Culture shapes all of social life, and indeed makes it possible.
At the same time, culture is created, disseminated, experienced, and used only in ways shaped by and dependent on other aspects of social organization. This approach has produced important work on both art worlds and popular culture. It has enjoyed a substantial growth in recent years, and has been especially effective in analyzing the institutional organizational of cultural work. This conventional sociology of culture is limited, however, by the tendency to affirm rather than critically analyze the definition of culture as a domain distinct from the rest of social life. There is a tension between seeking standing as a disciplinary subfield by claiming for the sociology of culture its own specific domain, and seeking to transform sociology more generally by bringing cultural analysis into play throughout the field.