The question about how culture shapes the possibilities for successful democratization has been a controversial issue for decades. This article maintains that successful democratization depends not only on the distribution of political interests and resources, but to seriously challenge a political regime, the advocates of democracy require cultural legitimacy as well Accordingly, the central question is how democratic ideas are connected to the broader culture of a social community. This issue will be addressed in the case of South Korea. The (...) Minjung democracy movement challenged the military regime by connecting democratic ideas concerning popular sovereignty and human rights with cultural traditions. The dissidents substantiated democratic values by articulating an alternative concept of political representation against the authoritarian regime, increasing the cultural resonance of their concept by linking democratic ideas to traditional narratives and practices, developing a rich dramaturgical repertoire of collective action, and mobilizing public outrage by fusing the above three elements within historical situations. (shrink)

I pursue three aims in this article: (1) a contextualization of Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural sociology within the broader trajectory of his intellectual development; (2) a sketch of the key ideas of his approach to cultural analysis against the backdrop of contemporary debates regarding culture and social structure; and (3) an appreciation and critical assessment of Alexander’s program.

I make use of this reply to McLennan to offer an overall perspective on the development of my work, normatively, empirically and theoretically, and in its earlier neofunctionalist and later cultural-sociological phase. I argue that, despite periodic suggestions that my cultural sociology seeks to push sociology towards an absolute subjectivity, the social-epistemological framework of ‘multidimensionality’ around which I organized my first work, Theoretical Logic in Sociology, still holds. Cultural sociology introduces a method and theory for understanding a dimension of social (...) life, it is not an attempt to explain every part of social life. There is still structural power according to this perspective, but the nature and force of this power must be understood differently. It is a mistake for social science to take a ‘realist’ path, either in its epistemology or in its mode of explanation. (shrink)

Simmel develops his concept of the stranger in an overly structural and reductionist manner. Contrary to Simmel’s suggestion, there is an indeterminate relation between structural exclusion and the attribution of strangeness. After showing that ‘the stranger’ must be rethought in a cultural-sociological way, this essay demonstrates an alternative approach. Articulating a ‘discourse’ that structures Western projections of strangeness, I explore its relation to colonialism, racial and class domination, and national conflict in modern Western history. This approach suggests an alternative, not (...) only to Simmel but to Merton’s and Coser’s earlier structural-functional reconceptualization of stranger theory. (shrink)

La nueva sociología económica ha concebido tradicionalmente el Mercado como un espacio sin cultura ni sociedad. No obstante los esfuerzos dirigidos a recuperar la dimensión cultural y no-instrumental del mercado, la profesión ha reconocido raramente que el reencantamiento cultural del mercado frecuentemente toma formas religiosas. La tradición neo-Durkheimiana en la teoría sociológica contemporánea puede contribuir a dar cuenta de dicho fenómeno con importantes consecuencias heurísticas sobre el desarrollo de la sociología económica.