Source
Swidler (1986), LIT-1367, read in full in NOTE-1075: American Sociological Review 51(2), 273–286. Page numbers are the journal’s.
What was actually shown
Nothing was shown empirically; the paper argues. Its argument has three parts, each resting on cited cases.
- Against values. In the culture-of-poverty debate the poor seem to share middle-class aspirations, so values cannot explain different conduct: “One can hardly pursue success in a world where the accepted skills, style, and informal know-how are unfamiliar” (p. 275).
- Strategies outlast ends. “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” (p. 277). The case is the ascetic Protestant ethos, which “outlast[ed] its ideas” (p. 276).
- Two models. In unsettled periods ideologies “directly shape action” (p. 278), but “ideology forms around ethos, rather than vice versa” (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). In settled periods culture and action are loosely coupled, and culture shows in “cultural lag”: people do not take new opportunities that “would require them to abandon established ways of life” (p. 281).
What could have come out otherwise is in the paper’s own research agenda (pp. 282–284): who stays traditional longer after immigration; whether belief systems break down when they stop regulating action rather than when they stop describing the world. None of it is tested there.
What this does not say
- Not that values never matter. Within an established way of life values “fine-tune the regulation of action” (p. 282).
- Not how a strategy is carried. The paper says culture works through “publicly available meanings” and not through “enduring psychological proclivities implanted in individuals by their socialization” (p. 283), but its notes borrow Bourdieu’s habitus for the skills a strategy uses (nn. 9, 11). The account is compatible with either carrier.
- Not what “structural opportunities” are. The selection clause is credited to Skocpol (n. 17) and left undefined, so as stated it can explain any surviving ideology after the fact.
- Not a measure of settledness. The contrast is “not, of course, absolute” (p. 278).
Connections
- CLAIM-420. A style of organizing action that outlasts the doctrine and ends that produced it is a form of persistence finer than the claim’s “perspectival” one: organization transmitted without its content.
- CLAIM-416. The unsettled model’s selection clause is the claim’s relativity of success to a regime, for ideologies. It has no reflexive part: competitors do not reshape the situations that select them.
- CLAIM-417. Cites this paper for a perspective’s “dispositional repertoire”. The repertoire is public, not dispositional, and the organized thing is the strategy, not the kit.
- Sewell (LIT-1383) restates the toolkit’s reach as the transposability of schemas.