Culture in Action

Introduction

  • Culture shapes actions through a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles.

  • Differentiates between settled and unsettled cultural periods:

    • Settled periods: Culture influences action by providing resources.

    • Unsettled periods: Explicit ideologies govern action, shaped by structural opportunities.

Major Thesis

  • Traditional views mislead by suggesting culture provides ultimate ends or values.

  • The paper offers an alternative view of culture's role in shaping actions systematically.

  • Culture consists of symbolic forms (beliefs, practices, art) used collectively in social behavior.

Cultural Definitions

  • Culture defined as publicly available symbolic forms, including:

    • Beliefs, rituals, arts, informal practices like language and stories.

  • The rise of cultural studies needs to consider cultural explanations rather than mere features of products.

  • Values remain the main link between culture and action, though this paradigm has been criticized.

Alternative Analysis of Culture

Steps in Analysis

  1. Culture as a "tool kit" for solving different problems.

  2. Focus on "strategies of action" and their persistent nature over time.

  3. Emphasis on culture's role in providing components for action strategies.

Culture as Values

  • Derives from earlier theorists:

    • Max Weber: Interests drive action; ideas influence flow of action.

    • Influence of values in the context of sociological explanation remains central yet flawed.

    • Talcott Parsons further distanced sociology from concrete symbolic elements, favoring abstract values.

Arguments against the "Culture of Poverty"

  • Challenges the idea that poverty culture dictates behavior (e.g., lack of assimilation).

  • Suggests that lower-class aspirations may align with middle-class values.

  • Cultural behaviors informed by structural barriers, not by differing values.

Prevalence of the Protestant Ethic

  • Weber's arguments explaining capitalism with Protestantism's influence illustrate cultural continuity.

  • Key Questions:

    • Why does the ascetic ethos outlive its initial doctrines?

    • Cultural organization of action persists more than its declared ends.

Cultural Explanation Challenges

  • Settled Lives: Cultural influences are entwined with normative behavior; ideology filters through everyday life.

  • Unsettled Lives: Ideologies become rules shaping new action and societal constructs.

Dual Models of Cultural Influence

Settled Lives

  • Influence is subtle, providing diverse strategies; cultural lag exists due to invested histories in certain strategies.

  • Settled culture is seen as constraining; gaps exist between professed values and actions.

Unsettled Lives

  • High coherence and strong control; ideologies directly shape actions and establish new practices.

  • Focus on ideology is crucial during periods of rapid social transformation.

Implications for Future Research

  1. Identify when values become less predictive of actions.

  2. Understand how beliefs lose plausibility in face of reality.

  3. Investigate how cultural elements can be reappropriated in new contexts.

Conclusion

  • Culture's role is to provide a toolkit for constructing action strategies; it shapes actions not by dictating ends but through available cultural resources.

  • Calls for new analytic models that focus on how culture interacts with social structures, emphasizing concrete cultural competencies.