The sociology of culture is an independent discipline of a social nature, which to date has a number of unresolved theoretical, methodological and practical problems.
First of all, the researchers themselves discover the uncertainty of the volume of the main concept of discipline - "culture". It is almost comprehensive, and its borders are so blurred that almost any manifestation of public life can be described with this concept. Moreover, the understanding of the subject that studies the sociology of culture, may vary depending on the interpretation of the term "culture", the variety of methodological and theoretical orientations that are selected for a specific study.
This discipline has become one of the most influential areas of Western cultural studies of the twentieth century, which was introduced by sociology M. Adler.
Cultural and social began to be understood as the ratio of the whole and its component. According to L. White, culture should have been considered as an aspect of all possible social relationships, so sociology cannot separate the cultural from the social.
When studying culture from the point of view of sociology, it is important to determine the approach, highlight the active or value component that allows you to combine individual elements of culture into a system, analyze data at different hierarchical levels, using the methods of both sciences.
The most significant representatives of the sociology of culture, whose work served as a solution to important methodological and theoretical issues in these areas, were M. Weber and A. Weber, T. Parsons, Leslie White, R. Merton, A. Mole, and others.
Culture is both a process and an object of research, which is addressed by the sociology of culture. Culture is a special quality state of society, which is characterized by certain material and spiritual indicators of development (production, science, art, education, sports, healthcare, social protection of citizens, law, politics, etc.)
In order to understand more clearly all the points that concern the subjects studied by the discipline, you need to understand that it is a specific branch of knowledge at the junction of two areas: sociology and culture. It follows that the sociology of culture is studying the patterns of development of culture itself , the forms of manifestation of its patterns in people's activities.
There are several approaches within which the sociology of culture explores its object. One group combines approaches that gravitate toward describing a culture in its statics. Within this group, such groups of theories as subject, value (axiological), symbolic, textual (semiotic) theories are distinguished.
The second group consists of campaigns that describe the dynamics of culture. They can be defined as activity, game, communicative, technological theories. The third group includes theories that are called subjective (focusing on carriers of cultural activity) and dialogue (answering the question of how culture organizes itself).
All of these theories and approaches exist in interaction and complement each other.
The sociology of culture studies conflicting trends and factors that influence the genesis of culture and the overall picture of culture from the point of view of the development of society. This knowledge is composed of separate layers of complex and interdependent elements: creative activities and ways ("technologies") of people's activities; creation, preservation, assimilation and translation of ideas, perceptions, cultural values; analysis of cultural phenomena, etc.
In the cultural context of sociology, it studies the stable and repeating forms of people's relations within social communities, the dynamics of the development of emerging cultural relations, which allows us to judge the degree of development of social relations and cultural progress or regression.