McLennon (2014) Sociology Cultural Studies and

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Sociology, Cultural Studies and the

Cultural Turn
Gregor McLennan
Introduction
For 40 years, the relationship between sociology and cultural studies has
posed central questions of self-denition and practice for both projects. By
orchestrating a range of manifesto-style statements the full literature can
only be gestured towards this chapter offers an analytical prole of the
unfolding dealings between the two formations, starting with the prevailing
discourse around sociology at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(CCCS) in the 1970s (Birmingham). The second sketch postmodern con-
juncturalism takes as background the worldwide growth of cultural studies
as an undergraduate quasi-discipline, involving the active displacement of
disciplinary sociology. In a third movement sociological readjustment the
tables are ostensibly turned once again, but at this point the whole notion
of the cultural turn, which rhetorically governs most of the debate, requires
critical focus. In the years after 2000, a mood of pragmatic reexivity emerges
in cultural studies and sociology alike, in which, despite latent tensions, various
balances are struck between culture and economy, theory and method, political
purpose and academic professionalism. With these developments, the prospect
of a more principled partnership between the warring twins (D. Inglis, 2007)
could be glimpsed. However, several recent currents of thought and research
are undermining the culture and society problematic that has sustained most
versions of the sociology-cultural studies encounter.
Birmingham
In a series of theses that set the parameters for the 1970s Birmingham mode,
Stuart Hall, the premier cultural studies gure, afrmed the need for this
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Sociology and Cultural Studies 511
emerging discourse to break with orthodox sociology. In keeping with Halls
inclusive cast of thought, these formulations were not outright rejectionist,
though there were reasons to be polemical. The perception was that the local
Birmingham sociologists felt miffed to be upstaged by the newcomer down the
corridor, making their hostility felt in a blistering attack (Hall, 1980, p. 21).
More generally, Centre thinking often revolved around themes circulating in
New Left Review, including Perry Andersons well-known diagnosis that the
absent centre in the national intellectual culture was partly due to Britains
failure to produce a classical sociology, the outcome of which, in the current era,
was a politically feeble sociological derivative of empiricism and functionalism
(Anderson, 1969, pp. 2212).
Halls own approach in his teaching and writing was always carefully
modulated. In one trademark mapping the eld essay (CCCS, 1973), a
sociology of literature line was endorsed in an effort to combat overly
textualist cultural criticism. In another (Hall, 1978), the sociology of knowledge
was designated as the hinterland of contemporary understandings of ideology,
featuring indispensable sociological forebears Durkheim, Simmel, Weber,
Berger and Luckmann, even Merton. So when it came to dening the posture
of cultural studies in general, in the direction of a complex Marxism, this
was conceived as posing sociological questions against sociology itself (Hall,
1980, pp. 205). Certain aspects of conventional sociology were to be opposed,
notably complacent notions of liberal pluralist society, the lifeless mass society
reading of culture, and sociologys dominant structural-functionalist models.
Yet cultural studies was sociological in a loose sense, such that lived practices,
belief systems and institutions, some part of the subject matter of sociology
fell within our scope. Hall perceived a kind of creative disintegration going
on within the older discipline, bringing a parallel movement of recovery of
questions of agency, culture and resistance. He included core selections from
classical and contemporary sociology in his Masters theory course at CCCS, and
he left Birmingham to become Professor of Sociology at the Open University
(OU), albeit in a profoundly interdisciplinary style.
Through the 1970s, the Birmingham presence was steadily felt within the
British Sociological Association, not only apparent in its 1979 volume on
cultural production (Barrett et al., 1979), but also in the review of practice
and progress in British sociology (Abrams et al., 1981). Richard Johnson,
Halls historian colleague, gave the main overview in the former, while Halls
depiction of cultural studies paradigms was used by the latters editors to frame
the situation facing sociology specically. Halls studies of encoding/decoding
and deviancy amplication had already penetrated sociology of the media,
while Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1977) which positioned racist perceptions of
muggings in Birmingham as the epitome of an entire swelling social conjuncture
of authoritarian populism, had great impact sometimes controversially upon
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512 The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain
critical criminology, political sociology, and the sociology of race and racism.
Hall also shared platforms and publications with younger sociologists on issues
around Marxs method and the theory of class, including a conference debate
with Nicos Poulantzas and Paul Hirst in 1976, when the relative autonomy of
the political was memorably thrashed out. A 1979 History Workshop conference
on questions of culturalism, held in a candle-lit (power-cut) church near
Ruskin College, also became rather legendary, its centrepiece though Johnson
and other Birmingham people also spoke being a crackling exchange between
Hall and E.P. Thompson. In 2011, Hall received one of only a handful of British
Sociological Association 60th anniversary distinguished contribution awards,
widely seen as richly deserved not only for his very inuential sociological or
sociology-related scholarship, but for his political passion and truly radiant
qualities as speaker, teacher and mentor. Actually, it is doubtful that Stuart Hall
felt any truly closer to sociology and sociologists as such at the end of his career
than at its beginning: his priorities and loyalties were always to do with certain
kinds of people and the spirit they carried, whatever their professional labels.
Nevertheless, the status of sociology in relation to cultural studies undoubtedly
posed productive tensions for Hall, on condition that sociologists abandoned
any aspiration to academic imperialism.
In many of the topic-specic areas of study at Birmingham, engagements with
sociology routinely framed how CCCS was to proceed, and Centre discussion
groups and publications often included people based in sociology departments
elsewhere. The most intimate liaison took place within the subcultures strand,
especially in Resistance Through Rituals. Theoretically, the way was cleared
by interrogating that veritable sociological trinity of ideas about post-war
social change: afuence, consensus, and embourgeoisement (Clarke et al., 1976,
pp. 218). Methodologically, a new deal had to be struck with appreciative and
ethnographic strands of sociology. On the one hand, the young Birmingham
researchers it cannot be emphasised enough that the vast majority at CCCS
were post-graduate students clearly relied upon ideas deriving from symbolic
interactionism and labelling theory, and they shared Stan Cohens sense of
the radical sociologists dilemma nding ways of staying in without selling
out (Roberts, 1976, pp. 250, 243). Yet participant observation research was
ultimately deemed to be tarnished by the positivist attitudes and naturalistic
methods of mainstream sociology, with its ingrained professional fear that the
eld of investigation will be distorted and contaminated unless the values,
theories, and subjectivities of researchers are suppressed (Willis, 1980, p. 90).
Even Howard Becker was held complicit in plunging us into a depoliticised
and de-moralised phenomenological never-never land (Pearson and Twohig,
1976, pp. 1245), though it had to be conceded that, just possibly in such
swingeing critiques, certain texts in the ethnographic tradition were being
traduced (Willis, 1980, p. 89). No such concessions were offered in the
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Althusser-affected Centre manner, from which heights sociological participant
observation was roundly castigated for its mystied consciousness of its own
practice (Butters, 1976, p. 263). The hiatus between high-theory and locally-
grounded Birmingham modes found expression in the tectonic (but originally
unintended) split into two parts of Paul Williss Learning to Labour (1977), a work
taken up in sociological theory as well as (massively) in sociology of education.
In the groups researching working class culture, community studies, education,
and race relations, sociology was presented as producing ideal types that
quickly become over-rigid abstractions: Parkins division of working-class value
systems into dominant, subordinate, and radical types (Brook and Finn, 1978,
p. 135); the Afuent Worker studies scheme of solidaristic versus instrumental
attitudes (Critcher, 1979, p. 32); educational sociologys reication of the
distinction between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged children (CCCS,
1981, pp. 1335); and the race relations sociologists contrast between the
weak family culture of rst and second generation West Indian youth and the
strong family culture which supports Asian acculturation (Lawrence, 1982,
p. 100). The problem within the subject specialisms of sociology was that they
remained on the surface, hypertypifying real experience and concentrating
on evidence from attitudes not material realities, rendering general sociology
inadequate because its main categories were (and are) descriptive they do
not deliver explanations (CCCS, 1981, pp. 1367). The unasked or partially
asked questions that invalidated sociology concerned the nature of the society
as a whole, especially its class nature, and about specically cultural processes
(CCCS, 1981, p. 136). And sociologys inability to ask these questions derived
from two things: the petit bourgeois class interests and liberal ideology of
professional sociologists, and the nature of sociology itself as a reformist project.
Given their preoccupation with multiple perspectives, good sociologists could
certainly entertain Marxism, but they could not rigorously follow its political
imperatives. With this in mind, Critcher (1979, pp. 2833) found the Afuent
Worker studies meticulous, sophisticated, substantial, and even glimpsed a
skeletal Marxism in them, but this was of a confused sort. The Education
Group noticed a signicant attempt at structural analysis in the old sociology
of education, but this was not related to the class organization of the society
as a whole (1981, p. 138). The sociologists of race were acknowledged as
recognising class differences, but not class determinations (Lawrence, 1982,
p. 123), and therefore could be said to be espousing merely sociologistic pseudo-
Marxism (Gilroy, 1982, p. 281). Sociologists of community, nally, are praised
for contesting the post-industrial society thesis, but like the others they simply
did not go far enough (Brook and Finn, 1978, p. 127). Ultimately, sociology is
condemned as reformist and repressive (Brook and Finn 1978:130), residually
prone to pathologising working class and black people (Critcher 1979, p. 34;
CCCS 1981, p. 141; Lawrence, 1982, passim).
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From that review, it would clearly be wrong to insist that the Birmingham
writings were sociological in any narrow disciplinary sense. As the anti-racist
scholarship in the Centre particularly brought out, if existing sociology was
being critiqued, this was not simply because we happen to disagree with their
theories (Lawrence, 1982, p. 134). There was a fundamental political charge
here that could not be captured just in terms of gaining a better perspective.
Nevertheless, Centre people took their sociological benchmarks seriously,
and their pattern of assessment would nowadays immediately be recognised
as sociologistic in a generic sense. Each critique depicted some standard
approach in the eld, and exposed it as being supercially empiricist, revealing
sociologys inability to understand society as a total structure (Brook and Finn,
1978, p. 130).
Even within this critical format, however, sociology and cultural studies alike
were being transformed by the question of how to put gender and ethnicity fully
into the theoretical, empirical and political mix. The masculinism of the Centres
own post-sociological ethnography had already been noted in Resistance Through
Rituals (McRobbie and Garber, 1976), and its prevailing white male politics was
beginning to be reexively deconstructed in the everyday life of the unit. The
CCCS volume Women Take Issue was one of the few never to mention sociology,
but its component essays perfectly encapsulated, indeed they brilliantly sought
to resolve, profound dialectical tangles between left traditions and feminist
radical pluralism, between emerging issues of subjectivity and the structured
relations of production and reproduction (Bland et al., 1978a, p. 48; 1978b,
p. 173). In Paul Gilroys neat summation in The Empire Strikes Back collection,
it was all a matter of tracing the correspondences, connections, ruptures and
breaks between capital, patriarchy and their racial structures, and seeking to
give all the ingredients their due in any proper view of the social formation as
a contradictory but complex unity (1982, p. 282). Many a sociologist from the
1970s and early 1980s would readily identify with this formulation, just as they
would balk at the CCCS refusal to grant their discipline any creative plasticity.
Nevertheless, quite quickly, CCCS topics and thinking were folded into the
eclectic concerns of sociology, though Halls Gramscian sense of a Birmingham
political project was less obviously transferable.
Postmodern Conjuncturalism
As cultural studies established a global academic identity in the 1980s and
1990s, the textbooks conrmed that a decisive break with disciplinary sociology
had been required for the successor discipline to emerge (Turner, 1990, p.
112; Brantlinger, 1990, p. 61; Grossberg et al., 1992, pp. 12). In one of these
statements, Simon During (1993, p. 1) instructed readers about the right way to
approach culture by warning how not to do it: sociologically, for instance. This
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is because sociology proceeds by objectively describing its institutions as if
they belonged to a large, regulated system. In another version, sociology was
couched as being concerned with universalised sameness and whole-society
integration, taking empirical objects as knowable within a at space which
makes the radicalisation of difference impossible to embrace (Stratton and
Ang, 1996, p. 364).
Such formulations rather abysmally missed the fact that ever since Gouldners
late 1960s diagnosis of the coming crisis in sociology, a great deal of unorthodox
sociology and super-reexivity marked the discipline. Moreover, the impression
given in second-phase texts that cultural studies for its part had always been
motivated by a sense of radicalised difference was seriously misleading. And
the new critique was itself thoroughly modernist in logical form: sociology
is presented in its essential sameness rather than by way of its contingent
differences; it is assumed to be entirely knowable in its epistemic and political
error by the superior cultural studies critic; and its ideological function is
unthinkable without some background presumption of an empirically existing,
systemic and integrative societal totality.
As the theory and politics of difference took command through the 1980s,
the neo-Marxism of Birmingham, if not quite its Gramscianism, came into
question, prompting more explicit recognition that the previous variant did
in fact contain a strong sociological pull, this now being gured as the main
obstacle to postmodernist conjuncturalism (Grossberg, 1993, p. 40). Instead
of even residual nods to left-rationalist modes of social explanation and action,
a kind of Deleuzian stylistics became near-compulsory, involving rhizomatic
and affective theorising, in which the notion of the social subject is replaced
by a nomadic subject, reshaped as a mobile situated set of vectors in a uid
context (Grossberg, 1993, p. 61). Instead of being cast as passionately interdisci-
plinary, versions of the new genre posited cultural studies as post-disciplinary, or
even as a kind of anti-discipline, uncategorisably open, inclusive, experimental
and pluralistic (Grossberg et al., 1992, p. 2). In this second register, what
needed to be stressed was the huge variety of styles of belonging, such that
the individuals relation to the elds continually incorporates and shifts under
the impact of contingent givens (During, 1993, p. 12). Even after the attraction
of this remorseless anti-generality had passed for most serious commentators,
some continued, embarrassingly, to play up its edginess in one formulation
Deleuze was held to be offering advice to start in the middle of things so as to
avoid looking for coherence (Jutel, 2004, p. 55); in another, cultural studies
was thought to be a happening that escapes the homogenizing inuence of
narrative (Belghazi, 1995, p. 172). One text invitingly entitled Cultural Studies:
The Basics followed up an ill-informed caricature of sociology with a denition
of cultural studies as transculturalism, referring to the desire to interrogate the
forming processes of meaning-making and the instabilities which characterize
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their operation. Somewhat dampening readers mounting excitement, however,
the author added that transculturalism offers no guarantees; that it is a theory
of perpetual exchange, and indeed that it was in fact already deeply suspicious
of itself (Lewis, 2003, pp. 723, 4378).
Together with the remarkable growth in cultural studies programmes around
the world, especially in the US, it was perhaps this sort of posturing, together
with massication in the colleges, which led Stuart Hall to express bafement
about the expanding eld in which he remained iconic (Hall, 1992a). Halls own
work through rst half of the 1980s was twofold, each aspect consequential for
sociology, but in different ways. Down one track, his analysis of Thatcherism
(Hal,l 1988a) as having real popular traction and as signalling a new kind of
ideological-cultural politics triggered a considerable rethink well beyond the
party-political left about the inherited verities of progressivism. In another
context not completely separate given the attacks on the OU by right-wing
ideologues (alleging it to be hollowed out by conspiring Marxists) Hall was
heavily involved in a series of quite outstanding extra-mural OU courses, the
topics of which rmly hit the notes of the times: crime and society, the state,
popular culture (co-chaired with Tony Bennett), beliefs and ideologies, and two
gigantic social science foundation courses. Each of these productions weighed
in at around 400,000 words of specially prepared student text together with
a wide array of TV and radio programmes, study cassettes, and sometimes
life-changing summer school experiences. Hall must have personally written
over a quarter of a million words for these programmes, even prior to the OU
tactic of delivering courses chiey through commercial publication, and he
loomed large in scores of broadcasts. Leading sociologists served as (invariably
admiring) external assessors, and sociologists up and down the land many
acting as local OU course tutors begged, borrowed or stole the in-house OU
units in order to revamp their own university courses. As at Birmingham, Hall
was abetted in these projects by a whole string of social scientists who were
highly esteemed in their own right, but his was always accepted as the really
galvanising presence.
In the later 1980s his prodigious OU effort undiminished Halls thought
became more explicitly anti-essentialist, increasingly folding in elements of post-
structuralism, feminist psychoanalysis and the post-Marxist discourse theory of
Ernesto Laclau (Hall, 1996a). Being still committed to a specically Left-inected
politics of difference, however, especially in the free market onslaught of the
day, he by no means deserted familiar structural understanding and critique.
Perhaps it is better to say that for the central cultural studies representatives in
this period, the conjuncturalism mattered more than the postmodernism. All
these aspects jostled for primacy and harmony in what was for Hall becoming
the paramount register for his wide-ranging notion of articulation, and for his
sustained interest in the condensations of power, discourse, race and ethnicity,
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gender, and class, namely post-coloniality. In this vein Hall delivered closely
followed essays such as New Ethnicities and The West and the Rest (1992a,
1992b) as well as reabsorbing the post-colonial canon (for example, Fanon) as
part of his engagement with the higher ights of post-colonial cultural theory
(Hall, 1996b). Into his retirement, Halls unsettling take on multiculturality
and hybrid cultural identities differed signicantly from both standard multi-
culturalism and left-liberal critiques of it (Hall, 2000), and he became pivotal
in metropolitan post-colonial artistic circles, helping establish (in 2007) a major
London centre for global and cultural diversity in the visual arts, incorporating
a Stuart Hall Library. Later still, in 2013, and to great public acclaim, an
insightful and moving lm by John Akomfrah the Stuart Hall Project was
made with the subjects close involvement. Halls inextinguishable, and always
subtly changing, sense of the organic intellectual in new times is evident in
these wider public and institutional contributions to cultural politics, thereby
overlapping at one corner with Tony Bennetts otherwise very different vision
for cultural studies after postmodernism, that of a policy-making reformers
science (Bennett, 1998).
Sociological Readjustment
Switching back to the loose overarching narrative, if Halls changes of theoretical
idiom over the years were handled, as always, in both a uently persuasive
and also at times cleverly cagey manner, elsewhere across cultural studies
and sociology ultra-deconstructionist tendencies were giving some cause for
concern, perceived as representing the comeback of that other rst parent of
cultural studies, literary textualism. Prominent ex-Birmingham authors Angela
McRobbie (1992, 1997) and David Morley (1997), long ambivalent about
disciplinary sociology, now felt that there was a need to get back to reality by
reasserting the properly grounded, ethnographic and sociological, dimension
of cultural studies. Americans Douglas Kellner (1995, pp. 3942) and Ben Agger
(1992, p. 76) proposed an even stronger recovery of sociological realism, arguing
that the new rampant culturalism had betrayed the best interdisciplinary
traditions. They defended an insurgent cultural studies against the fetishism
of consumerism and populism that seemed to be taking hold. In the UK similar
charges were made by Jim McGuigan (1992) and several of the contributors
to the highly charged collection Cultural Studies in Question (Ferguson and
Golding, 1997), who demanded the reinstatement of political economy.
Such responses to postmodern conjuncturalism underlined the productive
overlaps inside the ongoing wrangle between sociology and cultural studies.
But could it not be said by now that sociology had simply been wronged by
cultural studies, and that sociologys own undervalued strengths now needed
louder declarations of allegiance? This line was pursued in various ways,
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depending on whether it was Birmingham or postmodern conjuncturalism that
was being targeted. David Harris held that CCCS-style work, though valuable,
was only one option amongst others, and that sociology and other bourgeois
disciplines could claim to have had a more open relation to empirical evidence,
concluding that the revolutionary fantasies of breaking [with sociology]
should have been resisted from the outset (Harris, 1992, pp. 1956). In the area
of sport and leisure Chris Rojek charged that whilst theoretically Birmingham
researchers may have recognised the vital interplay between work and leisure
(for which read class and culture), this had been remorselessly denied when
the theory is applied to concrete empirical processes (Rojek, 1985, p. 134).
David Chaney (2004) found Birmingham ideology analysis disappointing,
spotting resemblances with previous sociological accounts of the cultural
system, neither perspective understanding that there is simply no outside to
culture. Even Raymond Williamss famous idea of cultures as whole ways of life
was too presumptive: for Chaney, only a culturalism couched as the piecemeal,
plural and reexive interpretive practices of everyday life would sufce.
As for second-phase cultural studies, it was supercial impressionism not
deep reductionism that needed sociological rebalancing. According to Keith
Tester, cultural studies had become morally cretinous, merely mimicking
the media it claims to expose, and it was theoretically empty because all that
ever got theorised was cultural studies itself (Tester, 1994, pp. 3, 4, 10). By
contrast, sociology holds out the possibility of a lively study of culture which
is informed by a seriousness of moral and cultural purpose, because if it is
worth doing sociology is not happy just to describe and explore what exists.
Pierre Bourdieus widely publicised attack on neo-liberalism added weight to
the positioning of cultural studies as an apolitical creature of fashion (Bourdieu
and Wacquant, 1999, p. 47).
Rojek and Bryan Turner pressed further, bewailing the faults of the
decorative sociology that had emerged under the inuence of cultural
studies aestheticism, the privileging of culture, a lack of comparative
historical perspective, capitulation to relativistic postmodernism; and political
proselytising in the absence of any real political agenda (Rojek and Turner,
2000, pp. 6339). Sociology, by contrast, had a more encompassing grasp of the
material base and our vulnerable existential embodiment, with the potential,
going back to Parsons and interactionism, for a systematic contemporary
dialectics of scarcity and solidarity (Rojek and Turner, 2000, p. 644; Turner
and Rojek, 2001, p. 3 and passim).
The quality of argument in these comeback manifestos was questionable.
Bourdieus charge that cultural studies practitioners were unconcerned by the
ravages of neo-liberal ideology was absurd. Testers afrmation of sociologys
moral superiority was patently speculative: If sociology is worth doing it
holds out the possibility of both explanation and outrage. That may well be
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so, but no sociological work was actually evidenced as achievement in that
regard. And Rojek and Turners polemic seemed similarly counterfactual, indeed
whimsical: as if Braudel and Anderson, and historical consciousness generally,
could be claimed for sociology rather than cultural studies; as if the emphasis
on embodiment had long been there at the centre of the discipline, instead of
only recently having emerged as an interdisciplinary concern; as if sociology
ever had a clear and dynamic political agenda; and as if the opposite case for
culturalism had not been advanced in Rojeks earlier critique of CCCS. Rojeks
subsequent (2003) book on Hall poured more oil on troubled waters, somewhat
damning with faint praise, and smearing the cult of Saint Stuart. Hardly
surprising, then, when major Hall interlocutor Bill Schwarz (2005) stepped up
to deliver at length an incandescent riposte, exposing Rojeks multiple factual
inaccuracies and bemoaning his woefully mechanical (that is, sociological)
mindset. The war, it seemed, was on again.
The debates we are instancing frequently took place in terms of the pros
and cons of the cultural turn, something that almost everyone agreed
had taken place through the 1980s as a combination of the rise of cultural
studies, the inuence of post-structuralist and postmodern ideas, and the
assumed greater centrality of culture, knowledge, consumption, lifestyle, and
identity in contemporary capitalist society itself. Accepting that these things
were important, Larry Ray and Andrew Sayer (1999) nevertheless insisted
that especially in conditions of rampant social inequality economy and
culture were not after all synonymous, and that their respective logics could
pull strenuously in different directions. If socio-economic relations were
undoubtedly culturally embedded, in the end culture wasnt everything. Rays
subsequent Theorising Society series continued this analytic readjustment
(Ray, 2003, p. viii; Smart, 2003, pp. 810), and many British sociologists were
exercised in trying to adequately reconcile culture, economy and society when
it came to substantive studies, for example in ethnicity and gender (Bradley and
Fenton, 1999).
Problematising the Turn
While the cultural turn was widely accepted to have occurred, and to signal
a move beyond established sociological mindsets, its metaphorical and
exhortatory character was not easily converted into stable argumentation. Take
the governing trope of Stuart Hall and Paul du Gays OU 1990s sequence Culture,
Media and Identities, which set that project up against the background of a
traditional explanatory hierarchy of the social sciences in general and sociology
in particular, in which cultural processes were deemed rather ephemeral
and supercial. But now, in the contemporary turn to culture, all this has
changed and the cultural has come to occupy a much enhanced position, on
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two counts. One is epistemological, because culture has not previously been
recognised sufciently as analytically central to social knowledge formation.
The second is substantive, because culture is today more important in every
area of our social lives (du Gay 1997, pp. 12).
The rmness of tone here masks considerable variation in the formulation
and strength of the problematic. If we ask, for example, what it is that is being
turned away from and towards, the answers include (du Gay, 1997; Hall, 1997a,
1997b): from political and economic processes (old) to cultural processes
(new); from social practices to their discursive conditions of existence; from
things in the natural and social world to language, words and meanings;
from material factors to symbolic ones; from infrastructure to superstructure;
and from reality to representations. None of these pairings, though, are
conceptually equivalent, and it is debatable that any of them can be aligned
unequivocally with a move from older conventional sociology to a new style of
cultural studies. Only in Marxist discourse, for instance, does the infrastructure/
superstructure logic hold, yet although a generally leftist ambience was prevalent
within British sociology in the 1970s, Marxism has never been hegemonic.
Moreover, while many sociologists would accept the importance of social and
economic processes, or social practices, these quite loose and exible notions
are not well captured by natural and social things. Finally, the plausibility
of assigning material and economic preferences to sociology probably stems
from an intuition that sociologists are interested in matters of social structure,
which is then assumed to be something other than cultural (Barrett, 1992,
p. 209). But these are contestable associations. Whether in sociological macro
systems-theorising or in micro situational alternatives, the components of
social structure that are typically posited roles, institutions, norms, media
of exchange, elds, organisations, interaction orders, typications and recipes,
membership, and so on constitute a lexicon palpably more communicative/
normative than material/economic.
This tendency in the sociological tradition(s) towards, if anything,
culturalism is worth reiterating, because even in the American setting in the
1980s the impression took hold that a renaissance of cultural analysis within
sociology was badly needed, by way of entering the thicket of cultural studies
(Alexander, 1988a, pp. 913; see also Alexander, 1988b; Crane, 1994). Jeffrey
Alexander (2003) pushed this agenda forward under the rubric of the strong
programme in the new American cultural sociology, decisively committed
to appreciating cultural phenomena in their own terms, and not as any kind of
reection of socioeconomic interests, general structural roles and incentives,
and so on. How exactly one was to understand cultural ideas, percepts and
practices strictly in their own terms and continue to develop any kind of
sociological thinking about them was a bit of a mystery (see McLennan, 2005),
but the force of the turn was clearly now being felt even in the sociological
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mainline, where, arguably, nothing terribly non-cultural had preceded it. Thus,
and spanning the generations from Parsons to postmodernism, Neil Smelser
gave a reading of the turn fully congruent with the reality/representations
motif, insisting that culture should not be treated as any kind of coherent
or independently real totality of social patterns; rather it was the product
of our imposed categorization (Smelser, 1992, pp. 17, 20). Norman Denzin,
hailing from an alternative sociological lineage, came to a similar conclusion,
proposing a merger between cultural studies and symbolic interactionism based
on exposing the great myth of late capitalism, that there is after all, a real world
out there (Denzin, 1992, p. 169).
What about the presumption that culture is more central these days? Here
the epistemological version of the thesis rather cuts across the substantive-
historical one. If the cultural turn refers to the need to see meanings, symbols,
discourse, values and the like as intrinsically important, key to any adequate
understanding of collective and individual life, then this must have uniform
historical application. Whether it be the symbolic carvings or religious
conversions of Picts and Celts, or Methodism and love of the seaside in the
Victorian industrial age, cultural expressions cannot have been any less real or
effective then than now; such is the very sense of culture being constitutive
(Hall, 1997b, pp. 208, 220). But in that case, cultural imaginaries cannot be
deemed to be somehow more important today. Rather, it is a matter of certain
cultural forms and communicative technologies being differently central a
fairly uncontroversial proposition.
As regards the extent of the turn, Hall warned against replacing one kind of
reductionism with another by understanding culture in a reied way, or by
thinking that there is nothing but discourse. Moreover, sociological classics
like Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel could readily be pulled into the analytical
upgrading of culture (du Gay, 2007, p. 18). So the turn was not nally a total
break with previous materialist and sociological bearings. Rather, it was more
of a reconguration of elements and even a process of recovery though,
certainly, in a new key (Hall, 1997b, pp. 2236).
Michele Barrett pursued the turn slightly more vigorously than Hall (at least
in his pedagogical writings), notably in essays celebrating Halls own work, style
and sensibility. Author of the important 1980 socialist-feminist text Womens
Oppression Today, Barrett came to urge feminists and the left fully to accept
the shift From Marx to Foucault, and make the leap from things to words
(Barrett, 1991, 1992). She could accept that sociologists were striving to
overcome their historic decits, just as socialist men were beginning to come
to terms with feminist challenges, but a there was reluctance in each case. Even
some feminists, critical of sociology, were cautious about the full turn, seeing
as this signied, for Barrett, nothing less than a cultural revolution, turning
away from any form of epistemological realism towards the aestheticisation
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of politics in terms of pleasure, the psyche, and the imagination (2000, p. 15).
Naturally, then, rationalist, cognitive discourses such as sociology were going
to be disturbed (1999, p. 15).
Barretts interventions underlined the fact that the questions in play around
the turn were more deeply political than narrowly disciplinary, and stressed
how much the whole terrain had been decisively shaken up by feminism. After
all, no male sociologist or cultural studies professor needed to bleat about
materialism to their (junior) feminist colleagues. Every woman critical thinker
had been through a collective and personal mineeld of issues around wages
for housework, domestic violence, marriage contracts, child care regimes,
dual systems exploitation, and glass ceilings. So if and when their attention
turned to matters of affect and subjectivity, this could not remotely be taken
as some kind of gross idealist forgetfulness of the impact of materiality on
gendered experience.
Still, Barretts articulation of the turn was far from self-evident. Like the
strong programmers in American cultural sociology, she complains that
sociology fails to grasp in their own terms phenomena like physicality,
humanity, imagination, the other, fear, the limits of control (2000, p. 19).
But whilst fair enough as an observation, this appears to guilt-trip sociology
and every other necessarily delimited investigative practice on the basis of
the sort of (impossible) totalising or fully integrated perspective that in her
more postmodernist declarations Barrett seems to rule out (1992, pp. 21415).
Perhaps literature gets closer to the desired breadth and depth of appreciation
(Barretts career moved from Sociology to English). But even if this is right, it
does not obviously hold for the considered study of literature, which operates
reectively at a distance from both creative writing itself and from whatever
the protean cultural substrate is that literature shapes. Con/textual analysis
also routinely involves insights and assessments distilled from a wide range of
propositional thought-styles, each of which including the sociological must
then be credited with at least some specic value and truth. Indeed, Barrett
expresses strenuous reservations about demotic culturalism on the basis of the
need continually to receive, assess and discriminate (1999, p. 2). Finally, when
Barrett and others seek to give priority to what is felt and experienced and
created and repressed and compounded over what is thought and systematised
and imposed and consciously intended and straightforward, they are reigniting
perennial philosophical dilemmas, resolvable neither non-rationally nor by
declarations about the imperatives of the current cultural turn.
Pragmatic Reexivity
Around the Millennium, a more ecumenical rationale worked its way across
cultural studies and sociology. Now that cultural studies had pluralised and
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(partially) postmodernised, and now that the cultural had to be recognised
as embracing meanings and practices, high cultural products and everyday
experiences, entirely whole and very partial ways of life, ideology and affect,
texts and contexts, signs and economies, its conceptual specicity had to be
doubted. And it had to be granted that even if the cultural turn had become
an obligatory reference point, this could come in several versions (du Gay and
Pryke, 2002, p. 5). Cultural studies radicalism was also freshly scrutinised, with
a re-engagement with Marxism and ideology-critique being urged from the left
(Smith, 2000; McGuigan, 2009). Francis Mulherns (2000) sophisticated if rather
contrived corrective strategy claimed that cultural studies had turned into a
variant of metaculture, that genre of elitist guardianship typied by Arnold,
Eliot and Leavis. For Mulhern, the hallmark of metaculture is the substitution
of moralistic talk of cultures nature and promise for truly transformative,
political ideas-work. In metaculture, visions of the social as expressed in culture
sclerotise by degrees into a belief in the social as constituted by cultural value,
the denition and possession of which is the business of an exclusive circle.
Others, less concerned to reinstate Marxism, entertained reexive liberalism
as an appropriate stance for cultural studies (Barker, 2003, p. 433), and moves
were made to re-position Halls social-reformist predecessor Richard Hoggart as
the true head and heart of the tradition (F. Inglis, 2004, p. 96).
Predictably, in this climate, Kuhn-speak circulated about a paradigm crisis
(Storey, 2001, p. 171), and the need for a new cultural studies after the cultural
studies paradigm (Baetens, 2005). In line with its multi-paradigm spread, student
textbooks were covering an ever larger number of origins, founders, theorists,
themes, and topics, never mind the politics. Undergraduate recruitment had
been pushing cultural studies for years towards self-presentation as a fully-edged
discipline, but it was a discipline lacking obvious cohesion and unity (White
and Schwock, 2006, p. 1), even if those very inconsistencies served to keep
the discipline fresh, energize it (During, 2005, p. 214). Interdisciplinarity was
still favoured by those with Birmingham roots (Johnson, 1997; Morley, 2000,
p. 245), Willis preferring a formula for cultural studies sometimes also used in
sociology about itself: discipline of the disciplines (Willis, 2003, p. xxi). More
lavish expressions included quasi-discipline, anti-discipline, interdiscursive
space, plural eld, uid project, border zone, and the current that washes the
shores of the islands of discipline. But none of this mattered like it did in the
1970s, because inter- and post-disciplinarity were by this time being actively
promoted in many subjects, and in the research funding bodies. Reecting
geographys striking intellectual expansion in this period, its own signature
generality, space, was soon incorporated as a core cultural studies dimension
too (Barker, 2003, Part 4; During, 2005, Part 3).
With its political, substantive, disciplinary and theoretical distinctive-
ness difcult to pinpoint, cultural studies authors underlined its practical and
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methodological features. This could come in epistemologically modest form
(Gray, 2003, p. 190), concentrating on inculcating empirical skills that might
serve as a kind of management template for marshalling the burgeoning
batches of cultural studies questions (White and Schwoch, 2006, p. 5). Just like
sociology students, cultural studies trainees were advised to let the research
question guide the selection of methods, to be exible about the use and mix
of quantitative/qualitative procedures, and to think carefully about whatever
evidenced generalities emerge from the produced data (Alasuutari, 1995). A
more normative version of methodologism stressed the necessity of ongoing
argument about the path of reasoning involved in enquiry, partly to avoid
all those dubious positivist aspects of methods still gesturally associated with
sociology (Gray, 2003, pp. 2, 16; Johnson et al., 2004, p. 1; Couldry, 2000,
p. 143, 2005b, p. 30). The emphasis on practice was occasionally uplifted into
an association with philosophical pragmatism, with Richard Rorty starting to
be referenced (Barker, 2003, p. 27), and Rorty-esque nominalism entering the
range of self-denitions, as in: cultural studies is what cultural studies does
(During, 2005, p. 8).
More determined theoretical approaches to the uses of cultural studies
included Angela McRobbies (2005) book of that title, which showed readers
how the difcult work of Hall, Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, and Judith Butler
offered insight into phenomena as diverse as Blairism, rap, postmodern lm,
and TV makeover programmes. This contribution kept alive something of the
Birmingham ideas-driven, politically selective habit, whilst registering in the
choice and fulsome afrmation of her theorists how primary the words now
barely sufce post-colonial and post-structuralist-feminist thought had
become. McRobbie also further fuelled the cultural studies-sociology encounter,
rst by including Bourdieu amongst the notables, then by criticising him for
various sociologistic lapses. With cultural studies in the Hall line anyway so
thoroughly reworking itself in terms of the post-colonial and the multicultural,
these have become the major domains in which disciplinary questions and
skirmishes reappear. On the one hand, sociology has been slower to take on
board the post-colonial challenge, owing to its deeper embeddedness in the
European Enlightenment heritage and its tendency to delineate society in terms
of the stages of modernity. Thus, when the issue became not just what culture
was but also whose culture we were talking about, and in what ways disciplines
themselves reproduced modernist-Westernist thought-styles, the complicity
of sociology with historic global injustices seemed apparent to post-colonial
radicals. On the other hand, post-colonial studies quickly developed its own
resume of familiar meta-theoretical antinomies, and post-colonial strands
committed to ideology-critique (including critique of sociology as ideology)
could not fail to be markedly sociologistic (McLennan, 2013).
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As with McRobbie, feminist sociologists ploughed increasingly fertile ground
between post-structuralism and sociological theory, Butler and Bourdieu, in
further negotiations of material versus cultural feminisms, frequently couched
in Nancy Frasers (2000) locution of redistribution versus recognition. On the
whole, British sociological feminists stood up for the primacy of social relations.
Thus, scepticism was expressed around the supposed inclination of Butler and
followers towards discursive/symbolic reductionism (McNay, 2004a, p. 173)
and a new feminist materialism was pronounced (Adkins, 2004a, p. 4), or at
least the inescapability of the material (Evans, 2003, p. 6). But these were highly
nuanced discussions, because the continuing feminist politics of interrogation
of sociology was pushing for a much more inclusive understanding of the
social itself (Witz and Marshall, 2004, p. 33). It was therefore not a matter of
returning to the already known social but of seeking to pin down the new
elements of the post-structural social (Adkins, 2004a, p. 5, 2004b) and of
building emotionality and physicality into an expanded sense of the material
itself. New phrases were tried out, seeking to overcome sociologys premature
separation of different forms of knowledge and experience (Evans, 2003,
pp. 356) lived relations, situated intersubjectivity (McNay, 2004a, 2004b),
symbolic economies (Skeggs, 2005), and the ubiquitous intersectionality.
Such inventive feminist theorising ensured that when, in the light of
the cultural turn, the quintessential sociological notion of class came to
be reassessed, a vigorous mix of views would be aired. In an emblematic
volume, the editorial quartet paired off and squared up, with Fiona Devine
and Mike Savage (2005, pp. 1112) drawing ideas from the cultural turn in
order to break with traditional stratication research, pressing that identities
conceived as recognition and stigma go well beyond previous thoughts about
structurally given positionalities. Rosemary Crompton and John Scott (2005,
pp. 191, 200) responded by espying a worrying individualism lying behind
all that subjectivity, signalling again the dangers lurking in taking culture
(too) seriously. Bev Skeggs (2005) followed up her (2004) writings on class,
self and culture by arguing that feelings and dispositions could never be taken
too seriously, adding that cultural values and stigmatised norms were always
materially inscribed, in bodies. In a related move, Andrew Sayer (2005) sought
to show why class experience was inextricably and even primarily moral, an
innovative discussion somewhat hampered, like Skeggss work, by its slight
treatment of the very terms class and working class.
These developments from the 2000s, then, reworked some familiar
polarisations, but made dialectical advances too. Partly, this was a matter of
institutional politics: at Birmingham University, most notably, the stand-alone
department of cultural studies which succeeded the post-graduate-only CCCS
was fused with Sociology only for the new joint enterprise to be closed down
in starkly managerialist top-down fashion. The protest from sociologists and
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cultural studies people alike, up and down the land, was loud and unanimous,
but to no avail. More generally in pedagogical terms, cultural studies started
to appear in the sociological introductions as necessary for sociology students
to know about, and considered as a natural part of the discipline broadly
conceived (for example, Macionis and Plummer 2005, pp. 1236; Fulcher and
Scott, 2004, pp. 637). Texts announcing their wholehearted commitment to
the cultural turn within sociology (Alexander and Thompson, 2008) did not,
in truth, greatly differ from those that did not. In parallel, cultural studies
primers more closely resembled those in sociology by way of topic coverage
and conceptual themes, especially when couched in sociology of knowledge
mould (Baldwin et al., 2004). And the showcase volume British Cultural Studies
(Morley and Robins, 2001) was notable both for the number of sociologists
involved and for the absence of intellectual differences among the variety of
specialist contributors. Altogether, there seemed to be a good case building
for something like sociological cultural studies (McLennan, 2006), or at least
for considering the two discourses to be (still) densely intertwined with one
another, in spite of residual temperamental differences (Wolff, 1999). Texts and
courses in social theory in particular seemed to be offering a menu of blended
insights and concepts (for example, Elliott, 1999, 2009). These gathering trends
received a scathing reaction, and a sociological explanation, from those who felt
that vague, puffed-up general theory had by this time over-run proper analyti-
cal-empirical sociological theory (Abell and Reyniers, 2000). A path-dependent,
takeover process had occurred, it was ruefully observed, whereby children of
the welfare state heyday, who went to university to study broadly Humanities
subjects, came to steadily colonise jobs in the social sciences, thereafter drawing
into their sphere of inuence new cohorts of like-minded students, colleagues
and publishers. Pretend sociology was the result, these stalwarts felt, with
the remnants of real sociology to be found, rather beleaguered, in parts of the
specialised, semi-autonomous research centres (Goldthorpe, 2004, pp. 1245).
The Knot Unravels
If such sociological specialists will regard the topic of this chapter as
exemplifying exactly what should have been avoided, others will approve the
state of reexive coalescence described in the last section. The overarching
gure of the cultural turn may turn fuzzy under examination, but productive
combinations have organised themselves around its terms, leaving headroom
for sparks to y as and when necessary. One indicative approach in this climate
is the cultural political economy perspective of Bob Jessop and colleagues,
which directly responds to the turn by building detailed attention to semiosis
into the analysis of contemporary capitalist dynamics (for example, Jessop
and Oosterlynck, 2008). In this outlook, economic directions are understood
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as secured and regulated, just as sociopolitical identities are conrmed
or contested, by specically rhetorical mechanisms. But a critical realist
connotation remains, because texts, categories and imaginaries are causally
effective orderings within a real, multidimensional rst-order system. Another
fertile furrow has been ploughed by material cultural studies, the Oxford
Handbook of which registers a new kind of material turn, on the basis that
the previous cultural turn rather was, paradoxically perhaps, too sociologistic
(anthropologists and archaeologists predominate in this school). That is to say,
social meanings, too easily arrived at, were too transparently read into too many
things, which have an ontological prole of their own. Overall, though, the
basic message is again conciliatory, since talk of too many turns just becomes a
matter of spin (Hicks and Beaudry, 2010, p. 20), and because the sociocultural
and the material should never be taken in isolation from one another (Hicks,
2010, p. 69).
Such initiatives, however, are not merely conciliatory; they offer fresh
formulations and new objects of enquiry, thus accentuating the process
whereby past locutions come to feel dated, allegiances weaken, perspectives
multiply, and more disruptive lines of thinking push forward. This process is
evident in the discourse of the Economic and Social Research Councils Centre
for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC), co-directed by Tony Bennett
for several years after he followed Stuart Hall as the chair of Sociology at the
OU. This signicant programme sustains the legacies of both disciplinary
sociology and cultural studies, cements the class-culture-Bourdieu-feminism
loop, and helps rebuff specialist claims that no serious empirical work gets
done when social-and-cultural talk is gushing forth. But on inspection, the
CRESC frame, whilst eminently inclusive, is not well captured in terms even
of pragmatic reexivity. For instance, in the blurb of the CRESC book series
Culture, Economy and the Social, and in the volume extending debates around
Bourdieu (Silva and Warde, 2010), notice is given that the days of epochal
theory are over, that another kind of descriptive turn is under way, and that
there are new critical agendas to attend to. All of which signal serious trouble
for the culture and society matrix that one way or another has steered the
sociology-cultural studies interface.
The logic of the epochalism charge (see, for example, Osborne, 2008;
Osborne et al., 2008) is that both sociology and cultural studies have striven
to out-do each other (or reach the right sort of accommodation) in articulating
a coherent overall approach to the phases and nature of contemporary society
(whether construed as modern, capitalist, patriarchal, post-colonial, or even de-
differentiated and fragmented), in light of which particular cultural expressions
and aspects of subjective life are identied as merely symptomatic expressions.
Despite many differences of emphasis, the common commitment is to
large-scale culturology, and an accompanying temperamental romanticism
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the compulsion critical scholars feel to somehow speak politically on behalf
of society, and for radical progressive change. The descriptive-cum-ethical
alternative resists these impossibly broad constructions and the moralistic tone
that accompanies them, looking instead at the way in which quite specic sorts
of accounts, data, and methods construct or problematise social facts and forces.
Instead of constantly probing for deep determinants, it is more interesting to
dwell on this labile, complex surface.
Another CRESC leader, Mike Savage, has been particularly active in conveying
these challenges, including the one that mass digital data poses for sociologys
standard methodological procedures. In one of several such pieces, Savage
notes how contemporary theorising inuenced by the cultural turn is also
pushing beyond it (Savage, 2012, p. 178). Non-representational theory is a
case in point. Its chief proponent, geographer Nigel Thrift, has consistently
argued that, substantively, contemporary capitalism is a thinking, knowing
and culturally creative formation, and therefore not amenable to older-style
political-economy treatment (Thrift, 2005). Thrifts meta-discourse, accordingly,
makes much of sensibilities and sensoria, impulses and intuitions, aesthetic
apprehension and the poetics of encounter. So far, so completely turned, we
might think. But Thrifts plea for ensoulment and invocation of the affective
swash of the present is personalised beyond any precedent in either cultural
studies or cultural sociology, and he disavows mammoth statements of any
sort concerning the cultural, the material, or even the cultural-material. In that
sense the rather cloying hegemony of the cultural turn (Thrift, 2008, pp. vii,
26, 148) is just as unproductive as what it sought to replace, because ultimately
its conceptual logic is just as cognitive (= inadequate).
Thrift gains his distance from the intoxicating culture of immediacy
(Tomlinson, 2011, p. 192) by urging a fusion of social theory with the new
biology, and by drawing the line at neo-religious appeals for a total makeover
of standard ways of thinking (Thrift, 2008, pp. 1318). No such wimpish
hesitancy for Scott Lash (2010), however, who boldly promotes a messianic will
to grasp the utterly singular intensities of cultural experience and anticipation.
Standard forms of theory are thereby condemned as lifeless extensive
understandings. Lash therefore advises that if cultural studies wishes to depart
from the tedious epistemological tropes so characteristic of sociology itself,
then every vestige of the concept that gave it denition, namely hegemony,
needs to be ditched.
Actor Network Theory (ANT) is omnipresent across this range of conceptual
revision. ANT picked up the drive of earlier Science, Technology and Society
(STS) currents to surpass 1970s sociology of scientic knowledge by modestly
and empirically investigating science as practice and culture (Pickering, 1992).
Since that time ANT has moved from the margins to the centre of social theory
and research. Quite a few sociologists nd this disturbing, given ANTs strident
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anti-epochalism, its anti-romanticism including scepticism about post-colonial
epochal-romanticism, we should note (Latour, 2005, p. 187) and its
renunciation of explanation in favour of description. In fact, it is slightly unclear
whether ANT does entirely foreclose on explanation, the key formulations
often being cryptic, as in if description remains in need of an explanation,
it means that it is a bad description (Latour, 2005, p. 137). The point is more
emphatically that explanation by reference to the social or society or social
interests needs to be abandoned (Joyce, 2002). These all-purpose inventions
are, for ANT-ers, the outcomes and effects not causes or factors of delimited
associations in which assemblages of human and non-human actors variously
bind and disperse. For ANT, the social circulates within the world of things, not
the other way round. At a pinch, we could say that ANT remains interested in
pinning down, and being politically engaged in, the structuration process, and
that it is still concerned to lay down (heterodox) rules of sociological method.
Thus, every science is sociological says Latour (2002, p. 121), following Gabriel
Tarde, whose monadology of mutual relations and proximate inuences
makes him the superior founding gure for ANT-ers (see Candea, 2010). But
if ANT is (nowadays) pushing an alternative sociology rather than completely
rejecting all things sociological, its prohibitions are strict. Not only must the
quintessential modernist binary nature/society be dismantled, so must all those
other polar codings that sociology and cultural studies tend to share: structure/
agency, macro/micro, the social/the cultural, the cultural/the material. Thus,
whilst ANT could be said to having been party to the cultural turn, it has
also been very uneasy about it, because ANT is more roundly about relational
material practices, opposing the reication of culture just as much as it opposes
old-style materialism and social-structuralism (Law, 1999, p. 4, 2002, pp. 212;
Latour, 2005, p. 168).
With such surpassing perspectives coming to the fore, sober deliberations
on social research after the cultural turn (Roseneil and Frosh, 2012) have a
moving on rather than a behold the turn feel, including a feminist moving
on. An American collection on historical sociology beyond the cultural turn
(Bonnell and Hunt, 1999) had also raised thorny issues about explanation and
the social, minus the ANT argot. Other recent discussions on both sides of the
Atlantic have been weaker (Back et al., 2012; Reed and Alexander, 2009), oddly
presenting the turn as something very new, and unconvincingly still intent on
forcing a stand-off between something called sociology of culture and something
called cultural sociology. Overall, our constituent conceptual problems need
further perspicuous and rigorous treatment before we can decide whether they
have yet more running in them, and a satisfying solution, or whether they have
in effect drifted to a close. As for the sociology-cultural studies dialectic, much
will depend on whether they survive as academic subjects in British universities,
which at time of writing is uncertain. And much will depend on the quality
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and personality of the standard bearers who might push any possible synthesis
further. The size of that task was hugely accentuated in February 2014 on the
death of Stuart Hall, the indisputably major and charismatic personality at the
heart of all these reconsiderations.
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