Sociology of Culture

Sociology of culture examines how beliefs, symbols and practices both reflect and shape social life. It explores the ways in which groups create, transmit and contest meanings through art, media, rituals, everyday interactions and digital platforms. Central concerns include the reproduction of social hierarchies through taste and distinction, the emergence of subcultures and counterpublics, and the transformation of cultural values over time. Scholars investigate how cultural resources—ranging from educational credentials and artistic canons to popular media and grassroots movements—are mobilised to negotiate identities, exercise power and engender social change. Interdisciplinary methods draw on ethnography, survey analysis, discourse studies and network approaches to trace connections between individual agency and structural forces. In an era of globalisation and digital convergence, sociology of culture addresses questions of cultural hybridity, regional variation and the role of institutions in mediating cultural access. By illuminating the interplay of material conditions and symbolic orders, the field offers insights into the dynamics of inequality, cohesion and innovation in a rapidly changing world.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Researchers have analysed the global patterns of cultural change using survey data from 1981 to 2022 across seventy-six countries. The study finds that values emphasising tolerance and self-expression have grown most divergent between high-income Western nations and the rest of the world, even as regional neighbours display increasing similarity. This suggests a trend of global divergence coupled with regional convergence, challenging earlier expectations of uniform cultural homogenisation under modernisation.

A scoping review of psychological literature on body modification synthesises nearly a hundred studies of tattooing, piercing and related practices. It reveals a shift from viewing these alterations as pathological or deviant towards understanding them as meaningful expressions of identity, fashion and social belonging. The review highlights thematic categories of risk, health, credibility and aesthetic self-fashioning, calling for refined methods to capture the complex motives and outcomes of body modification.

In the context of digital discourse, analysts have explored how online exchanges in one East Asian society constructed promiscuity and cheating as moral deviance. Examining debates on a social media platform, they show that informal social control through hashtags and comment threads reinforced compulsory monogamy and intensified stigma against marginalised sexual practices. The findings underscore the need for content-regulation measures that go beyond narrow moderation tactics to address collective moral norms and digital violence.

Sociology of Culture publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in sociology of culture across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Cultural capital: Non-economic assets such as education, credentials and cultural knowledge that confer social distinction.

Habitus: Internalised dispositions and sensibilities shaped by past experiences that guide tastes and practices.

Cultural omnivorousness: The consumption of a wide array of cultural forms, spanning both elite and popular domains.

Value divergence: The process by which cultural values become increasingly dissimilar across societies.

References

1. Worldwide divergence of values. Nature Communications (2024).
2. Deviance as an historical artefact: a scoping review of psychological studies of body modification. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2023).
3. Social media construction of sexual deviance in Hong Kong: a case study of a Facebook discussion. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2024).
4. The Dynamics of Democracy, Development and Cultural Values. PLOS ONE (2014).
5. Chinese social value change and its relevant factors: an age-period-cohort effect analysis. The Journal of Chinese Sociology (2024).
6. Beyond the cultural backlash: exploring diverse pathways to authoritarian populism in Europe. Democratization (2024).