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619 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2008)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0619 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION The Diversity of Culture By AMY BINDER, MARY BLAIR-LOY, JOHN EVANS, KWAI NG, and MICHAEL SCHUDSON B y 2008, the much publicized cultural turn in sociology is old news.' How far are we from the point where we made our initial turn toward culture? Some say we are in the midst of it (Friedland and Mohr 2004), while others believe we are in fact moving beyond it (Bonnell and Hunt 1999). Rather than debate this question, our goal in this special volume of The Annals is to add substance to the claim that all sociology must concern itself with meaning. The volume will pro- vide evidence of cultural work being done throughout the discipline by offering updated reports from several different sociological sub- fields. The collection intentionally differs from other attempts to define cultural sociology from a particular theoretical position. Rather than aiming for definitive conclusions, we demonstrate how culture is already put into use in many areas of sociological inquiry, some of which, at first glance, seem to have little to do with culture. The goal is to provide a justification, not so much in the form of a theoretical defense, but more as a practical argument for the growing sig- nificance of culture to our discipline. To para- phrase a comment made by critical theorists, our theory is already inherent in reality-or in other words, in the concrete research of many sociolo- gists today. As Jacobs and Spillman (2005) point out, cultural sociology contributes to other sub- fields by empirically addressing central theoreti- cal issues such as agency/structure, macro/micro, NOTE: The authors are grateful to the University of California, San Diego's, Social Science Division, the Department of Sociology, and the Department of Communication for generously funding the annual cul- ture conferences in 2005, 2006, and 2007. Richard Madsen, our department chair, has been generous and supportive throughout. For his input into the idea of an edited collection of articles, we thank Calvin Morrill, who also contributed an excellent piece on organization theory to the volume. We also thank Julie Odland, man- aging editor of The Annals, for her assistance. The edi- tors contributed equally to this project. Our names are listed alphabetically for convenience. DOI: 10.1177/0002716208318469 ANNALS, AAPSS, 619, September 2008 6

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