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PETERSON, R A The Production of Culture A Prolegomenon
PETERSON, R A The Production of Culture A Prolegomenon
A Prolegomenon
RICHARD A. PETERSON
Vanderbilt University
Author’s Note: Please see note 1 for the history of this research and
acknowledgements.
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MODES OF ANALYSIS
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NOTES
1. A number of people were most helpful in nurturing the ideas reported here,
and I would particularly like to thank Peter Blau, Alvin Gouldner, Robert Merton,
Anthony Oberschall, Donald Ploch, Harrison White, and Mayer Zald. Funding for the
Vanderbilt Symposium for which this paper was written was provided by grants from
the National Science Foundation, Shell Foundation, and Vanderbilt University
Research Council. Russell Davis, Patsy Doherty, and Betsy Schmidt have given
unflagging assistance in producing the symposium and this special issue of the
American Behavioral Scientist. Each of the symposium participants commented on
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an earlier draft, and I would like particularly to thank the two discussants, Leo
Lowenthal and Bernard Beck, for their incisive comments. In addition, Bernard
Barber, Ivar Berg, Peter Berger, Pierre Bourdieu, Tom Burns, Priscilla Clark, Jerry
Gaston, Thomas Gutterboch, Alex Inkeles, Rene Konig, Rosanne Martorella, John
Meyer, Tim Patterson, Claire Peterson, Joachim Singelmann, Marcello Truzzi, and
Barbara Walters made specific useful suggestions on at least one of the earlier drafts.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge my debt to Paul DiMaggio, who has commented
fruitfully from the earliest days of problem formulation to final editing.
2. In the final chapter of her study of invisible colleges of scientists, Diana
Crane (1972) notes that there are numerous similarities in the production of science,
art, and religion. Unhappy with the designation "sociology of knowledge," she proposes
"sociology of culture" for this common field. The prime difference between her
formulation and the one discussed here is that while she focusses on "high" science,
art, and religion, we would incorporate the analysis of the production of "low" or
popular culture in these three realms as well.
3. Of course it does violence to the ideas of many of the authors cited to place
them exclusively in one or another of these orientations; think, for example, of David
Riesman’s (1950) The Lonely Crowd . Most would argue that all three have some
utility, but the questions remain-where, when, and how?
4. A number of commentators have noted the lack of cumulative development
in the sociology of culture (Duncan, 1968; Crane, 1972; Parsons, 1973; Geertz,
1973). While differing in other respects, each calls for a greater focus on the ways in
which symbols are generated and changed.
5. Content can be focal for several quite different reasons. Symbolic artifacts
may be analyzed to learn about the workings of social systems. This is the strategy of
the structuralism developed by Levi-Strauss (Pettit, 1975). Alternatively, the content
of culture may be prime grist for the sociologically informed critic of society (cf.
Burns and Burns, 1973). Among American scholars at least, this tradition, which
dates back to the debates over the efficacy and ethics of socialist realism, was put
into eclipse in the 1950s by the paranoid excesses of McCarthyism. Yet today some
critic-essayists including Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Vincent Canby, and
Tom Wolfe regularly use elements of culture to assay the condition of society in a
way which research sociologists might find quite informative.
6. When symbol systems are deliberately fabricated or changed, they are usually
labelled "ideology" and considered quite apart from culutre (Peterson, 1972b:
15-16).
7. It is noteworthy that those polemical opponents Mills (1959) and Parsons
(1961) long since agreed that in complex industrial societies culture-symbol systems
are increasingly produced in self-conscious, limited milieux.
8. As Michael Useem has noted in correspondence, this progress in the sociology
of science has been bought at the price of accepting scientists’ own definition of their
domain as divorced from the rest of society, a focus which sets aside intriguing
questions about the changing place of the scientific community in society. That this
myopia is not inherent in the paradigm of culture production is suggested by his
work (cf. Useem, 1976) as well as that of Bourdieu (1975), Hierich (1976), and
others.
9. The focus on production should not obscure the fact that there is a
difference between producing a refrigerator on the one hand, and a president, a play,
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a law, a god, or a scientific formula on the other. In common these latter are invested
with symbolic meaning well beyond their utility, and their creators are vested, in
some degree, with "sacred" powers.
10. For example, contemporary American religious groups must compete for
"consumers" in a free competitive market (Heirich, 1974), and their every assertion
about the world is subject to the test of science. Science in turn is made by a
self-perpetuating elite of esoteric specialists. Yet, the relative power position of these
two systems of thought and the groups of persons who control them were very nearly
just the opposite in Europe only 500 years ago. See also Kavolis (1974).
11. Highly educated and for the most part from the middle class, academics are
thoroughly familiar with the high-culture critique of low culture. Because of their
experience, however, they are less exposed to the inverse critique. In their review of
the evidence on the injuries middle-class culture has had on the working class,
Sennett and Cobb (1972) have not explicated the lower-culture critique of high
culture. We are convinced, however, from work with the fans of country music, that
there is a widely felt, if not clearly articulated, moralistic critique of high culture
which is very nearly the same as the condemnation of low culture made by Haag and
Rosenberg (Peterson and DiMaggio, 1975).
12. A most interesting example of the sorts of investigations possible in this area
is provided by Kurt Back’s (1972) study of the sensitivity training and encounter
movement.
13. The research (cited in the references) made separately and in concert by
Denisoff, Hirsch, DiMaggio, Berger, and Peterson has shown that even in the
American commercial music industry, which is ostensibly devoted to giving the
buying public exactly what it wants, the numerous elements of the infrastructure
between creator and consumer significantly shape what the public gets. Similar
findings seem to be emerging from a study of the quite different French recording
industry being conducted by Jean-Pierre Vingolle and Antoine Hennion of the Ecole
Nationale Superieure des Mines.
14. To date, what we know suggests that society is reproduced by amorphous
mechanisms of a Lamarckian sort analogous to "acquired characteristics" in biology.
Thus, it is unlikely that a mechanistic DNA of culture will soon be discovered.
15. Inculcation has a harsh sound but, it has the same place for society as
socialization has for the individual.
16. No American general sociologist engaged in research today articulates this
is fundamental to the broad range of linked
view, but just such a conception
empirical studies being carried out at the Center for European Sociology of the
Sorbonne under the general direction of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu often employs an
economic metaphor in talking of cultural "stock," "capital," and "investments;" but
he also speaks of culture as "reproducing" society in a way cognate with the genetic
metaphor The Bourdieu group has not published a fully developed statement of its
perspective, but the range of its interests can be gauged by the projects described in
"Current Research," published by the Center for European Sociology in 1972, and in
its new journal, Actes de la Recherche en Scierices Sociales. The sophistication of this
research is exemplified in Bourdieu ( 1968, 1973, 1974, 1975) Bourdieu and Darbel
(1966) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1970)
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