Culture and Everyday Life

′Bennett provides a well organized, very readable and interesting discussion of a number of significant everyday cultural forms and I am confident student readers will find the book very valuable′ - Barry Smart, University of Portsmouth

Culture and Everyday Life provides students with a comprehensive overview of theoretical models, issues and examples of contemporary cultural practice.

Bennett begins by summarising and situating - in everyday settings - the key theoretical models applied in the study of existing cultural practices. This entails a systematic study of how academic thinking about mass culture has changed, from critical accounts of early mass cultural theorists to radical postmodernist critiques of mass cultural accounts and to ′the cultural turn′, which explored how various social identities are culturally constructed.

Following this are themed chapters that cover a particular aspect of late modern culture, such as media, music, fashion, tourism and counter-cultural ideologies and movements. In each case a comprehensive literature review is provided and its theoretical and empirical relevance to our understanding of the relationship between culture and everyday life in contemporary society is explained.

Lucid, meticulous and illustrated with a host of examples, this is a superb text for teaching and research in the Sociology of Culture and Cultural Studies.

Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University and previously held academic positions in the UK and Canada. His areas of research specialism include youth culture, popular music scenes, history and heritage, local music industries, DIY culture and practice and qualitative research methods. He has written and edited numerous books including Popular Music and Youth Culture, Music, Style and Aging, British Progressive Pop 1970 – 1980 and Music Scenes (co-edited with Richard A. Peterson). He is a member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and a former Chair of the UK and Ireland IASPM branch. In 1999 he co-founded the British Sociological Association Youth Study Group. He is also a member of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) and former Editor in Chief of the Journal of Sociology. He is a Faculty Fellow of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, an Adjunct of the Institute of Sociology at the University of Porto, an International Research Fellow of the Finnish Youth Research Network, a founding member of the Consortium for Youth, Generations and Culture and a founding member of the Regional Music Research Group. He is also co-founder of KISMIF, a biennial conference focusing on DIY cultures and practice.