Cultural Sociology

The Chair of Cultural Sociology represents cultural sociology in research and teaching as an independent sociological perspective. It is interested in understanding what binds societies together at their core, what moves them, or what causes them to fall apart. This concern must be distinguished from the narrowed interest of the sociology of culture, which, as a hyphenated sociology, examines phenomena of cultural production in high and popular culture. The cultural sociology represented here must also be differentiated from comparative cultural research (today almost only significant from a historical perspective), which focuses on entire societies as cultural entities.

The professorship is therefore dedicated to cultural sociology understood as a general theoretical perspective on society and based on the assumption that cultural processes have an independent relevance for the constitution of society. Thus, unlike in traditional sociology, culture is not understood as the dependent, but as the independent variable, following Jeffrey Alexander: It is neither a mere effect of social structures such as the economy, the division of labor, or the milieu and class structure, nor can it be considered separately from or as an extension of the realm of societal production of meaning or social sense. Rather, culture is constitutive of social structures, even if it cannot be equated with them. Embedded in sociostructural contexts, it centrally contributes to the social constitution of meaning. The focus of cultural sociological discourse at the department is placed on post-structuralist and neo-Marxist approaches at the intersection with cultural studies and ethnology. 

The teaching unit is further dedicated to cultural sociology through specific subject areas. They are situated in contemporary political sociology as well as in a sociology of law and crime considered as political sociology. Political phenomena and processes such as statehood and state practices or political activism are invariably subject to cultural conditions. They are grounded in symbolic orders just as much as they reproduce or renew symbolic orders.

Of particular interest are:

• cultures of governance, especially with regard to forms of statehood with a focus on social norms, norming, and sanctioning (sociology of punishment and abolitionism, of criminal justice system, and of security)
• cultures of law, especially with regard to theoretical foundations and law in everyday life (Pierre Bourdieu's conception of law, theories of legal conformity, non-professionals in law, political struggles in law)
• cultures of protest in their interaction with state regulation (relationship between police and street protest, subjectification and regulation).