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Cultural Studies and the Sociology of Culture
Ten years ago, I moved from Britain to the United States. Before that date, I had taught for 13 years in a department of sociology in Britain. My geographical move also entailed an apparent change of disciplines (and, given the nature of the academy in Britain and the United States, also a change of academic divisions, from the social sciences to the humanities). But the change was only apparent, except in the material sense of my institutional location. My work didn't change radically (though I hope it has developed in the past decade). I didn't retrain, or take another Ph.D. This biographical fact is interesting, I think, not for its own sake, but because of what it says about the organization of disciplines in Britain and America, and about the study of culture in the late twentieth century.
There are a number of issues here. First, giv en my background and training in a certain kind of European sociology and my involvement already in interdisciplinary work, I am not sure that many departments of sociology in this country would have been prepared to give me a home. The discipline here has, as far as I can see, remained resolutely intradisciplinary as a collective project; moreover, it has manifested a strong attachment (in some cases, a growing one) to positivist scholarship, including quantitative and mathematical methods. For the most part, this has also been true of that subspecialization called the sociology of culture, many of whose practitioners continue to operate with untheorized and unexamined categories of social analysis.
Second, new emphases have emerged in the humanities, which have rendered certain sociologists welcome-new historicism, the new art history, postcolonial and feminist approaches to literature and culture, and so on. And third, the success and proliferation of cultural studies in the United States, in academic programs and in publishing, has provided new opportunities for such cross-departmental moves. Given my alienation from much American sociology, my lifelong interest in the study of culture, and the hospitality of the humanities, my current situation makes plenty of sense. Nor is my own change of discipline-home unique. Simon Frith, delivering his inaugural lecture as Professor of English at the University of Strathclyde, opened his...