Sociological Issues in Culture and Critical Theorizing

The aim of this paper is to present and critically discuss the long journey of the enterprise of culture from the modernist condition of “high culture” (or “elite culture”) to the contemporary postmodernist (?) condition of “popular culture” (or “mass culture”). It will particularly seek to illustrate and assess the nature, role and implications of the various “modes of reading and interpreting” culture and explore a broad church of arguments and theoretical approaches around the (underlying) ideological functions and connotations of cultural production, distribution and consumption. In addition, a particular emphasis will be given to the so-called structure-culture-agency debate, on the analytical basis of a number of historically significant intellectual (sociological) currents and traditions such as, the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Marxism, post-modernism and cultural studies.