Since sociologists returned to the study of culture in the past several decades, a pursuit all but anathema for a generation, cultural sociology has emerged as a vibrant field. Edited by three leading cultural sociologists, The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology presents the full theoretical and methodological vitality of this critically significant new area.The Handbook gathers together works by authors confronting the crucial choices all cultural sociologists face today: about analytic priorities, methods, topics, epistemologies, ideologies, and even modes of writing. It is a vital collection of preeminent thinkers studying the ways in which culture, society, politics, and economy interact in the world.
Organized by empirical areas of study rather than particular theories or competing intellectual strands, the Handbook addresses power, politics, and states; economics and organization; mass media; social movements; religion; aesthetics; knowledge; and health. Allowing the reader to observe tensions as well as convergences, the collection displays the value of cultural sociology not as a niche discipline but as a way to view and understand the many facets of contemporary society. The first of its kind, The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology offers comprehensive and immediate access to the real developments and disagreements taking place in the field, and deftly exemplifies how cultural sociology provides a new way of seeing and modeling social facts.
"This groundbreaking, readable handbook [is] the first single volume to attempt to unify its diverse contemporary applications in a wide range of traditional genres of sociology...Valuable for college universities and libraries supporting undergraduate and graduate degree programs in sociology and history."-CHOICE

Jeffrey Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Ronald Jacobs is Professor of Sociology at SUNY-Albany. Philip Smith is Professor of Sociology at Yale.

1. Introduction: Cultural Sociology Today
Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald Jacobs, and Philip Smith
PART I The Cultural Method in Sociology
2. Cultural Sociology as a Research Program: Post-Positivism, Meaning, and Causality
Isaac Ariail Reed
3. Rationalization Processes inside Cultural Sociology
Richard Biernacki
4. Four Ways to Measure Culture: Social Science, Hermeneutics, and the Cultural Turn
John Mohr and Craig Rawlings
PART II The Economic as Culture
5. Culture and the Economy
Carlo Tognato
6. Culture and Economic Life
Lyn Spillman
PART III The Political as Culture
7. From Moral Sentiments to Civic Engagement: Sociological Analysis as Responsible Spectatorship
Robin Wagner-Pacifici
8. Reinventing the Concept of Civic Culture
Paul Lichterman
9. Cultural Sociology and Civil Society in a World of Flows: Recapturing Ambiguity, Hybridity and the Political
Gianpaolo Biaocchi
PART IV The Media as Culture
10. Mediatized Disasters in the Global Age: On the Ritualization of Catastrophe
Simon Cottle
11. Media, Intellectuals, the Public Sphere, and the Story of Barack Obama in 2008
Eleanor Townsely
12. Entertainment Media and the Aesthetic Public Sphere
Ronald Jacobs
PART V Race and Immigration as Culture
13. Rethinking the Relationship of African American Men to the Street
Al Young
14. Ethnicity, Race, Nationhood, Foreignness, Etc.: Prolegomena to a Cultural Sociology of Difference-Based Interactions
Giuseppe Sciortino
15. Burning Schools/Building Bridges: Ethnographical Touchdowns in the Civil Sphere
Mats Trondman
PART VI Religion as Culture
16. The Constitution of Religious Political Violence: Institution, Culture and Power
Roger Friedland
17. Globalization, Culture and Religion
Kenneth Thompson
PART VII Social Movements as Culture
18. Narrative and Social Movements
Francesca Polletta and Bobby Chen
19. The Politics of Authenticity: Civic Individualism and the Cultural Roots of Gay Normalization
Steven Seidman, Chet Meeks, and James Dean
PART VIII Trauma as Culture
20. Rethinking Conflict and Memory: the case of Nanjing
Barry Schwartz
21. Cultural Trauma: Emotion and Narration
Ron Eyerman
22. The Chinese Construction and Repression of Trauma: The Rape of Nanjing
Jeffrey C. Alexander and Rui Gao
PART IX Events as Culture
23. Events as Templates of Possibility: An Analytic Typology of Political Facts
Mabel Berezin
24. Cultural Pragmatics and the Structure and Flow of Democratic Politics
Jason Mast
PART X Materiality as Culture
25. Consumption as Cultural Interpretation: Taste, Performativity and Navigating The Forest Of Objects
Ian Woodward
26. The Force of Embodiment: Bodies, Dispositions and Culture
Arthur Frank
27. Music Sociology in a New Key
Lisa McCormick
PART XI Knowledge as Culture
28. Narrating Global Warming
Philip Smith
PART XII Classification and Ambiguity as Culture
29. Broadening the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Focus On Mundane Life in Organizations
Nina Eliasoph and Jade Lo
30. Inbetweenness and Ambivalence
Bernhard Giesen