Culture Section Newsletter
Chair's Letter (Spring, 2003)

The Cultural Turn in American Sociology — A Report from the Field* John W. Mohr In my last chair’s letter I raised the question of what the role of the culture section should be at the upcoming “Question of Culture” ASA meeting. I noted that we will all need to be vigilant in combating false stereotypes of cultural analysis. I also suggested that we should seize the opportunity to communicate with our colleagues elsewhere in the discipline about what the new cultural sociology has to offer. In Atlanta we will have plenty of opportunities to do just that. The incoming chair of the section, Robin Wagner Pacifici, has organized a series of intriguing panels under the theme “Culture in Extremis.” In addition to these sessions, Bill Bielby and the ASA program committee have invited a couple of dozen others to organize sessions on various cultural topics (including a panel that I put together on meaning and measurement). Beyond this, thanks to the generosity of Tim Dowd (a.k.a. Timithy J. Down) there will be two mini-conferences held at Emory University immediately following culture day at the ASA (see the invitations elsewhere in this newsletter). One, organized by Tim and Pete Peterson, is on the cultural analysis of music. The other, organized by Tim and myself, will focus on meaning and measurement. In anticipation of this intellectual feast, I want to again take up the question — what should be the role of the culture section (and its members) at these meetings? In thinking about this issue I decided that the best thing would be for each of us to reflect in some concrete way on what it is that we value about cultural sociology. What would we, as scholars, want to explain to our colleagues about the virtues of cultural analysis? What follows is a rather idiosyncratic list of 10 talking points that captures my own sense of how to respond to such a query. 1. Things go better with culture: First, I would want to make clear that cultural sociology is not a sub-field of the discipline concerned with a particular institutional sphere (such as the arts, the media, or popular culture). Rather I would describe it as, first and foremost, an approach to sociological work that highlights the human side of social phenomena, which is to say, it is an endeavor that emphasizes the ways in which social life is received and produced through the active agency of human beings who, as Geertz (1973) asserts, are suspended in webs of meaning that they themselves have spun. Cultural sociology is that project which seeks to track the way that people make sense of the world, and how, in making sense, so do they make the world. This reflects a fundamentally constructivist orientation. It sees the world as a meaningful place and it endeavors through its activity to discover what the relevant meanings are, to read and report on those meanings and to use them in constructing an explanatory narrative. No doubt, some will quibble with my formulation, but I think we all share some version of this basic idea. Indeed, members of the culture section have led us to this insight by demonstrating that such widely disparate social phenomena as the rise of Italian fascism (Falasca-Zamponi, 1997), the proliferation of gay identities (Armstrong, 2002), the spread of religious nationalism (Friedland, 2002), the use of money (Zelizar, 1997), the rationalization of science (Evans, 2002), the design of census categories (Ventresca, 2002), the experience of love (Swidler, 2001), or of violence (Cerulo, 1998), the decision to build a dam (Espeland, 1998), to organize a railroad (Dobbin, 1994), to recycle waste products (Lounsbury, Ventresca, and Hirsch, 2003), to launch a police assault on a house in Philadelphia (Wagner-Pacifici, 1994), or a raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco Texas (Hall, 2002), are all more clearly understood as matters of culture. Each demonstrates that a cultural interpretation, a reading of the shared meanings, adds critical explanatory value. Without it, you will misunderstand the phenomena. 2. We’ve only just begun: My second observation follows from this. If cultural sociology provides a critical explanatory resource then non-cultural sociologists are missing out. Cultural analysis (understood as a well formed interpretative endeavor) is an indispensable component of all sociological work that seeks to account for social processes, social dynamics or social orders. Without this tool, sociologists will inevitably produce inferior research. This then leads me to my (admittedly partisan and somewhat grand) assertion that culture is more than a sub-field of sociology, it is a frontier, the leading edge of a broad transformation in how sociologists will go about doing their work. Thus, as my colleague Roger Friedland and I have argued at some length in a new essay (Freidland and Mohr, forthcoming), the cultural turn is not, as some would have it, an intellectual trend that we need to get beyond or pull back from (Bonnell and Hunt, 1999), it is, on the contrary, a paradigm shift in sociology and it is has only just begun to manifest itself. 3. Can’t we all just get along? My third point will require more exegesis. If the second assertion is true, it does not imply that all sociologists are on their way to becoming ethnographers or qualitative scholars (in the traditional sense of that term). There is, after all, as much value added by scientific inquiry as there is by hermeneutic analysis. Both are valid (though different) ways to advance a field of knowledge. We should throw no one overboard. Besides, it wouldn’t really make sense to leave the tools of formal analysis behind. They are extremely powerful tools. So, my third point is that the cultural turn will necessarily involve a kind of rapprochement between the hermeneutic and the scientific. To use C.P. Snow’s (1959) metaphor, the two cultures will have to learn how to get along and share meaning. This is less idealistic (and less painful) than it sounds. Indeed the biennial “Cultural Turn” conferences (www.soc.ucsb.edu/ct4) that Roger Friedland and I have hosted at UCSB (since 1997) have demonstrated time and again the profitability of such an exchange. 4. Against Truth and Method: My fourth point is just a refinement of the third but it takes us to the heart of the matter. There is no inherent contradiction between the hermeneutic and the scientific. There are those like Gadamer (1996) who assert that interpretation is an art form and science is something altogether different. I don’t agree with this formulation. I think that humanists and scientists do pretty much the same thing, they generate knowledge. They do so by producing systems of discourse that are essentially forms of talk (and dually, forms of practice) shared by groups of people, following certain norms of collective behavior. The difference between the two cultures concerns their relationship to technology, their style of social organization, and the character of their rhetorical forms (on the latter see Chuck Bazerman’s comments on Cultural Turn 4, elsewhere in this newsletter). 5. You Can Count on it: My fifth point is that science can also be of use in the interpretation of meanings. I say this because I think science is a pretty neutral endeavor at its core (though of course every particular incarnation is necessarily loaded to the gills with assumptions) and thus has the capacity to be applied to all manner of things. The part of science that interests me the most is the aggressive use of technology. Think of astronomers; they use signal detection equipment to measure wave particles that the human senses are incapable of perceiving. Analyses of these data (and of the statistical systems that underlie them) are then used to build knowledge systems. No technology, no knowledge. My suggestion is that cultural sociology should also invite technology in. Like the astronomers, we should use what tools we have available to help sift through streams of data taken from the textual universe. Doing this will enable us perceive the meaningfulness of the world in ways that our embodied senses are incapable of achieving on their own. Of course to do this is a big job. You need to load all of these assumptions into the machinery and then you need to try it out, time and time again. This works best as a community activity, with lots of like-minded others to bounce ideas off of. This community is beginning to find its feet. Look, for example, at Bernard Harcourt’s (2002) fascinating analysis of the meaning of guns in gang culture, Vedres and Csigó’s (2002) study of political discourse in post-socialist Hungary, Stanley Lieberson’s (2000) trend analysis of first name choices, John Martin’s (2000a) mathematical deconstruction of Richard Scarry’s children’s books, Bearman and Stovel’s (2000) use of network analysis to study the autobiographical narratives of members of the German Nazi party, Mische and Pattison’s (2000) tripartite lattice analysis of the relationship between social movement discourse and collective action, Breiger ‘s (2000) duality analysis of power and discourse among Supreme Court justices, my own essays on analyzing welfare discourse (e.g., Mohr, forthcoming-a), or any of a number of other intriguing projects (including a whole sub-genre of work by a new generation of organizational scholars — see Ventresca and Mohr, 2002, for a review). 6. The Raw and the Cooked: My sixth point is that all this stuff is still pretty new. It is true that there have been a number of important antecedents. Think of Lévi-Strauss’s (1955, etc.) work on the structural analysis of myth, Charles Osgood and his colleagues’ (1971) studies on the semantic differential, Roy D’Andrade (1995) and company’s research in cognitive anthropology or Pierre Bourdieu’s (e.g., 1984) empirical analyses of cultural fields (see Mohr, 1998, for a review). However, the new quantitative work that I just cited (point 5 above) has all come about within the last decade. And while I think that this work is extremely good, it is admittedly primitive and clumsy, primarily because the science has yet to coalesce. In any case, it surely doesn’t stack up well against the wealth of interpretative work by humanists and qualitative sociologists. By this comparison, skepticism about the potential contributions of meaning and measurement is surely justified. But I think that this reflects more about the state of the art than about the state of the world (see point 4 above). My recollection of the first meaning and measurement mini-conference (held at George Mason University back in 1995) was that participants had more enthusiasm than results to share with one another and precious few exemplars to point to. The field has come a long way in 8 years. We now have a rich crop of exemplar studies, a regular stream of ambitious young recruits, and a number of recent defections from the realist ranks by senior scholars such as Mike Allen, Peter Bearman, Ron Breiger, Stanley Lieberson, and Harrison White. It is an exciting time for the measurement of meaning. 7. The Long and Winding Road: It is hard to understand what is new about this work without seeing the context from which it emerged. And so my next point is just to say that this new science of meaning analysis represents a break with what went before, even as it contains continuities from earlier projects. I would tell this story by noting that modern American sociology emerged out of a Faustian bargain that was struck with the natural sciences some 40 years ago. It was around that time that quantitative sociologists began to turn away from the formal analysis of meaning and the broader project of cultural interpretation, splitting subject from object like atoms in the new nuclear age. This happened in part as a reaction to the hollowness that characterized early attempts to model “national values” and the surprising discovery that attitudes did not predict behavior (see Smith, 1998). But, as the early history of network analysis demonstrates, it was also the result of an effort to scale research problems down to a manageable size (Mohr, forthcoming-b). The effort to tie meaning to measurement persisted in sub-fields such as political sociology where public opinion matters have continued to be of interest, but with rare exceptions (e.g., Martin, 2000b), these studies have not found their way back into an explanatory science of social institutions. This turn away from formal efforts of interpretation persisted on into the new age of cultural sociology. Pete Peterson (1976, 1979) can be credited with bringing formal analysis back into cultural studies but he did so by stepping around the problem of meaning. DiMaggio’s early work followed a similar strategy. His studies on cultural capital (DiMaggio, 1982) made use of various indicators of cultural participation, knowledge and attitudes to mark off levels of cultural resources which he then showed to have tangible effects (as increments to R-Square) without ever making claims about what his subjects thought, experienced, or believed to be true. The new institutionalists (e.g., Powell and DiMaggio, 1991) followed the same path — after laying out an ambitiously constructivist vision of the organizational world, their research focused on the effects of meanings, not their content. Even Bourdieu, in his own way, failed in his efforts to analyze the content of cultural meanings (see Mohr, forthcoming-c). This is now changing. Today’s cultural scientists study the meanings themselves—their shapes, their logical forms, their underlying structures—as well as their effects. 8. Don’t worry, be happy!: My eighth point is that these changes will not deprive us of our humanity (or our humanists). The melding of technology and interpretation is nothing new. Language was the first interpretative technology. Writing was another, as was the invention of the library, the printing press, the broadsheet, the fountain pen, the typewriter, the paperback book, the Dewey decimal system, the Xerox machine, the word processor, and the world wide web (to name just a few). One could also speak of literary technologies — the epic poem, the novel, iambic pentameter, the refereed journal, deconstruction, the tenure report. All of these are tools we deploy in the service of interpreting, sharing, and analyzing meaning. My point is that the pursuit of knowledge is never as pure and unmediated as we might imagine and thus the use of formal analysis is less of a radical break in this trajectory than it is another evolutionary step. I expect that within a few decades we’ll see literary scholars making regular use of statistical analyses in their readings of Milton and Melville, if only because the technology of reading itself is rapidly moving down this path. In fact, the field of literary computing is already off to a healthy start (e.g., Potter, 1989). But does this mean that there will no longer be a place for the solitary scholar sitting alone in her study reflecting on the state of the world? I have no doubt that that place will always be honored. I also think that the merger of science and hermeneutics is not going to lead to the de-skilling of humanist scholars. On the contrary, as Paul Attewell (1987) demonstrated, the introduction of new technology into the work place can also lead to an upgrading of skills. Interpretative work may well be facilitated by technology, but it will never be replaced by it. 9. Reach out and touch someone: This brings me back to the start. My ninth point is that the real task before us is to convince mainstream (quantitative) sociologists that their solidly grounded statistical descriptions of the world are partial, inefficient and incomplete. Professing a faith in Berger and Luckmann (1967) is an insufficient response to the stark realities of a socially constructed world. Here is the difference . It doesn’t matter that you acknowledge that the world is a meaningful place if you then you go off and either ignore that fact in your measurement process (as organizational ecologists do) or you only go so far as to measure culture’s effects (as the new institutionalists have done). If you do this, then you are not using your technology to its full effect. You are running your models with one hand tied behind your back. Is it any wonder that our R-squares have always seemed puny in comparison to our colleagues in the natural sciences? Imagine instead a world where you could never escape the demand to add in that extra explanatory value of cultural analysis, a world where science and hermeneutics are full and equal partners, a world where everything can be and needs to be a matter for interpretation. Tell that to the next positivist you meet. (And if you want to see how to do that with style, see Breiger (2002)). 10. One step beyond…: My tenth and final point would be just to summarize all of this by saying that the cultural turn is coming all right, but it has only just begun to swing on its hinge. The process will not be complete until the scientific side of sociology meets up with the hermeneutic side. It won’t be finished until we sociologists have learned all that our colleagues in the humanities have to teach us — about discourse, the ways of metaphor, the power of rhetoric, the logic of narrative. If the world is truly, as Geertz has assured us, a vast web of meanings, then it is hard to see how we can make an effective claim to knowledge about that world until we have mastered both the art and the science of interpretation. We need both skill sets if we are to learn what those webs are made of, how they are spun, how they persist, how they change, how they are used and, and how they structure the institutional lives that we lead. When the pages of the ASR are filled with articles whose R-squares are pegged to variations in rhetorical use of social movement activists, the narrative claims of organizational actors, or the metaphorical logics of political agents, when Donna Haraway starts running logistic regressions and Mike Hannan begins to publish interpretative essays in Signs, that will be the day that we can start talking about getting beyond the cultural turn. But we have a ways to go before we have to worry about that. Well, for what its worth, this is the kind of thing I would want to tell my colleagues (both the cultured and the non-cultured) at the upcoming meetings. What about you? 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