Contribution
A reorientation of the sociology of culture away from Parsons’s values. It proposes three steps (p. 273): culture as a “tool kit” of symbols, stories, rituals and world-views; “strategies of action”, persistent ways of ordering action through time, as what culture explains; and culture’s causal role as supplying the components from which strategies are built, not the ends they serve. It then splits the analysis into two models, for settled and unsettled periods, with different causal pictures, and lists research questions that would tell the toolkit model from the values model.
Key insight
What persists is the way action is organized, not the goal it aims at. “If culture provides the tools with which persons construct lines of action, then styles or strategies of action will be more persistent than the ends people seek to attain. Indeed, people will come to value ends for which their cultural equipment is well suited” (p. 277). The ascetic Protestant ethos outlasting the doctrine that produced it is the case: “If ideas shape ethos, why did the ethos of ascetic Protestantism outlast its ideas?” (p. 276).
Assumptions
- Culture is public symbolic vehicles. “culture consists of such symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life” (p. 273).
- Action comes in chunks. “people do not, indeed cannot, build up a sequence of actions piece by piece, striving with each act to maximize a given outcome. Action is necessarily integrated into larger assemblages” (p. 276).
- Cultures are internally plural. “all real cultures contain diverse, often conflicting symbols, rituals, stories, and guides to action” (p. 277).
- A strategy is not a plan. “The term ‘strategy’ is not used here in the conventional sense of a plan consciously devised to attain a goal” (p. 277).
Key results
No data. By section:
- Against values (pp. 274–276). The culture-of-poverty debate “cannot be resolved by evidence that the very poor share the values and aspirations of the middle class, as indeed they seem to do” (p. 275). What differs is equipment: “One can hardly pursue success in a world where the accepted skills, style, and informal know-how are unfamiliar” (p. 275). “Action is not determined by one’s values. Rather action and values are organized to take advantage of cultural competences” (p. 275).
- The tool kit (p. 277). Culture “is more like a ‘tool kit’ or repertoire (Hannerz, 1969:186-88) from which actors select differing pieces for constructing lines of action”. Retooling is costly: the ghetto youth pursues group loyalty “not because he disdains what individual achievement could bring, but because the cultural meanings and social skills necessary for playing that game well would require drastic and costly cultural retooling”.
- Weber’s functional equivalents (p. 278). If religious ideas caused economic trajectories, culture “must not change more easily than the structural and economic patterns it supposedly shapes”; the discovery of ascetic ethics everywhere modernization went undermines that.
- Unsettled lives (pp. 278–280). Ideologies, “explicit, articulated, highly organized meaning systems”, “establish new styles or strategies of action” and “directly shape action” (p. 278). Ideology, tradition and common sense are phases on a continuum (p. 279). But “ideology forms around ethos, rather than vice versa”: Calvin “‘opportunistically’ revised and reworked his doctrine in order to achieve a particular psychological effect” (Walzer; p. 280). And “It is, however, the concrete situations in which these cultural models are enacted that determine which take root and thrive, and which wither and die” (p. 280).
- Settled lives (pp. 280–281). Culture and action are “loosely coupled”: “People profess ideals they do not follow” (p. 280). Culture’s influence shows in “cultural lag”: “People do not readily take advantage of new structural opportunities which would require them to abandon established ways of life” (p. 281), not from attachment to values but reluctance “to abandon familiar strategies of action for which they have the cultural equipment”.
- Figure 1 (p. 282) tabulates the two models: settled culture has low coherence and weak direct control and “Creates continuities in style or ethos”; unsettled culture has high coherence and strong control, but its “long-term influence depends on structural opportunities for survival of competing ideologies”.
- Research questions (pp. 282–284). Who stays traditional longer after immigration (the toolkit model predicts the old and encapsulated; the values model the advantaged); how belief systems break down (when they stop regulating action, as for Kuhnian paradigms); what capacities ideologies confer (pietist Protestants winning whatever their alliances); how ideologies become common sense.
- Against socialization (p. 283). “Culture does not influence how groups organize action via enduring psychological proclivities implanted in individuals by their socialization. Instead, publicly available meanings facilitate certain patterns of action, making them readily available, while discouraging others.”
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Culture affects action by supplying a repertoire from which strategies of action are built, not by setting the ends of action | moderate as an argument; untested here | critique of the culture-of-poverty debate and of Weber (pp. 274–278); Hannerz, Liebow cited |
| C2 | Strategies of action persist longer than the ends they serve, and people come to value ends their equipment suits | weak to moderate | the Protestant ethos outlasting Calvinist doctrine (p. 276); Gerson on women’s choices (p. 282), cited |
| C3 | In unsettled periods explicit ideologies directly shape action, and ideology forms around ethos rather than the reverse | weak to moderate | Walzer on Calvin, cited (p. 280) |
| C4 | Which competing ideologies survive is decided by the structural opportunities in which they are enacted | weak: asserted, with Skocpol (1985) credited | p. 280 and n. 17; Figure 1 |
| C5 | In settled periods culture constrains through the cost of retooling, seen as cultural lag, while beliefs and action are loosely coupled | moderate | attitude–behaviour literature cited (n. 18); illustrative (pp. 280–281) |
| C6 | Culture works through publicly available meanings, not through dispositions implanted by socialization | interpretive; stated, not argued at length | p. 283 |
Concepts
- Tool kit / repertoire: the set of symbols, stories, rituals, world-views, skills, habits and styles available to actors, “which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems” (p. 273). Taken from Hannerz (1969).
- Strategy of action: “a general way of organizing action (depending upon a network of kin and friends, for example, or relying on selling one’s skills in a market) that might allow one to reach several different life goals” (p. 277).
- Settled and unsettled lives: the contrast is “less between settled and unsettled lives, however, than between culture’s role in sustaining existing strategies of action and its role in constructing new ones” (p. 278).
- Ideology, tradition, common sense: phases of a cultural system, from articulated and contested, to taken for granted but articulated, to invisible (p. 279).
Connections
It builds on Hannerz’s repertoire, Geertz, Bourdieu’s strategies and habitus (nn. 5, 9, 11; Swidler’s strategies are “the larger ways of trying to organize a life … for which particular, culturally shaped skills and habits (what Bourdieu calls ‘habitus’) are useful”, n. 9), Walzer on Calvin, and Skocpol on ideology and structure. It cites Sewell’s work on French artisans as an example of reappropriated cultural capacities (p. 283); Sewell’s 1992 theory of structure, LIT-1383, takes up its transposability in another vocabulary.
Bearing on the record
- CLAIM-417 (selves as organizational perspectives). The claim cites this paper with Wacquant (LIT-1377) for sense 2, “a perspective’s dispositional repertoire and the resources coupled to it”. Two corrections. First, Swidler’s repertoire is not dispositional: C6 says culture works through “publicly available meanings”, not “enduring psychological proclivities implanted in individuals”. That is the opposite of habitus as Wacquant states it, so the two cannot be cited together as one account. Second, the repertoire is not the perspective: it is a stock of components, and the organized thing is the strategy of action built from them. If anything here answers to TERM-072 sense 1, a realized organization through time, it is the strategy, not the kit. The paper is closer to the claim’s lineage and character than to its realization: a strategy of action persists across changes of end (C2).
- CLAIM-420 (a figure’s legacy: story, perspective, descent). The Protestant ethic case gives a fourth way something persists that the claim does not list: a style of organizing action that outlasts the doctrine and ends that produced it (“this individualistic way of organizing action can be directed to many values”, p. 276). That is a perspective transmitted without its content, a finer cut than the claim’s “perspectival” persistence.
- CLAIM-416 (competition over tests). C4 is the selection half: ideologies “in active competition with other cultural frameworks”, whose survival is decided by the structural situations they are enacted in. Swidler does not discuss competitors reshaping those situations, so she supports the claim’s relativity (success relative to a regime) and says nothing of its reflexive part. Her question “What capacities do particular cultural patterns give those who hold them?” (p. 283), with pietists who “won out politically” whatever their alliances, is one form of the claim’s question of what success under a regime shows.
- CLAIM-287 and CLAIM-329 (persistence). Cultural lag (C5) is persistence through the cost of rebuilding equipment, neither continuous running nor transmission of an organization as such. It bears on what those claims say is conserved, and does not test either.
- TERM-072 (perspective). The tool kit is a set of kinds and components, publicly held; the strategy of action is nearer a realization; ideology is a representation that, in unsettled periods, directly organizes action. Swidler’s ordering, ideology formed “around ethos, rather than vice versa” (p. 280), is a case where a representation follows the organization it describes.
- THEORY. The two-model account (C1–C5) is a substantive claim about how culture causes action that the record does not hold. Filed Proposed as THEORY-890, with the paper’s own research questions as its test.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- A theoretical essay. Every case is illustrative and second-hand (Lewis, Liebow, Hannerz, Weber, Walzer, Gerson, Fulbrook), and none was chosen to test the model.
- “Structural opportunities” (C4) are not defined, so the unsettled model can explain any survivor after the fact.
- The settled/unsettled line is admitted to be “not, of course, absolute” (p. 278), and no measure of settledness is given.
- C6 is stated in one passage against socialization accounts, while notes 9 and 11 borrow Bourdieu’s habitus approvingly; the paper does not reconcile the two.
Open questions
- Would the immigration test (p. 283) come out as the toolkit model predicts: more traditionalism among the old and encapsulated than among the advantaged? The paper names the test and does not run it.
- What marks a period as unsettled independently of the ideological activity used to identify it?
- If strategies outlast ends, what transmits a strategy: the public symbols, as C6 says, or trained dispositions, as habitus says?