Popular culture is difficult to define, partly because both terms—“popular” and “culture”—have meant different things at different points in history depending on the theoretical or disciplinary framework employed. In the simplest terms, popular culture is culture that is widely favored by many people—the culture “of the people.” But this definition leaves unanswered the question of what culture is and what, if anything, differentiates popular culture from other conceptual categories such as folk culture, mass culture, or workingclass culture. In making distinctions, social, economic and aesthetic criteria are not easily disentangled. For example, “culture” can refer to: (1) a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development (“the development of Western culture”); (2) the expressive activities of communities and societies, as in sports, holidays, festivals, ceremonies; or (3) particular intellectual and artistic practices, as in literature, painting, dance and song (Storey 1993). “Popular” can mean not only “of the people,” or that which is well-liked by a large number of individuals, but also “common,” accessible to the average person, and even “inferior” (Shiach 1989).

As Storey has pointed out, it is often easier to understand popular culture in contrast to what it is not. Perhaps most obviously, popular culture is not elite or “high” culture, which is, by definition, unpopular and exclusive. Nor is popular culture synonymous with folk culture or working-class culture. The former generally refers to culture that is local, non-commercial and expressive of a particular group or community identity (quilting, folk tales, or folk music); the latter, to texts and practices associated with a working-class sensibility and enjoyed primarily by members of the working class (nickelodeons, burlesque, bingo or bowling, as well as organizational strategies). Of course, all three types can, and often do, overlap. Yet there is no direct one-to-one relationship between a class or community and a particular cultural form. To paraphrase Stuart Hall (1981), “class” and “popular” are deeply related, but they are not absolutely interchangeable.

Moreover, it is important to bear in mind when distinguishing popular from elite culture that these categories are not fixed or static, so that what was once considered “low” may now be “high,” and vice versa. For example, Shakespeare was once the most popular playwright in America, but his works were gradually “rescued” from the marketplace and enshrined in official institutions controlled by wealthy patrons; as a consequence, Shakespeare became high culture, the purview of the social and intellectual elite (Levine 1988). Likewise, as Storey notes, the seaside holiday began as an aristocratic practice and within a hundred years had become a popular one, while film noir started as a despised popular cinema and is now the preserve of academics and film critics. Thus it is not the specific contents of the categories “high” and “low” that matter, since these change over time, but the fact that a distinction exists, one that tends to sustain cultural hierarchy.

Nor is popular culture simply mass culture, although the overlap is perhaps greatest here. Indeed, in highly industrialized contemporary societies like the US, there is very little that we might call the culture “of the people” that is not derived from commercial culture and that is not dependent upon commercial consumption for its expression.

Consequently, American popular culture is increasingly tied to mass culture, and, by implication, to mass production and mass consumption. This association more than anything reinforces popular culture as high culture’s opposite: low, vulgar and base; lacking in creativity originality and tradition.

So what distinguishes popular culture from mass culture? The difference lies less in the specific content than in the relationship between content and consumer. According to Storey, Fiske (1989) and other scholars, mass culture consists of the texts, objects and relations of the culture industries; popular culture is what people make of those texts, objects and relations. For example, the culture industry produces many television programs, but how people understand them and what role television plays in everyday life is not self-evident or necessarily “given” in the programs themselves. Thus mass culture is the objective repertoire from which people create subjective, popular meanings—albeit meanings inevitably circumscribed in key ways by the repertoire itself.

This meaning-making not only acknowledges an active dimension to consumption, it requires us to consider popular culture in a more local, personal and political sense. As Hall insists, the making of popular culture involves an ongoing negotiation or struggle between people’s needs and desires (what he calls the forces of resistance) and the needs of the culture industries (what he calls the power bloc, or the forces of incorporation). Of course, this is hardly an equal struggle, for the power bloc by definition has disproportionate clout in establishing the terms and limits of the cultural terrain in the first place. Popular culture is contradictory in nature: both constraining and enabling; limiting how we think about the world and offering opportunities for creative social and personal expression within those limits.

Popular culture is therefore not a fixed set of objects and practices, nor a fixed conceptual category but something constituted both through the act of consumption and through the act of theoretical engagement. Scholars have focused on different aspects of popular culture, some turning to texts (romance, television, film, pop music, etc.), others examining lived culture such as holidays, hobbies, or fandoms. Different scholars have employed distinct theoretical approaches, most of them “structuralist theories” that generally claim that forms of popular culture—food, clothing, sports, games, rituals, entertainment—help reveal the underlying rules, structures and values of a society. For example, Marxists emphasize the relation between popular culture and the capitalist mode of production, suggesting that popular culture reproduces class inequality by generating enormous profits for those who control the culture industries while inculcating in consumers the values and ideology necessary to justify this—and other—unjust social arrangements. Psychoanalytic approaches tend to see popular culture as symptomatic expressions of society’s “collective unconscious,” as articulating indirectly through the symbolic language of entertainment our collective fears, anxieties, fantasies and desires.

Ethnographic approaches investigate how forms of popular culture are produced and consumed in everyday life, what it means to people, how they contribute (or not) to the formation of individual, group and community identities. What all approaches have in common is the assumption that objects and practices taken to be part of popular culture are “readable,” that they “speak” to us and that they tell us important (though not necessarily positive) things about the society in which we live.