Culture and Everyday Life

Culture and Everyday Life is a clearly written and highly accessible text that provides a comprehensive overview of the key theoretical models applied in the study of contemporary cultural practices and their application in everyday settings. This entails a systematic study of how academic thinking about mass culture has changed from critical accounts of early mass cultural theorists to radical postmodernist critiques of mass cultural accounts, to 'the cultural turn' which has sought to explore how various social identities are culturally constructed. After setting the scene the author goes on to provide themed chapters that cover a particular aspect of late modern culture including the media, music, fashion, tourism and counter-cultural ideologies and movements. In each case a comprehensive overview of the existing literature is provided and its theoretical and empirical relevance of our understanding of the relationship between culture and everyday life in contemporary society is clearly explained. Lucid, penetrating and illustrated with a range of rich examples, this is a superb text for teaching and research in the sociology of culture and cultural studies.