Johnson (1986), "What is Cultural Studies Anyway?"

Johnson (1986) describes three tenets cultural studies brings from Marxism. These three assertions for the basis of why cultural studies is important and necessary.

1. Cultural practices are aligned with social relations.

2. Power is embedded in culture, and it can work to inhibit people defining and realizing their needs.

3. Culture is not autonomous or predetermined, but a site of struggle.

In order to study cultural power and movement, Johnson (1986) proposes a model including four moments in the circulation of a cultural object: production, texts, readings, and lived cultures. These moments each interact with social relations. Moments like production and readings take place privately, while texts and lived cultures represent the public manifestations of these moments. Furthermore, as texts move through the cycle, they grow to represent more abstract and universal forms. Conversely, lived cultures are material and concrete, as they represent the real situation of social relations.

1. Production -- The moment of production happens in the private sphere, and involves the planning and development of objects prior to their release into the public. The production moment draws from lived cultures. While it is numbered as the first moment of cultural circulation, then, it is actually a continuation of a previous cultural object in the cycle.

2. Texts -- When the object is released from the private sphere of production, it begins to circulate as a text.

3. Readings -- The text gains real meaning when it is encountered by audiences. Meaning is made by readers in private engagement with the text. Readings, like production, are therefore a more difficult moment to capture in scholarship.

4. Lived cultures -- Once readers have engaged and made sense of the text, the text's meanings are sometimes integrated into the readers' lived culture. At this point, an element of the text can be taken from its context and reimagined as some element within the overall publicly experienced culture.

Based on his understanding of cultural cycles, Johnson (1986) encouraged cultural studies scholars to draw from a variety of methods including the study of production mechanisms, textual analysis, and ethnography and interviews of readers.