Toward a Cultural Sociology of Failure


Elisabeth Rondinelli, Saint Mary's University; Katherine Pendakis, Memorial University

In this presentation we offer reflections on a newly emerging ‘culture of failure’ in North American society that has within it a critique of the ways in which our society is organized. This culture is mainly aimed at, concerned with, and produced by Millenials and Gen Z, and is expressed in mainstream media and social media ranging from observations of changes in the labour market (like ‘the great resignation’ and ‘quiet quitting’) to reflections on the mundane failures of everyday life (like ‘goblin mode’ and ‘bedrotting’). Importantly, this culture disrupts the dominant therapeutic narratives of failure, which tell us that it is best thought of as something from which to learn and a necessary stepping stone on the way to success and self-development. Because such narratives are oriented toward young people transitioning into adulthood, failure is represented as providing lessons on the way to achieving conventional and normative markers of adulthood. As sociologists, what tools do we have to make sense of this emerging culture of failure? In the absence of a ‘sociology of failure,’ we provide a systematic overview of the discipline’s implicit attempts to understand failure. Framing our overview in terms of the promises and limitations of these attempts, we examine contributions from both critical and cultural sociology. Critical sociologists have long been preoccupied with the power and pervasiveness of individualistic discourses that encourage people to take personal responsibility for their circumstances and status. We demonstrate that given critical sociologists’ preoccupation with critiquing the ways in which capitalism produces ideologies that justify inequality, they tend to narrowly treat discourses of failure as evidence of internalized individualism, false-consciousness, and neoliberal subjectivity (see, for instance, the work of Jennifer Silva in Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty). Since our interest is precisely in the critical capacities that are evident in contemporary discourses of failure, we argue that the critical sociological tradition requires considerable intervention if it is to recognize and explore how a culture of failure can also be a culture of critique. We then turn to cultural sociology. Given its foundational premise that social actors are agents engaged in creative meaning-making activity that cannot be reduced to reflections of structure, we would expect to find conceptual tools that could provide a more expansive analysis of cultural discourses of failure. While we do indeed discover these, we argue that, in practice, cultural sociologists tend to avoid taking up failure as a social fact requiring careful theoretical elaboration and detailed empirical investigation. Indeed, the closer cultural sociologists come to investigating failure, the more they rely on analyses from critical sociology that reduce actors’ talk of failure to evidence that they lack critical capacity and an understanding of the conditions that shape their lives. This overview of sociological treatments of failure is part of a larger research project that aims to develop theoretical and methodological tools for a more expansive sociological analysis of contemporary cultures of failure.

This paper will be presented at the following session: