Comparing Japanese and American interaction, Language, Social Structure, and Culture argues that language use is instrumental in the construction of social structure and culture. In order to ground the work in empirical evidence, verbal interaction in similar situations – Japanese and American cooking classes – is compared. Unlike other studies of verbal interaction, a genre analysis approach is used to examine regular patterns at three levels of language use: interaction, discourse, and grammar. Collectively, these patterns exhibit both similarities and differences across the classes in the two cultures, creating the unique event that has been institutionalized as a cooking class in each culture. In concluding, the author suggests that genre analysis is a useful approach for cross-cultural research in that it provides information about situation-specific language use, but also information about what aspects of linguistic structure are likely to become conventionalized across languages and cultures, across situations, and across time.

This book uses surveys, statistics, and case studies to explain why and how cultural norms affect political attitudes and behavior.

This is an exploration of the creative work done by leading sociologists who were inspired by the scholarship of Neil Smelser.

"This text is intended for a one-semester introductory course."--Page 1.

Society and Culture reclaims the classical heritage, provides a clear-eyed assessment of the promise of sociology in the 21st century and asks whether the `cultural turn′ has made the study of society redundant. Sociologists have objected to the rise of cultural studies on the grounds that it produces cultural relativism and lacks a stable research agenda. This book looks at these criticisms and illustrates the relevance of a sociological perspective in the analysis of human practice. The book argues that the classical tradition must be treated as a living tradition, rather than a period piece. It analyzes the fundamental principles of belonging and conflict in society and provides a detailed critical survey of the principal social theories that offer solutions to the challenges of modernism.

American Cultural Sociology presents a serious challenge to British Cultural Studies and European grand theory alike. This exciting volume brings together sixteen seminal papers by leading figures in what is emerging as an important intellectual tradition. It places them in the context of related work in Sociology and other disciplines, exploring the connections between cultural sociology and different approaches, such as comparative and historical research, postmodernism, and symbolic interactionism. The book is divided into three sections: Culture as Text and Code, The Production and Reception of Culture, and Culture in Action. Each section contains edited contributions, both theoretical and empirical, addressing the key debates in cultural sociology, including the autonomy of culture, power and culture, structure and agency and how to conceptualise meaning.