Production of Culture

The expression production of culture identifies a perspective or approach originally developed in the field of industrial sociology in the 1970s and 1980s, mainly through the work of the late Richard A. Peterson, then professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The recording industry, jazz, and especially country music originally provided the empirical ground for the development of this perspective, which Peterson has carefully and successfully generalized beyond the narrow boundaries of his own case studies. Over the years, the original proposal has developed as an intellectual movement, strongly influencing the formation of a specialized subdiscipline of sociology devoted to the study of culture, that is, the sociology of culture (sometimes also called cultural sociology). The production perspective has some resemblances and historical links ...