professional programs, creating a sharp downturn in demand for faculty. The optimism that had characterized disciplines in these fields during the 1960s quickly faded. The idea that sociology was soon to become a “science,” the source of the positivism dispute of the sixties, faded along with it. Logical Positivism as a coherent movement collapsed under the weight of the problems of the theory-observation distinction. At the same time Political Theory, which had been taught largely as an historical study – a history of error, as Leo Strauss described the standard textbook of the time, George Sabine’s A History of Political Theory, or as a continuation of the mood of Kulturpessimismus, as in the writings of Sabine’s critic, Leo Strauss – revived, partly in response to the stimulus from the success of Rawls, partly in response to new ideas about participatory democracy rooted in the experience of the sixties. Social theory also changed: the role that Parsons had played as a focus of theoretical discussion was replaced; the work of Ju˝rgen Habermas, particularly his Theory of Communicative Action, reassessed and re-appropriated the classical theoretical tradition in social theory to replace Parsons’ synthetic account, and this work coincided with a systematic reconsideration of the classic social theorists, especially Weber. An additional source of new thinking came from the “dependent” periphery, as thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which emancipated Socialist theory from received dogmas about class struggle and recognized the centrality of other antagonisms and the need for open democracy. (shrink)

To be effective, whistleblowing policies should be adapted to the organisational culture. They need to be custom-made and not follow a one-size-fits-all logic, specifically when they are installed to stimulate responsible peer reporting, a highly sensitive and value-laden type of whistleblowing. This paper attempts to illustrate that grid-group cultural theory could help to construct a whistleblowing policy by linking reporting styles to the organisational culture. First, we will identify four types of policy measures that are hypothesized to (...) be effective in four types of organisational culture. Second, we develop the hypothesis that certain organisational cultures can induce peer reporting that is harmful for the organisation. The whistleblowing policy can then be used as a catalyst for cultural change. (shrink)