Culture, Economy, and the Social - Book Series
Culture, Economy and the Social
Editors
Professor Tony Bennett, Sociology, Open University
Professor Penny Harvey, Anthropology, Manchester University
Professor Kevin Hetherington, Geography, Open University
The Culture, Economy and the Social series aims to publish innovative contemporary, comparative and historical work on socio-cultural change. Our intention is to publish empirically-based research that works across theoretical traditions and established disciplinary approaches. We are looking for studies that critically examine the ways in which socio-cultural change is framed and made visible, and that are attentive to perspectives that tend to be ignored or side-lined by generalizing narrative tropes and theoretical positions. We seek to commission work that registers how particular events and practices come to appear remarkable at particular times and in particular places. This commitment to the particular is not a move against theoretical work. On the contrary, a core aim for this series is to counter simplistic (epochal) accounts of social and cultural change through a theoretical engagement with the irreducible complexity presented by empirical research.
Such complexity is widely recognised across a range of theoretical traditions in the social sciences and humanities. It is evident in ‘cultural economy’ approaches to the organisation of markets, is an aspect of the contributions made by science studies and actor network theory to the study of organisational processes and institutional practices, and is a distinguishing feature of the new schools of cultural history that have now displaced the position once enjoyed by social history. Feminist scholarship and queer theorists have stressed the importance of sexuality and embodied practices in the performance of social relationships. In cultural studies, the influential range of constructivist perspectives derived from discourse theory, post-structuralist linguistics, psycho-analytic and neo-Marxist approaches have been complemented by work on culture and governance. Figures such as Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and Bourdieu are widely cited points of reference that connect traditional concerns in sociology and anthropology to those of cultural geographers, to the wider social-science and humanities based disciplines. Analyses of power and cultural value, of material culture, public action, ethics and responsibility figure widely in contemporary debates across the social sciences and humanities.
These fundamental questions about how to understand the diverse manifestations of contemporary capitalism, and how to approach the various ways in which the ‘social’, ‘the cultural’ and ‘the economic’ are apprehended as tangible sites of value and practice are carried forward in this series. Our approach is explicitly comparative – working across disciplinary perspectives, working cross-culturally, and working historically. We expect the books in this series to be actively engaged in the analysis of the different theoretical traditions that have contributed to the development of the ‘cultural turn’, with a view to clarifying where these approaches converge and where they diverge. Our commitment to interdisciplinary is thus aimed at enriching theoretical and methodological discussion, building awareness of what common ground has emerged in the past decade, and thinking through what is at stake in those approaches that resist integration to a common analytical model.
Methodological discussion is of central importance to these ambitions, issues of method often masking cherished but unexamined assumptions about those social realities we seek to apprehend. In particular we encourage work that thinks critically about the relationship between image, narrative and number as sources and forms of evidence. We invite reflection on the communications infrastructures (in both technological and explicitly inter-subjective modes) that underpin our engagements with others as we carry out our research and seek to communicate what we find to others.
