Beginning in the 1960s, a group of theorists, working at Birmingham, in England, started the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, the main aim of which was to promote research into the way culture operates in relation to power in society. Renowned and key participants were black sociologist  Stuart Hall , its first Director, Basil Bernstein, Paul Willis and others. See Hall, S., The Popular Arts, Hutchinson, London, 1964, and Hall, S., Cultural Studies: An Introduction, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1992. Their theories suggested that the old (Marxist) model of class was now less useful in its ability to accurately theorise social processes. The move by colonized nations to throw off the burden of oppression (Algeria, India, Pakistan etc) and the move by colonial states towards independence, coupled with the advent of feminism, the Civil Rights Movement (and black power), the Gay Libertaion Movement, the rise of a working class meritocracy and other social phenomena of the 1960s and 1970s had now rendered the concept of class as the sole defining model of social relations as redundant. Included in all of this was a parallel interest in the role of the mass medial in she shaping of identity.

Basically, the field was developed (as noted above) because of the inability of existing models and theories to account for the social processes that appeared in the 1960s following rapid and worldwide moves to decolonization across the globe. It became clear that our understanding of Culture as a theoretical concept was very limiting, and therefore the movement of Cultural Studies progressed alongside new understandings of the concept of Culture itself.

 

According to the French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu , Culture has an uneven exchange value. Some (dominant) cultural values are valued "higher" than other (subordinate) cultural values in society. ie. ballet has a higher cultural value than kapa haka.. Cultural capital operates like economic capital such that those with the most capital have the greater power to increase their capital accumulation, while those with the least capital have a dimin¬ishing opportunity to do so. This leads inevitably to a situation where the power to define meaning is increasingly lodged in the hands of fewer and fewer increasingly powerful individuals of the dominant culture. See: Bourdieu, P., Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1977, and: Bourdieu, P. Distinction - A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1984