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This fascinating book discusses the particularities, pleasures and promises of a sociology that underscores the significance of culture as a vital dimension of social life. It advocates an intellectually open-minded cultural sociology that acknowledges how culture influences sociologists' own work and urges a field traditionally dominated by qualitative methods to open up to experimental and survey research.

Understanding Cultural Sociology explains how the crisis of sociology in the 1960s resulted in a cultural turn away from positivism, due to discontent over positivist pretensions of strict objectivity and neutrality. Yet, the book also critiques how this shift gave rise to theoretical reductions of culture to structures of power and inequality, resulting in awkward resemblances to conspiracy theories. Dick Houtman advocates Emile Durkheim's and Max Weber's classical sociologies of culture and religion as promising blueprints for a cultural sociology that counters such reductionist tendencies.

Staying away from mere theoretical exegesis, this illuminating book is a vital resource for students and scholars of sociology with an interest in what classical cultural-sociological theorizing has to offer to the empirical study of today's major social and political conflicts.