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Social Science General

Sociology and Mass Culture

Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard

by (author) Patricia Cormack

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2004
Category
General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780802086860
    Publish Date
    Apr 2004
    List Price
    $45.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802035288
    Publish Date
    Aug 2002
    List Price
    $62.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442680043
    Publish Date
    Jul 2002
    List Price
    $66.00

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Description

In this concise and engaging work, Patricia Cormack investigates the broad cultural significance and relevance of academic sociology by examining its on-going relationship with modernity and mass culture. She bids us, rather than deny sociology's participation in culture, to see the discipline as informing ethical, epistemological and pedagogical questions. Through an examination of the writings of Emile Durkheim, C. Wright Mills and Jean Baudrillard, Cormack illustrates how their formulations of sociology as a cultural practice is rooted in the very mass culture that it studies.

Central to the argument is a discussion of conceptual and rhetorical devices - "totems" and "tropes" - within social theory. In agreement with the three theorist subjects, Cormack posits that the social is a discursive artifact, becoming over time a "social fact", explaining and sustaining ordinary life. Durkheim treats the 19th century birth of sociology (in which he played a large part), as an intrinsic aspect of modern cultural consciousness. Mills advances this view further, treating the "Sociological Imagination" as part of and informing, mass culture. Baudrillard treats sociological reason as now equivalent to and inextricable from commonsense understandings of the culture it seeks to understand - rendering the sociological project essentially mute.

Of value to social scientists, and theorists in particular, this is a specialized volume - a sociology of sociology - written at senior undergraduate or graduate level. It is intended as textually oriented ethnography, and thus presents a theoretical rather than empirical investigation of the relationship between sociology and culture.

About the author

Patricia Cormack is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at St. Francis Xavier University.

Patricia Cormack's profile page

Editorial Reviews

'An important contribution to reassessment of sociology's place in the modern world.'

Choice

'Engaging and intelligent ... I look forward to future developments of Cormack's distinctive voice.'

American Journal of Sociology