Across the divide: moving beyond 'decorative theory'

In his preface to the second edition of the Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, then Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, Bryan S. Turner (2000), argues that the ‘decorative theory’ of textual analysis threatens to destroy the intellectual credibility of the social sciences. Constructing an impassioned critique of cultural versus social theory, Turner (2000: xv) argues that the cultural theory underpinning textual analysis has ‘become an end in itself’, merely ‘the narcissistic study of its own textual traditions’. For Turner, the decorative theory of textual analysis is symptomatic of metaphysical impasse within the social sciences, where sociological inquiry is being abandoned for the pointless ‘reading’ of cultural relations and media texts, the substance of which is reified and removed from a socio-historical context.