Welcome to the Real World: Escaping the Sociology of Culture and Cognition

Recent developments in cultural sociology show that our field remains entrenched in a troubling pattern. As Lizardo (2014) demonstrated, sociologists have a pathological relationship to interdisciplinarity. We tend to create internal “avatars” of other disciplines rather than working with them directly. This fools us into thinking that we’re interdisciplinary when, in reality, “[t]hese subdisciplinary avatars have been created by sociologists for sociological consumption” (Lizardo 2014: 985). Little has changed in the past seven years. In this paper, I will briefly examine one recent case - values - where some sociologists are actively resisting interdisciplinary engagement. I argue that most of their objections are unfounded. I then examine other, less obvious, mechanisms that discourage cultural sociologists from interdisciplinary dialogue.