What do sociologists mean by 'culture'?

Culture is the whole way of life of a group — its norms, values, beliefs, language and material objects — learned, not inherited. AQA wants you to distinguish several conceptions:

• High culture — opera, ballet, classical music, fine art: the culture of the elite. Bourdieu argues it is not objectively 'better' but simply the taste of the dominant class, functioning as cultural capital that marks out and reproduces privilege. Taste, for Bourdieu, is a weapon of distinction.
• Popular (mass) culture — the culture of the many, mass-produced and commercial. Strinati argues the boundary between high and popular culture has collapsed; the Frankfurt School (Adorno) saw the 'culture industry' as producing passive, standardised consumers.
• Subculture — a group within society whose norms and values differ from the mainstream (youth subcultures, occupational subcultures, deviant subcultures).
• Global culture — Ritzer's 'McDonaldization' and the fear of cultural homogenisation; against this, others point to hybridity and glocalisation, where global products are reworked locally.
• Consumer culture — identity increasingly bought rather than inherited. Bauman argues we now live in liquid modernity, where identity is a project we assemble and constantly revise.

Cultural diversity: distinguish cultural relativism (judging a culture by its own standards) from ethnocentrism (judging others by your own). Both terms earn marks when used precisely.

High culture

How culture gets inside us

• Primary socialisation happens in the family. Parsons called the family a 'personality factory' whose job is to internalise society's shared norms and values so deeply that they feel like our own; society thereby becomes part of the individual.
• Secondary socialisation happens through education, peer groups, religion, the workplace and the media. Durkheim saw education transmitting the collective conscience; Bowles & Gintis saw the hidden curriculum producing obedient workers; Willis's lads show that socialisation can be resisted.
• Structure or agency? Functionalists and Marxists give an over-socialised picture in which culture programmes us (Wrong's criticism). Interactionists insist we actively negotiate our identities. Giddens's structuration theory tries to hold both: structure and agency are two sides of the same coin, since our actions reproduce the very structures that shape them.

Nature or nurture? Cross-cultural evidence (Mead's work on gender in Papua New Guinea; the sheer variety of family and gender arrangements worldwide) is used to argue that most of what looks natural is in fact culturally learned.

Primary socialisation

Interactionism: the self is made in interaction

• Cooley's looking-glass self: we see ourselves reflected in other people's reactions and become what we think they think we are. The self is a social product.
• Mead: through language and symbols we learn to take the role of the other. Play and games teach the child to internalise the expectations of the generalised other — society.
• Goffman's dramaturgy (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life): social life is theatre. We give performances on a front stage, manage impressions, use props, and relax the performance backstage. Where the role does not fit, we practise role distance. Stigma, Goffman's other great concept, is a spoiled identity that must be managed.
• Becker's labelling links to all of this: a label can become a master status that overrides every other identity a person has.

Evaluate: interactionism is superb on the micro level but is accused of ignoring structural power — who has the resources to make their definition of you stick? Marxists and feminists supply that missing dimension.

Which source of identity?

Tap a concept, then tap the sociologist's home ground.

Class and gender as sources of identity

Class identity.

• Marx: identity flows from your relationship to the means of production, and class consciousness is the recognition of it.
• Weber separates class (market situation) from status (social honour) and party — so identity can be built on prestige as well as wealth.
• Savage's Great British Class Survey used Bourdieu's three capitals (economic, social, cultural) to map a seven-class structure running from an 'elite' to a 'precariat' — showing class is about culture and connections, not only income.
• Skeggs (Formations of Class and Gender) followed working-class women on caring courses and found class was lived as shame and a constant effort to be seen as respectable — an identity people disidentify from rather than proclaim.

Gender identity.

• Oakley made the fundamental distinction between sex (biological) and gender (culturally constructed), and identified manipulation, canalisation, verbal appellation and different activities as the mechanisms of gender socialisation.
• Connell: gender is a hierarchy, dominated by hegemonic masculinity, with subordinated and marginalised masculinities and 'emphasised femininity' beneath it.
• Mac an Ghaill describes a 'crisis of masculinity' as traditional manual work disappears and the breadwinner identity loses its footing.
• Butler's postmodern turn: gender is performative — something we do repeatedly, not something we are.

Sex and gender

Ethnicity, nation, sexuality, disability, age

• Ethnicity. Stuart Hall argues there are new ethnicities — identity is not a fixed inheritance but is constantly reconstructed. Gilroy analyses a Black Atlantic diaspora identity forged across nations. Johal describes British Asian young people with a hybrid or 'Brasian' identity who 'code-switch' between white and Asian settings. Modood notes younger generations describe themselves as British more readily than their parents did, without abandoning ethnic identity.
• Nationality. Anderson: the nation is an imagined community — you will never meet most of your fellow citizens, yet you feel a deep bond, sustained by shared language, media and ritual. Nationality is constructed, not natural.
• Sexuality. Weeks argues sexual identity is socially constructed and historically variable; Plummer analyses sexual scripts and the homosexual career — how a person comes to adopt a sexual identity through interaction and labelling. McIntosh treated 'the homosexual role' as a social role rather than a condition.
• Disability. Shakespeare and the social model argue disability is produced by a society organised around able bodies, not by impairment as such. Goffman's stigma applies directly.
• Age. Childhood, youth, middle age and old age are social constructions whose meanings vary across time and culture — a point developed further in Families and Households.

Imagined communities

Buying who you are

• Veblen's classic idea of conspicuous consumption: goods are bought to display status, not just to be used.
• Bauman: in liquid modernity identities are no longer given by class, work or community but assembled and reassembled through consumption. Freedom for the affluent; anxiety and exclusion for the 'flawed consumers' who cannot afford to play.
• Postmodernists. Lyotard announces the collapse of the metanarratives (Marxism, science, progress) that once anchored identity. Baudrillard argues we now live in hyperreality, among simulacra — signs without an original — so identity itself becomes a media-made image.
• Globalisation. Against the homogenisation thesis, Giddens and others stress reflexivity: in late modernity tradition loosens its grip and the self becomes a project we must continuously construct. Global flows produce hybridity as much as sameness.

Evaluate postmodernism: critics reply that class, gender and ethnicity still powerfully constrain identity. You cannot simply 'shop' your way out of poverty or racism — consumption-based identity is a luxury of those with economic capital. Use Skeggs and Savage against Bauman and Baudrillard.

Postmodern identity

Concept match-up

Match each sociologist to their concept.

Putting the perspectives head to head

• Functionalism sees culture as shared and integrating, transmitted by socialisation to create value consensus. Strong on how societies cohere; weak on conflict, diversity and power — and guilty of an over-socialised view of people (Wrong).
• Marxism sees culture as ideology: the ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of the ruling class. Gramsci softens this with hegemony — the ruling class must win consent, and can be challenged by a counter-hegemony. Strong on power; accused of economic determinism.
• Feminism shows culture is patriarchal: gender identity is manufactured (Oakley) and hierarchical (Connell). Difference feminists and black feminists warn against treating 'women' as one uniform group.
• Interactionism restores agency: identity is negotiated in interaction (Cooley, Mead, Goffman, Becker) — but neglects structure.
• Postmodernism (Lyotard, Baudrillard, Bauman) sees identity as fluid, fragmented and chosen — but is criticised for exaggerating choice and ignoring persistent inequality.

Exam craft: a top-band answer never lists perspectives — it puts them in dialogue. 'Bauman claims identity is now chosen; Skeggs's working-class women, however, could not escape being classed. Choice, then, is itself unequally distributed.'

Hegemony

Youth subcultures: style as resistance

• The Chicago School gave us the study of deviant subcultures; the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies reread youth style through Gramsci. Hall & Jefferson (Resistance Through Rituals) argued post-war working-class youth subcultures were a symbolic attempt to win back space and solve, magically, the class problems their parents faced.
• Hebdige (Subculture: The Meaning of Style) read punk as bricolage — everyday objects (the safety pin, the bin liner) torn from their normal meaning and reassembled as a refusal. The catch: capitalism swiftly incorporates the style, sells it back as fashion, and defuses the resistance.
• McRobbie & Garber made the feminist objection: subcultural theory was written about boys on the street, and missed girls entirely — girls' culture was a 'bedroom culture', private and therefore invisible to male researchers.
• Postmodernists (Bennett) reply that fixed subcultures have dissolved into fluid 'neo-tribes' — young people move between styles as a matter of taste, not class resistance.

Bedroom culture

The big ideas to know

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