In recent decades, the focus of the study of culture in sociology has been divided between the sociology of culture and cultural sociology. In the former approach, culture is seen as a reflection of the deeper and more "real" social structures.

A cultural sociology, however, begins from the premise that ideas and beliefs retain autonomy from the social structures to which they refer and illuminate. Only after the internal logics of meaning have been discovered and understood--the codes, narratives, and rhetorical techniques--can the cultural be put back into social structure, and analyzed in a multidimensional way. Edited by Jeffrey Alexander, arguably the leading cultural sociologist in the world, and two other widely respected practitioners, Ron Jacobs and Phil Smith, these essays from an international cast of the best and brightest cultural sociologists cover topics in theory and method; power, politics, and states; economics and organization; mass media; social movements; religion; aesthetics; knowledge; and health. Organized by empirical areas of study rather than particular theories or competing intellectual strands, the editors demonstrate that cultural sociology is not so much as a specialized subfield of sociology but, rather, an intellectual approach that can be generalized across all the core fields of the discipline.