Concepts of culture in the sociology of punishment

The author analyses the different ways in which the concept of ‘culture’ is currently deployed in the sociology of punishment. Using a distinction first developed by W.H. Sewell Jr, he distinguishes two usages of the concept—culture as an analytical dimension of social relations (‘the cultural’) and culture as a collective entity (‘a culture’). The theoretical issues and problems entailed in these two usages are discussed and several pragmatic solutions proposed. The author argues that analytical accounts of ‘the cultural’ should be regarded as artificial (though necessary) abstractions. Descriptive ethnography, discourse analysis and textual explication ought to be viewed as components of historical or sociological explanation, not as substitutes for explanatory analysis. The author argues for the integration of cultural analysis into the explanatory project of a multi-dimensional sociology of punishment.