Culture

Almost all encyclopedia entries and essays dedicated to the lemma ‘cul-ture’ cite Raymond Williams’ famous statement in his 1976 Keywords: «Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language». This sentence can be easily modified to say that ‘culture’ is one of the most complicated words in sociological theory as there is no author who has explicitly or implicitly avoided addressing the topic. But this is not the only debt that the study of culture owes to Williams, who defined culture as also the ‘ordinary’ and ‘the whole way of life’ found in a particular society (Williams 1958). Contrary to any elitist view of the phenomenon focused on the existence of a high and legitimate forms of culture, Williams underlined that culture is part of the everyday activity of human beings because they are able to produce, learn and share it. This chapter briefly reviews the use of the term ‘culture’ in classic and critical sociological theory. The first section discusses two general over-views of the notion of culture (by Bauman and Jenks) to introduce the multi-faceted complexity of the term and to find a lowest common de-nominator that can act as a basis for the discussion. The following sections consider, among the many possible, some approaches of classic sociology (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, the Chicago School) and some critical ap-proaches to the topic (the Frankfurt School and British cultural studies). Discussed as theoretical proposals representative of the analysis of culture in the age of the digital revolution will be Manuel Castells’ notion of net-work culture; Henry Jenkins’ ‘convergence culture’; and ‘participatory culture’.