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This chapter analyses a shift in contemporary American sociology to the study of culture and cultural analysis. This shift or return of culture in sociology represents something of an intellectual pendulum swing. Talcott Parsons's structural functionalism dominated the middle decades of the 20th century. It taught that human societies are regulated and coordinated from the top down by their cultural systems and that, from the bottom up, individual actors are oriented and guided by cultural values that they internalize through socialization. In the mid-1960s and 1970s, however, Parsons's structural functionalism was attacked and displaced as the dominant framework in the discipline. Various developments within and outside of sociology had helped prepare the intellectual ground for new and creative sociological scholarship that began to employ culture in ways more sophisticated than structural functionalism.

This chapter discusses two disciplinary paradigms that prefigured the institutional requirements of the post-World War II university and expanding new class: the New Criticism and the structural functionalism. The New Criticism emphasizes close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. Structural functionalism is a sociological theory that aims to explain why society functions by focusing on the relationships between the various social institutions that make up society. The separation of literary studies and sociology that took place under the aegis of these paradigms has masked underlying affinities between the attitude of the two disciplines toward the new class that critics and sociologists hoped to train within their classrooms. Moreover, both paradigms involve similar deformations of the social trustee ideology that had pervaded the professional stratum in the early twentieth century.

This essay charts the genealogy of the sociology of emotions as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. It shows how the dominant structural functionalism in postwar US sociology did not provide a language for emotions and largely relegated them to the irrational and deviant. Impulses for a sociology of emotions came from within the discipline – mainly Erving Goffman's symbolic interactionism – as well as from the impact of larger social and political contexts, especially the preoccupation with social, racial, and gender inequalities. Arlie Hochschild's classic study The Managed Heart constituted the prime example for the emerging constructivist perspective on emotions, which then radiated outwards and began to influence researchers in Western Europe. As an American “import,” the US sociology of emotions initially displaced a long standing European tradition in the field (Simmel, Elias) but has meanwhile evolved into a multidirectional and genuinely transatlantic discourse.

This chapter shows that a work history is the result of a process of drift in which a person must take advantage of opportunities as they arise and so build a career that reflects the unintended consequences of those actions. The availability of suitable jobs depends on the prevailing economic conditions and the pattern of higher education policy and it is impossible to plan for openings in particular departments or places. Commitment to a career and an identity as a sociologist develops as a result of reflection on the choices made and their outcomes. The chapter traces the ways in which working in particular Departments shapes the developing identity of someone as a sociologist and helps to build a particular conception of the nature of sociology as a subject. This developing identity underpins the choices made about involvement in professional bodies such as the British Sociological Association and about participation in activities that shape the development of the discipline.

In this chapter, the author comments on Su Li's discussion of the constitution of ancient China. In his account of Chinese constitutional law, Su Li tackles constitutionalism from a historical point of view. While acknowledging Su Li's contributions to urging Chinese legal scholars to rethink the meaning of “constitution,” not as a modern, liberal, normative conception, but in its original, constitutive, descriptive sense, the author argues that Su Li's structural functionalism fails to pay sufficient attention to the problem of legitimation and the dimension of politico-cultural meaning. The author examines the popular ideas about constitutional law and constitutionalism in contemporary China before delving into Su Li's arguments in detail. In particular, he addresses the issue of constitutional continuity and discontinuity as well as legitimacy continuity. He also cites Su Li's claim that the emperor was an indispensable constitutional institution in ancient China.

This chapter describes how both sociological and lay understandings of family change have been informed by the belief that modern families are fundamentally different from traditional families. It reveals the origins of this idea in nineteenth century evolutionary thinking and shows how it was developed by twentieth century sociologists. The chapter introduces some of the iconic studies on Irish families from this period and evaluates them in light of recent scholarship. It describes how qualitative research on contemporary families and new findings on historical households, together with the growing influence of feminism, prompted the development of more critical perspectives in the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter introduces some of the concepts and theories that are essential for understanding family change, including kinship and family systems and the demographic transition.

This chapter explains in concise narrative the historical background and developments leading up to American sociology’s contemporary investment in its current sacred project. The chapter begins by describing the efforts in early modern Europe and the Enlightenment to reconstitute society on rational, secular, scientific grounds instead of religious faith. The chapter then shows the discipline of sociology’s deepest roots as involving a vision of world transformation guided by a radically new sacred vision of humanity, life, society, and the cosmos, providing examples from leading early American sociologists. The chapter focuses on the breakdown of the structural-functionalist paradigm in the 1960s and the radicalization and fragmentation that followed, along with the institutional growth and influence of the 1960s cultural and sexual revolutions and political activism in the discipline.