TY - JOUR AU - McLean, Paul PY - 2010/04/26 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE JF - TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology JA - TRAILS VL - IS - SE - DO - UR - https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/sociology-of-culture-mclean SP - AB - The theme of culture and empirical research on culture has grown IMMENSELY in sociology and the other social sciences over the last twenty years. Many disciplines have experienced the so-called ‘cultural turn.’ Beyond just recognizing that culture matters, scholars have developed a variety of theories of just what culture is and how it operates. Cultural processes and practices, and symbolic and classificatory systems, are constitutive elements of social life and important sites of, and vehicles for, political contestation. To speak of culture this way is to speak in terms of shared ways of life, shared repertoires of action, shared orientations to the world, shared common sense, shared points of contention, shared ‘operating systems,’ shared webs of significance, and so on. ER -