Introduction

Abstract

This book is an account of sociological debates in relation to culture, taste and value. It provides an introduction to several perspectives, and addresses a number of key questions. The book echoes Raymond Williams (1981, p. 13) in conceptualizing ‘culture’ as both ‘a whole way of life’ and as ‘artistic and intellectual activities’.¹ The debates in this book utilize, at various times, each of these senses of the word. The book brings to the fore the tensions between culture and market forces, between individual expression and impersonal societal forms, between ways of acting and thinking that are value-driven and those that impose order on reality through quantifiable and calculable standards. For example, it considers the pursuit of particular value-systems where cultural values are in retreat as a consequence of processes of rationalization (see Chapters 1 and 2); it argues that taste and cultural evaluation are expressive of class and educational background and yet, also, can to some extent be consciously planned and actively performed (see Chapters 3, 4 and 5). It considers alternative ways of evaluating cultural objects during times in which the logic of profit occupies a dominant position as the arbiter of value (see Chapter 5); it examines tensions in the global field of cultural production where sameness and difference coalesce: where the heavy tread of transnational corporations is accompanied by the pitter-patter of more light-footed culture creators, and where even the most standardized cultural objects have aesthetic properties that are assessed variably by audiences familiar with the codes associated with the particular category of cultural production to which these objects belong (see Chapters 6 and 7).