This article traces the development of cultural sociology by reviewing two scholarly debates:one is the conceptual definitions on culture,and the other is about the relationship between culture and structure.The author makes two contributions to these debates.The first is to classify various scholarly definitions of culture into four schools,namely,subjective culture,structural culture,dramaturgic culture,and institutional culture.The author draws on conceptual distinctions among these schools and argues that their interrelationships and interdependence imply the underlying mechanism whereby society and culture survive and develop from one generation to the next.The second is to offer a focused analysis of three sociological stands on the relationship between culture survive and develop from one generation to the next.The second is to offer a focused analysis of three sociological stands on the relationship between culture and structure:macro\|structural culturalism,structural culturalism,and culturalism.The author argues that culture retains its relative autonmy in society,and that cultural autonomy depends on social structure,human action,particular cultural domains,and culture\|relevant structural fields.
This paper provides a detailed review of Thompson, Bourdieu, and Gans. These three sociologists developed such cultural concepts as taste, habitus, and experience in discussing social class and social stratification structures. These conceptualizations are complementary to a structural perspective on social class and social stratification that is prevailing in sociology today, and thus indicate the transition of cultural sociology toward maturity.
This paper reviews and discusses western sociological theories and research about poverty in structural and cultural perspectives. Structural explanations focus on how social and economic forces produce and reproduce poverty; cultural explanations, on the other hand, approach poverty problems from the viewpoints of poverty culture and environmental adaptation, analyzing such underlying factors as social anomie, absence of values, inconsistency between expectation and reality, tensions out of broken promises, discrimination, social isolation and exclusion. Comparing the two perspectives, the author maintains that when poverty is structurally produced and reproduced, cultural factors become important in either reinforcing or reducing poverty. Thus, the paper is intended to show that these two sets of explanations are complementary to each other: while structural explanation fails to fully account for poverty, it is cultural explanation that shows its interpretative power.
