230075 SE Reading Seminar: The Cultural Turn in Contemporary Social Theory (2015W)

Ongoing debates in sociology claim that a “cultural turn” in social theory indicates a shift from modern to postmodern forms of social thought. While modern sociology assumes that the social exists as an object that can be studies scientifically, postmodern sociology challenges these assumptions and denies the existence of a coherent framework that is able to explain the constitution of social reality in all its complexity. One key element in this debate is that social reality is culturally constructed – by actors as well as by scientific observers and that the cultural ways of constructing reality are more important than the structural conditions (class, gender, race) which constitute social relations and different ideological positions. This claim is undergirded by processes of social change which gave way to a post-industrial society and its emphasis of ways of life and consumerism rather than production and class-structure.

The cultural constitution of society, however, lies at the heart of modern social thought as well. From Weber to Schütz and Parsons, sociology was conceptualized as the scientific study of social meaning and the relational structures that are based in mutual understanding, even under conditions of pluralization and differentiation. Modern sociology is aware of the relational constitution of social phenomena and takes the fact into account that the social world is pluralized and differentiated. Moreover, there is not one single perspective in understanding the social, but a plurality of analytical standpoints are possible. From a methodological perspective, modern sociology asks for the conditions under which social reality can be analyzed scientifically.

The seminar will take the classical tradition and the place of culture in it as a starting point in order to discuss contemporary approaches to culturally informed sociological analysis in the work, for example, of Jeffrey Alexander, Zygmunt Bauman, Jock Young, Randall Collins and others. It shall be asked, to which extent contemporary social theory takes the classical standpoint into account that scientific concepts are construction of scientific observers that are different from reality, but related to it by means of research questions and positions of scientific inquiry.