A New Research Programme for Cultural Sociology: On Christopher Thorpe’s Cultural Sociology of Cultural Representations

Abstract

This essay offers a critical appraisal of Christopher Thorpe’s ‘Cultural Sociology of Cultural Representations’ both as a contribution to the historical sociology of English cultural representations of Italy and as the foundations for a new research programme in cultural sociology. It analyses the most important theoretical and critical choices made by Thorpe in setting up his project, and how these inform the analysis of English representations of Italy. It explores the role played Bourdieu’s Field Theory and the Strong Programme of Jeffrey Alexander and the Yale Cultural Sociology (YCS) group in the new approach advocated by Thorpe. It identifies particular strengths in Thorpe’s new programme, in particular in addressing the complex temporalities of cultural change, as well as some weaknesses linked to the structuralist model of culture in YCS, with its over emphasis on discursive meaning as the essence of culture. It suggests these shortcomings could be ameliorated with the help of Peirce’s semiotics, certain strands of recent psychology, and some aspects of action theory.