Tony Bennett (sociologist)

Tony Bennett was born Frederick Anthony Bennett on 12 February 1947^[1] in Manchester, England.^[2] He earned a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University in 1968 and a PhD in sociology at Sussex University in 1972^[3] that was focussed on the relations between the concepts of realism and class consciousness in the work of György Lukács.^[4]

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Bennett taught sociology at the Open University in the United Kingdom, as a staff tutor and then as chair of the Popular Culture course.^[5] In this period he produced his first major book, Formalism and Marxism, published 1979, which argued for the compatibility of Russian formalism with Marxism while criticizing Althusserian Marxism.^[6][7]

He moved to Griffith University in Brisbane in 1983,^[4] where he became Professor of Cultural Studies, Dean of Humanities, and director of the ARC Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy until 1998.^[3][5] During this time, he turned towards the work of Michel Foucault and away from the Marxism of Stuart Hall and Antonio Gramsci.^[4] His 1990 book Outside Literature demonstrated an early stage of this postmodern turn,^[8][9] while 1995's The Birth of the Museum was unambiguously indebted to Foucault.^[10][11]

In this phase of his career he began to work specifically on cultural policy: he set up an Institute for Cultural Policy Studies at Griffith in the late 1980s, and prepared the paper "Putting Policy into Cultural Studies" for a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign cultural studies conference in 1990.^[4] This paper was widely regarded as seminal,^[12][13][14] though it had markedly more limited impact in the US than elsewhere and though it came in for sharp criticism from leading US scholars, particularly by Marxists including Fredric Jameson.^[15] It was published in 1992 as a chapter in the book Cultural Studies edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. He continued this work with further essays collected in Culture: A Reformer's Science (1998), which again championed a Foucauldian approach against "resistance" theories of culture from Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams to Michel de Certeau,^[16][17] and with a survey of Australian cultural policy in Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics, Programs (2001).^[18]

In 1998 he returned to the Open University, where he became Professor of Sociology and a founding director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC).^[3][5] Here he produced the sociology course textbook Understanding Everyday Life (2002) with Diane Watson.^[19]

In 2009 he returned to Australia as research professor in Social and Cultural Theory at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University,^[3] while remaining a visiting research professor at the Open University and an associate member of CRESC.^[5] By this time his key post-structuralist influences had also expanded to include Pierre Bourdieu, Nikolas Rose, and Bruno Latour.^[4][17] He became emeritus in 2020.^[20] He has also been a visiting professor at universities in the United States, China, and Canada.^[3][5]

His work has been important in literary and popular culture studies, especially as a founder of the Australian school of cultural policy studies.^{[3][12][13][14][21]} He is an elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1997).^[3][5] He was the founding editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy.^[20]