Hegemony, Resistance, and the Cultural Turn: Revisiting the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies

The theoretical innovations and empirical research of the Contemporary Centre for Cultural Studies in the 1970s, commonly known as the Birmingham School, are reconsidered as a critical sociological approach to culture. Led by Stuart Hall, Birmingham School scholars theorized that the social crisis of their time was ultimately determined by shifts in the political economy of capitalism, but their ethnographic research also illuminated multiple sites of opposition and resistance among subcultures involving working class and nonclass subjectivities. Their perspective on class and culture thus exemplifies the class dynamism approach which opposes the class abstractionism that has characterized some Marxist thought in recent years. The Birmingham School is also contrasted with the forms of U.S.-based cultural sociology which theorize culture from a Durkheimian-Parsonian standpoint as an autonomous symbolic order. The early cultural studies of the CCCS therefore represents a vital alternative to both class abstractionism and mainstream cultural sociology. They developed a kind of Marxist sociology that can dialectically integrate insights from the ‘cultural turn’, which is conceptualized not simply as an intellectual trend but as part of a socio-historical condition created by late capitalism.