Tony Bennett (sociologist)

Tony Bennett is an English academic who has also worked in Australia. Bennett is an important figure in the development of the Australian approach to cultural studies known as "cultural policy studies."

His works include The Birth of the Museum, a study of the birth and cultural function of the modern museum, and Outside Literature. He is professor of sociology at the Open University in the UK, and Director of the Economic and Social Science Research Centre on Socio-Cultural Change.

Tony Bennett is Visiting Research Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and an associate member of CRESC, the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change. Professor Bennett was the Professor of Sociology at The Open University from 1998 to 2009, and a Founding Director of CRESC, before leaving to take up his current position as Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory in the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney. He also worked at The Open University in the 1970s and early 1980s, initially as a Staff Tutor in Sociology and subsequently as Chair of the Popular Culture course before leaving for Griffith University where he was Professor of Cultural Studies and also served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Director of the ARC Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy. He is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Professor Bennett's interests span a number of areas across the social sciences and humanities, with significant contributions to the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, cultural sociology, and museum studies. His work in literary studies includes influential assessments of the relations between formalist and Marxist criticism, and critical appraisals of Marxist aesthetic theory. In cultural studies his work has had a formative influence on the study of popular culture and he has played a leading role in the development of cultural policy studies. His work in cultural sociology includes major surveys of the social patterns of cultural practice and consumption in both Australia and Britain, and critical engagements with the sociology of literature and audience and reception theory. His work in museum studies has contributed to the development of the 'new museology' particularly in the light it has thrown on the role of museums as instruments of social governance.

The common thread running through his interests across these areas concerns the ways in which culture is tangled up in the exercise of power. This continues to inform his current research focused on the ways in which the knowledge practices of aesthetics and anthropology have informed modern processes of cultural governance from the 19th century through to the present. This work includes a significant focus on the part played by the early fieldwork phase in Australian, British, French and American anthropology in the development of new practices of colonial governance. It also includes a concern with the varying social uses of aesthetic discourses, and the role of aesthetics in the history of social theory. He is also engaged in an inquiry into the role of habit as a key concept in social, political and cultural theory, and with the role it has played in the practices of both liberal and colonial governance.

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