David L. Altheide
Arizona State University
Meanings and definitions matter in everyday life and are the foundations for thoughts and feelings. The development of massive information bases now permits analysis of numerous news reports and public information in order to identify potential sources of public perceptions and what is on “our minds.” Tracking Discourse is one way to study how symbols converge in print, in visuals, and in public discourse. Tracking Discourse approaches numerous documents qualitatively in order to become familiar with formats and emphases, while suggesting topics and themes. The perspective will be illustrated with materials from an ongoing study of the discourse of fear that dominates public perceptions and debates. A discourse of fear may be defined as the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of the effective environment, or the physical and symbolic environment as people define and experience it in everyday life. The implications of this discourse and alternatives to it will be discussed.
Rethinking Labor: New Technologies of Globalization
Aneesh
Rutgers University
This discussion focuses on a rapidly growing, but little researched, practice of on-line labor flows from India to the United States. Using high speed datacom links, programmers based in India now work on-line and in real time, on computers situated in the United States. This practice—after passing through the conventional frames of economics and national bureaucracies—is variously understood as "trade in services" or "sub-contracting," but never as "labor migration" which is still reserved for physical migration of the bodies. Such conventional frames—I argue—constitute the "new" in terms of the "old." With the growth of information technologies and the resulting separation of work performance from the site, we need a different set of frames for understanding what is "labor" and how it "flows." In the context of programming labor, if the projects completed on-site—by physically bringing programmers from India to the US—are closely similar in nature to off-shore projects traveling on-line, we need to rethink the framing—and thus the constitution—of two practices in terms of "migration" and "trade."
Eating Disorders and the DSM:
How Classification Affects Treatment Decisions and Cultural
Attitudes
Rachel Askew
Rutgers University
Are the eating disorders (anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa) distinct disorders with different courses and outcomes? And if so, what are the cardinal features of each disorder? The most recent edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders put out by the APA ("the official 'bible' for characterizing mental disorders") classifies the conditions as separate. However, a close examination of the DSM's categorization of the conditions reveals considerable overlap of the two definitions. In addition, past and current research points to differences in psychopathology within each category rather than between the categories set forward by the DSM.
Despite the discrepancies between the DSM's classification of the disorders and the actual reality of living with an eating disorder, the DSM's delineation of the disorders directly affects the type of treatments made available to specific individuals. Thus, whether one is diagnosed with anorexia or bulimia nervosa affects the duration and type of treatment one receives. In addition, mental health professionals conceptualize anorectic and bulimic patients differently as a result of the DSM's dichotomy—a cognitive distinction they may pass along to their patients and to the public at large.
Producing Human Capital: Cultural and Economic Value in the Humanities
My study of the Canon Wars in the U.S. and in four college English departments finds that battles over multiculturalism emerged as a national struggle for the discipline's economic survival. Once the market value of high status literary culture became uncertain, a shuffle over the content and value of English literature ensued, but local understandings vary by departmental prestige (by the department's likelihood of conveying cultural capital to students and by their likelihood of using it to their own advantage). I hope this case study will begin a conversation about the specific processes through which cultural capital may be translated into economic capital and vice versa. The exercise should open possibilities for, and test the limits of, Bourdieu's "cultural capital" metaphor. Although the temptation of reducing "culture" to "status" is dangerous, his approach permits sociologists to employ "markets" as powerful cultural frames that likely extend beyond the economic realm. I find this approach useful, not because I think *academic* market theories are the best way to understand human behavior, but because *popularized* market theories are powerful elements of post-industrial culture.
Closing the Economy/Culture Gap: A Multinarrative 'Case'
József Böröcz
Rutgers University
Widely practised and taken for natural as it is, the divorce of the "economic" from the "cultural," or vice versa, in sociological analysis is also artificial and conducive of spot blindness. Worse yet, it is often also a violation of the integrity of the case--i.e., a barrier to understanding. I will illustrate this last claim by presenting a miniseries of narrative snippets, in search for a sociology of economic alterity, cultural exploitation, and other apparent oxymorons.
Insiders and Outsiders:
Thoughts on the Politics of Classification in Art
Anne E. Bowler
University of Delaware
The sociology of art presents us with a substantial body of research documenting the crucial role of social factors in the emergence of new systems of artistic production, distribution, and reception. Traditional classifications of timeless "great works" have given way to the increasing recognition that the very categories "art" and "not-art" are always socially constructed, culturally contingent, and historically specific. The case of asylum art provides an excellent illustration of this process as well as its deeper theoretical and methodological implications for the sociology of art. Having documented the constellation of socio-cultural factors that gave rise to the so-called "discovery" of asylum art in the earlier 20th century, my current research focuses on the contemporary resurgence of interest in this marginalized genre. It is argued that earlier and later modes of reception are linked by a preoccupation with questions of authenticity, a critical dimension in classificatory schemas applied to asylum art and outsider art more generally. A significant point of continuity, preoccupation with authenticity nevertheless forms the basis for important shifts in the meaning of and contemporary market for asylum art. Special attention is given to issues of commodification, the use of symbols in identity construction and boundary formation, and the role of contingency in processes of differentiation and distinction.
The Institutional Imaginary: Culture and Cognition, Passions and Interests
Craig Calhoun
New York University
A recent revival in "institutionalist analysis" has encouraged a new approach to the role of culture in the reproduction of stable patterns of social relations and forms of social organization. In this work, the emphasis has fallen overwhelmingly on culture as a source of continuity in organization and action. Culture reproduces and transmits guidelines for what to do (and not do), how to do it, and how to represent it. These cumulatively enable social actors to construct specific organizations in line with intersubjectively understood forms. This may be a matter of "institutional memory" within a specific organization, or of sharing in a common cultural approach to constructing specific organizations.
In the present paper, I propose to extend this line of analysis by shifting the emphasis to a more active view of the ways in which social forms are imagined. This requires combining attention to culture and cognition, and also considering how each is shaped by passions and interests. Categories such as 'nation" or 'corporation' help to constitute the basic institutions of modern life. They are shaped by both memory and new thought, institutional imperatives that hold imagination in check, and also those that demand new imagination to make action possible.
Culture as Knowledge Level Dynamics
Kathlen Carley
Carnegie Mellon University
Culture is often characterized in terms of shared norms, beliefs, attitudes and responses. From a cognitive standpoint, knowledge and human cognitive processes underlie all of these phenomena. Viewed from this perspective culture will change as individuals interact and learn. In this talk, an approach to studying culture is described that is grounded both on empirical data drawn from texts and computational analysis using cognitively motivated multi-agent models. In the multi-agent computational model the agents have the ability to learn and communicate, to develop shared norms, beliefs, attitudes and responses. The model can be initialized with data drawn from an empirical analysis of knowledge level data collected from texts gathered from members of the population. An illustration based on a small firm will be described.
Individualism Pro Tem: The Case Against Linear Models of Relational Development
Karen A. Cerulo
Rutgers University
For the past twenty-five years, a bevy of intellectuals have announced the dominance of individualism in America. In 1976, author Tom Wolfe anointed the "me generation." Three years later, philosopher Christopher Lasch declared the "culture of narcissism." Through the 1980s and 1990s, scholars wrote of rising selfishness, declining civility, suburban isolation, and loss of community. Now, at the millenium's end, many see Americans as hopelessly disengaged. Indeed, political scientist Robert Putnam has declared the "death of Civic America."
Concerns for a growing individualism are anything but new. From Tonnies to Durkheim, from Simmel to Cooley, from Davis and Merton to Habermas and Giddens, core social theorists have promoted conceptual categories that both create and sustain ideas of a linear march toward individualism. The argument is familiar. Developing societies such as the U.S. experience a shift from "we" to "me," -- a shift that is the unfortunate yet inevitable price of a fully developed, complex, and highly modern society. Each new technology, each leap forward delivers expansion at the cost of community. Each developmental stride overpowers or slowly eradicates the important interaction rituals that comprise the very notion of local community.
Are concerns for a growing individualism warranted with regard to the U.S.? Has American society slowly "walked the line" leading from intimate community to an anomic me-centered world? If so, is individualism a terminal condition or simply "pro tem"? Is the return of cohesive community or other relational forms unlikely or impossible?
This paper presents preliminary findings from a larger project devoted to the study of American individualism (U.S. circa 1850-1995). In this project, I am pursuing several new ideas regarding the status of American individualism:
The Rest of the Story:
The Social Patterns of Story Elaboration
Karen A. Cerulo
Rutgers University
Many individuals never move beyond the introductory elements of a media story. Rather, in their attempts to apprehend and evaluate an incident, such individuals process the bare facts – the who, what, when, where, how, and why of an account – and proceed to "fill in the blanks" or the details of a story on their own. Such individuals clutch a mere outline of a phenomenon and actively author "the rest of the story." In so doing, media users engage in a process to which I refer as story elaboration – the embellishment, enhancement, and extension of professionally constructed narratives.
To date, the practice of story elaboration has received little attention in the social scientific literature. However, the research I will discuss today suggests that the phenomenon is quite widespread and worthy of careful scholarly attention. In today’s presentation, I highlight the social profile of those who engage in elaboration and I contrast this profile with that of individuals who refrain from elaborative practices. My broader project also:
The Mind-to-Mind Connection:
Are Technologically Mediated Social Bonds and Communities
"Really" Real?
Mary Chayko
Rutgers University
In this high-tech age, people learn a great deal about many others whom they have never physically met. In visiting web pages and trading messages over the Internet, enjoying television, radio, and other mass media, talking on the telephone, and reading newspapers and books, we learn quite a bit about a whole host of people with whom we have never had face-to-face contact. We may feel that we "know" some of these absent others, as we respond to them and resonate with them mentally and emotionally. We may even come to care about a few of them quite deeply. Yet we never "meet" them in the traditional sense.
I consider this mode of social connectedness "mind-to-mind," as opposed to face-to-face, connecting. But what do we make of it? What does it say about the ways in which social bonds can be made and maintained, of the modes by which individuals live in community with one another, of the nature of togetherness itself? I interviewed fifty people from diverse backgrounds at length about their experiences of social connecting at a distance and surveyed 143 additional people online to learn more about how these connections are formed and sustained and perceived. In providing an overview of my research and relating some of the experiences of mind-to-mind connecting that were shared with me, I hope to stimulate discussion as to the meaning and authenticity of such experiences for modern mass media users.
Solitude as a New Sociological Frontier
Ira J. Cohen
Rutgers University
When do we make sense of what is going on in our lives? When do we daydream? When do we try to work with our emotions? When do general impressions crystalize in our minds? These are unusual questions for theorists of culture and cognition. Typically, the main question is not when do we think or feel, but rather how are thoughts and feelings shaped by social forces? Durkheim correctly maintained that the elementary forms of mental life have cultural origins. Schutz and Mead persuasively argued that the social actor's thoughts and feelings are provoked by interaction with others. More recently Giddens and Bourdieu have moved to reconcile these complementary theoretical positions. I assume the general validity of all of these lines of thought. But by asking when questions about mental life I mean to suggest some exciting and potentially profound new directions in the sociology of mental life.
I am most interested in episodes of solitude, episodes that recur in every culture's customary routines. Recurrent episodes of solitude are just as necessary for mental life as focused interactions, or so I maintain. If solitary confinement ultimately induces madness in prisoners, radically prolonged episodes of interaction ultimately produce broadly similar results. For example, by depriving recruits of solitude religious cults break down their resistance to what they might otherwise find to be highly disturbing feelings and disruptive, or even suicidal thoughts.
Solitude is a new sociological frontier with its own theoretical agenda. Since episodes of solitude recur in every culture, it seems likely that some trans-cultural mental processes are involved such as problem-solving, inner-directed catharsis, imagination and mental amusement. But, as a Durkheimian position would imply, every culture (and sub-culture) structures episodes of solitude through distinctive practices of its own. Thus, Christian prayer structured some of the most intense episodes of solitude in the Middle Ages, whereas identity work and emotion work structure some of the most intense episodes of solitude today. In different cultures solitude may be required for divine inspiration, pursuit of inner peace, or artistic creativity. Self-flattery and self-pity are best experienced in solitude as well. Absorbing entertainment such as music, drama, and novels divert us from focused engagements with others even though we may be surrounded by a crowd.
Erving Goffman once said that interaction creates a socialized trance, an all-absorbing little world unto itself. In solitude, we often enter trances with boundaries of their own. Paradoxical as it may seem: in order to be social, we sometimes need to be alone.
Scripts and Institutional Change
Michele Dillon
Yale University
The cognitive turn in sociology allows for a dynamic view of how culture is enacted in everyday life. Yet sociologists have been slow to exploit this move in analyzing processes of social and institutional change. I would like to draw attention to the ways in which people interrogate what might appear as pre-given and taken-for-granted scripts, and use them to reconstruct schemas that validate new institutional routines and ways of being. Drawing on my research with institutionally marginalized Catholics (cf. *Catholic Identity,* Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), I will discuss how these Catholics use symbolic resources within the doctrinal tradition to redefine the meanings and boundaries of Catholic identity. I will also show that when conservative Catholics who are opposed to specific institutional changes (such as women priests), are asked to conceptualize alternative futures for the church, their re-imagining of Catholicism allows for a much greater acceptance of institutional change than is apparent from the overall political/ideological profile they present when measured by standard survey questions. Overall, my research with Catholics suggests that institutional cultures allow for a greater diversity of individual and collective scripts than is often assumed by sociologists of culture (e.g., Bourdieu, *Practical Reason,* Stanford University Press, 1998).
To further illustrate how specific institutional contexts constrain and empower how people use cultural resources, I will also discuss preliminary findings from my current research on religion and meaning in American lives. Based on a longitudinal sample of Americans (N = 150), differentiated by gender, social class, and religion, I will discuss how scripts relating to gender equality, for example, vary depending on the life-stage and structural context of the interviewees. The variation in the scripts produced suggests that attitudes toward equality are not necessarily contingent on some overarching ideological position, but derive from how everyday experiences are understood and integrated by the interviewees. Through these processes, some interviewees come to embrace an egalitarian view of gender differences whereas others remain skeptical.
Commensuration:
Using Numbers to Create Relationships Between Things
Wendy Espeland
Northwestern University
Commensuration, the transformation of different qualities into a common metric, is a fundamental feature of social life. It is a basic way that we create and subvert social boundaries of all sorts, especially boundaries around things that we value. Common examples of commensuration include price, cost-benefit ratios, utility functions and the quantitative ranking of everything from colleges to toasters. Commensuration changes what we notice, how we value, and how we treat what we value. It creates new things and new relationships among things, it makes some objects and relationships invisible, and it is often an important way to express or negotiate power. Yet, commensuration is so prevalent and so deeply institutionalized, we often take it for granted. Especially for scholars interested in how we classify social relationships and how we process information, commensuration is a crucial strategy for organizing the world, and one that we cannot afford to ignore.
Quantitative Measurement and the Sociology of Knowledge
John H. Evans
UCLA
Sociologists of science have long used data from texts, such as citations and content codes, to make claims about the production of knowledge. However, because they rely on data gathered by the Institute for Scientific Information, which only gathers data from journals, they have generally been limited to examining the physical and biological sciences, where knowledge is primarily transmitted through journals. Examining sociological knowledge in this way must be either done in an extremely limited fashion or results in biases, because sociologists also transmit knowledge through books. To gather these data for yourself would have been logistically impossible. However, with the growing power of personal computers, it is now possible to scan texts into your computer, translate these words into numbers using commonly available word processing programs, and subsequently address questions of knowledge production. This means that disciplines that write books can be examined, as can questions from before the mid-1960s when the ISI began collecting data. I offer an example from my book, where I used citation and content code data from an extract of 51,000 texts, gathered, collated and analyzed on my PC, to explain why debates about human genetic engineering changed from assuming substantively rational arguments to formally rational arguments between 1959 and 1995. Other topics that scholars could examine include the rise of the ideas of deconstruction, orientalism, queer theory, etc.
National Politics, Market Economics:
Problems of Definition
Russell S. Faeges
University of Notre Dame
The Latin-derived word "nation" is one of the oldest in the English language, but until the late-18th century its meaning was almost static, and little connected with politics. This equilibrium was punctured circa 1790: since then dozens of new words (and hundreds of phrases) based on "nation" have emerged (starting with "international" and "nationalism"), while the use of "nation" itself was politicized, and converged with use of "country" and "state," the three words becoming virtually interchangeable across a wide range of use. These linguistic changes map a revolution in cognition and institutions, which envisions humanity divided into distinct groups — "nations" — each of which has, or should have, its own territory — "country" — and autonomous political status/institutions — "state." The nationalization of politics raise two major issues.
One is substantive: the variable and varying relationship of national politics to economics. Nationalism arose in close association with market economics and industrial revolution; increasingly the two are at odds.
The other issue is methodological: how to conceptualize and theorize nations, nationalism, etc. The classic approach to these problems is definitional, that is, it requires definitions of these concepts, which are notoriously definition-evading. I argue that to solve the problem of nations and nationalism requires understanding why they are undefinable, and developing non-definitional strategies of conceptualization.
Thinking About Villains: Adolf Hitler and the Problem of Sticky Reputations
Gary Alan Fine
Northwestern University
Just as heroic figures have reputational images that affect society, so too do those that societies label as bad or evil. Through the lens of these groups and individuals we come to understand (or believe that we understand) human potentials. Villains serve both to bring us together, as Durkheim and Erikson have suggested, and also set boundaries with others. Further, links to these individuals serve to stigmatize those whose actions and selves we reject.
Nowhere is this process more clear than in the case of Adolf Hitler. For this study I focus on some of the ways that Hitler has been used in American society. Over a half century after his death, the image of Hitler ubiquitious, found within political discourse and popular culture alike. Those who attempt to rehabilitate Hitler's image, even modestly, find themselves tarred - not with being cranks, but with being morally disreputable. This paper examines several uses of Hitler within American culture, and attempts to develop a theory for the usage of evil exemplars.
What to do When It's Too Late to Change the Survey: Dealing with "Imperfect" Instruments in the Data Collection Process
Sylvia Fuller
Rutgers University
Designing surveys that will provide valid, reliable data about cultural meanings can be a Herculean task, particularly when the survey covers diverse populations and asks sensitive questions. Not surprisingly, a large body of research is devoted to developing and evaluating techniques to help researchers best accomplish this. Despite this, it is not unusual to uncover problems of design only after a survey has been implemented. Standard texts pay relatively little attention to this eventuality, in part because of the difficulty of making changes to a survey once the data collection process has begun. In this talk I discuss some of the problems that were uncovered, and the steps taken to rectify them, in an ongoing study of the effectiveness of state funded HIV prevention programs in New Jersey. While major changes to the survey were not feasible, some measures were nonetheless possible to increase the reliability and decrease bias in the data.
Sex Scandal Narratives and the Public-Private Divide
Joshua Gamson
Yale University
As a by-now firmly entrenched public narrative, sex scandals are interesting not just as stories in their own right, but also for the questions they raise about the operation of cultural scripts more generally. Drawing from work in progress on American sex scandals, and building on a more general interest in how sexual scripts are deployed in larger struggles over public-private boundaries, I want to focus in particular on two areas: the interaction between discursive elements over time, and the relationship between institutional environments and cultural repertoires. Sex scandals are moments in which the public-private divide is thought through and to some degree reworked; just how that reworking takes place remains quite tricky to understand. That analytical trickiness may be useful for pushing forward research on "discourse."
Sex scandals seem to draw from several major discourse pools, and the interaction between these pools has clearly changed over time; but just how what is being and can be thought about through scandal narratives at any given time may be dependent on where each of these sub-discourses sits in relation to the other. With scandals, for instance, I'm thinking of discourses of gender, in which the key question is the appropriate relationship between men and women, and in which the division between public and private maps in different ways onto the division between male and female; discourses of celebrity, in which the rise and fall of public figures, their strategic use of details of private life, and the match or mismatch between public persona and private are central; discourses of invasion, in which private life is seen to be under attack by various forces, such as sensationalistic mass media organizations and government surveillance. Clearly, making sense of the changing interaction between these various discourses, and how they come together in sex scandals, involves paying close attention not just to relations between cultural elements, but also to the organized activities to promote one or another of these discourses: various feminist interventions, for instance, or changes in journalistic norms, or the rise of the profession of public relations.
Sex scandals, which emerge and operate quite differently in a range of institutional settings–-not just politics, but also entertainment, religion, military, and academic settings–-also point to the question of how institutional exigencies shape the way specific schemas take hold. In setting political and organizational boundaries on activity, institutional environments favor some actors and not others, some discourses and not others. They thus set the course for what sorts of cultural resources can be deployed, how, and by whom. Certain uses of sexual meanings, for example, are more easily accommodated by particular institutional settings: for instance, the story of women using "feminine wiles" to get ahead operates quite differently in the military context than in the political and academic; a mismatch between public and private persona may be scandalous and damaging for religious figures but expected of, and a boost to interest in, entertainment figures. The institutional conditions under which cultural schema take their shape–-the conditions under which certain understandings of "public" and "private" circulate more easily than others, in this case--need to be analytically central. This is, of course, easier said than done, and I'd be interested in discussing strategies for doing so.
How Story Telling Can Be Empowering
William A. Gamson
Boston College
When cultural norms and practices privilege those forms of discourse that are disembodied, emotionally detached, technical, and based on argumentation, this can potentially create a chasm between the language of policy discourse and the language of the life-world. The U.S. mass media is frequently criticized for its tendency to reduce complex social issues to human interest stories and to personalize the news. But this practice, while it is insufficient, may be necessary in encouraging a sense of agency among ordinary people about their ability to participate in the public sphere. Under certain conditions, it honors their own experiential knowledge and its relevance for policy discourse, encouraging them to participate in public life by increasing their sense of collective agency.
Contested Possibilities: Averted Lynchings in the Jim Crow South
Larry J. Griffin
Vanderbilt University
By the 1920s, considerably more threatened lynchings were prevented than completed in the South. Averted lynchings are (a) situations in which mobs, having actually formed in public, (b) appeared realistically through their expressed statements and/or actions to threaten to kill seriously another person(s) in an unlawful fashion, (c) but in which a lynching did not eventuate because of the intervention of other actors. Decisive intervention came in many forms: African-Americans successfully resisted mob violence by behind-the-scenes maneuvering, by acts of individual sacrifice, and by public displays of collective defiance, and southern whites, both lay and official, acted to prevent lynchings by appeals to "law and order" and justice, by moving or hiding jailed prisoners to prevent their capture by lynch mobs, and by the use of force. White supremacy thus did not unalterably script or encode what southerners would do when confronted by racial conflict or potentially lethal racial situations: their actions were often conflicted, nuanced, and surprisingly unpredictable.
By thinking of averted lynchings as historical events with certain formal temporal properties (contingent unfolding, sequentiality, narrative "followability," etc.), I intend both to explore how and why some threatened lynchings from becoming lynchings proper and to exploit their prismatic richness for understanding the inconsistencies and contradictions in the Jim Crow South. Events display the anatomy and dynamism of social structures: how they are put together, how and where they produce social tension, and how the possibilities for human liberation and constraint are organized. They thus serve as the repository and (perhaps temporary) resolution of social conflicts and reveal how multiple or contradictory social relations and cultural meanings surface and are held in check or how they are suppressed and the likely consequences of this.
Every threatened lynching, for example, consists of and refracts historical contestation and possibility, both literal and at the level of meaning: white mobs and white law officers battling each other, thereby contesting the meaning and future structural implementation of law and order; prisoners and jailers contesting the meaning of decency and social place; lynch mobs and African-Americans clashing, thereby contesting and structuring the meaning of race and justice; white Southern women contesting their imposed dependence on white men for protection from black men and thus rejecting accepted meanings and roles of gender and race. Events, finally, are inherently contingent because they did not have to happen as they did: neither the event's context nor its early actions entirely prefigure what will subsequently happen, and thus the unexpected turn--an armed intervention, an act of resistance by the intended victim, a person refusing to sanction mob death--may be decisive for subsequent action and for whether a threatened lynching is completed or prevented. Through their precise unfolding, events, then, encapsulate and display historically contested structural practices and potentialities, simultaneously pointing to possible avenues of both societal change and continuity.
The Visualization of Social Theory
Douglas Harper
Duquesne University
The metaphors of social science are often visual, though our data seldom are. In fact, it remains uncommon for sociologists to put the process of seeing to work when developing sociological ideas. In the past years a small movement of visual sociology has begun to work in the intersection between sociological thinking and seeing.
The ideas and images I will share at this meeting will be taken from past and present research on homelessness, the sociology of work, the evolution of agricultural societies and the sociology of jazz.
The question which underlies this presentation concerns the nature of sociological evidence: when and how is a photograph sociological data?
Rhetoric and the Cultural Meaning of Welfare Reform
Sharon Hays
University of Virginia
Although many have analyzed the practical potential of welfare reform for ending "dependency" and eradicating poverty, my current book-length project, Inside Welfare: Gender, Family Values, and the Work Ethic, seeks to uncover the cultural message and moral code that is being sent by welfare reform. My focus is on the framing of family life, the work ethic, and gender roles that is found in this legislative elaboration of the proper path for single mothers, deadbeat dads, and their progeny. To that end, my research offers a textual analysis of the language and logic of welfare legislation and policy, and an ethnographic and interview-based account of the cultural interpretation of those policies and mandates at the local level, among welfare clients and caseworkers.
In this discussion session format, I'll touch briefly on just of a few of the relevant issues and findings. In keeping with the theme of the conference, my research offers a perfect purchase point for uncovering the inadequacy of any universalistic account of cognition. The diversity of readings of welfare reform is striking. It begins with the congressional framers, as both conservatives and liberals approving the same document yet deriving very different conclusions as to its meaning. These diverse and often contradictory readings continue through the interpretations of state policy makers, the media, and the public, and take on additional forms at ground level where one finds differential readings by eligibility workers vs. social workers, "successful" welfare offices vs. those whose welfare rolls are not declining fast enough, by long-term vs. transitional welfare clients, clients who live in housing projects or inner-city conditions vs. those who live in "safer" neighborhoods, clients of color vs. clients who are white, and so on. All these readings, I argue, highlight not only a diversity in interests and experiences, but also more widespread cultural tensions in the meaning and significance of independence and dependence, paid work and caregiving, public and private lives, competitive self-interest and obligations to others, the value of the work ethic and the value of personal ties and familial bonding, equality and difference feminism, liberalism and communitarianism, and "meritocratic" membership and inclusive citizenship.
The Cultural Construction of Mental Diseases
Allan V. Horwitz
Rutgers University
The fundamental assumption of modern psychiatry is that mental diseases are distinct, categorical entities. Mental illnesses are assumed to be universal disorders where manifest symptoms are indicators of underlying pathology. This paper develops the notion that the modern system of categorical mental illnesses is a cultural production that emerged in a distinct historical period out of professional, political, and economic concerns. Further, most mental symptoms classified in this system are not indicators of underlying diseases. Rather, the types of mental symptoms that predominate in particular times and places reflect culturally legitimate notions of symptom displays, major identity categories, and professionally acceptable illness labels. Mental illnesses are neither universal disease entities nor arbitrary labels imposed on resisting patients but collective cultural constructions suitable to particular social conditions.
Perspectives on the "Unfinished Infant"
Nicky Isaacson
Rutgers University
The American understanding and classification of premature infants has changed dramatically from the late 19th century to the present. What previously had been categorized as miscarriages, abortuses, "weaklings," unsalvageable fetuses or "freaks of nature" are now perceived of as babies, subject to a variety of medical and social interventions designed to finish what nature has failed to complete. Nonetheless, there is still social disagreement about which fetuses should be classified as premature infants. From allocating expensive health care resources to determining women’s reproductive choices, the current trend of treating ever-younger fetuses as premature infants has wide-ranging social, ethical and political implications.
Although whom we categorize as premature has expanded, the premature baby remains an "unfinished infant," not yet constituting a consistently uniform or clearly bounded subject. I suggest that the premature infant, commonly assumed to be a natural subject, is, in fact, a product of specific social and cultural forces. The "unfinished infant" thus presents an often-troubling cognitive challenge for those pondering the question of who is fully human. I suggest that in order to negotiate the tensions and contradictions embodied in the premature baby, we employ specific metaphors and other strategic rhetorical and visual representations in an attempt to focus our attention on specific baby-like attributes of the unfinished infant and to stabilize the shifting horizon of when life begins.
The Individual in Macrosociology
James M. Jasper
On the surface, it would seem as though the individual must be theorized in microsociology but not in the more structural world of macrosociology. In fact the opposite may be closer to the true. The outcomes of political conflict, the choices of public policies, the growth of social movements, the dynamics of organizations, and trends in the arts, to take disparate examples, cannot be fully explained without attention to key individuals, what they choose, and what they symbolize. Often, they are influential less for their direct choices (as a "great man" approach to history would have it) than for their indirect effects on cultural symbols and sentiments. Leaders, and especially founders, symbolically embody their organizations and thus shape organizational cultures and expectations. Other prominent figures (artists or protestors, for instance) may embody a certain character or way of being and feeling in the world.
The current challenge is to figure out what we need to know about individuals in order to further our macro-level explanations. One approach is to think of individuals as parallel to cultures: as containing systems of related meanings, habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, and a set of normative allegiances.
Global Capital: Relations of Place, Notions of Self
Eric Kaldor
Rutgers University
Multinational Corporations (MNCs) represent fascinating social forms from both macro- and microsociological perspectives. While world systems theorists and others point to MNCs as one of two powerful types of actors in the modern capitalist world economy, conversational analysis and ethnographic research suggest that these powerful organizations are complex sites themselves for micropolitical struggles. Using exploratory research collected in Hungary during 1999, this paper explores the theoretical ground in between core-semiperiphery domination and the micropolitics of contestation.
Penetration of the post-state socialist economies by global capital was achieved under a powerful discourse of Western superiority (a reworking of Cold War and Orientalist discourses) largely accepted by East European governments and managers. Using extended narrative interviews from Hungarian and expatriate managers within foreign owned firms as well as additional conversations and materials, I argue that micropolitics within transnational firms entails a reexamination and elaboration of the West/other discourse. This discursive field has significant implications for the character and organization of multinationals as exemplified in one case discussed here. The paper concludes by proposing a theory of relations of power in the global economy that navigates between neocolonial domination and active resistance.
What Cognition and Affect Can Tell Us About the Future of Television
Robert Kubey
Rutgers University
It is my view that there will be far less change in television than many prognosticators would have us believe. Much prediction is based only on what technology can deliver and what the industries would like us to buy or believe is possible, not on enduring elements of human behavior that are not about to change. The prediction that the World Wide Web, for example, will completely displace television is unfounded in my view as are the ideas that we will all soon have 500 channels or that "interactive" TV will be a big industry. Research findings on how people experience television both affectively and cognitively will be considered.
The Collective in the Individual and the Individual in the Collective
Matthew P. Lawson.
The College of New Jersey
A number of respected sociologists and historians have noted that changing economic situations are associated at the macro-level with periodic revivals of individualistic ideologies (evangelical Christianity in particular). To explain this macro-level association my research has come to focus more and more on the micro level. Changes in life chances create strain in face to face relationships. The symbolism and ritual practices of born-again Christianity provide people with a new relationship schema, on the basis of which they can transform the quality of their face to face relationships. My comments at the conference will focus on the activity in charismatic prayer meetings, a social context in which individuals corporally and cognitively rehearse this new relationship schema. If their joint efforts are successful, they produce at the collective level a representation of the phenomenon they seek to achieve at the individual level.
Morality And Emotions in the Cultural Construction of Selves
Diane Margolis
University of Conneticutt
This paper explores the social psychology of culture and cognition by explicating the connections between culture and cognition and ideas developed in my 1998 book The Fabric of Self: A Theory of Ethics and Emotions. The self might be thought of as a repertoire of the personae we can bring to center stage as social contexts demand. This repertoire changes over time as the body ages, as the person passes through a succession of social positions, and as the culture changes. Culture provides guidelines, or images, for self-constructs. It offers a collection of possible personae. These are not only images of the possible, but also guidelines for goodness and badness, scripts for what to do, what not to do, how to act, how not to act, and how to present ourselves. Culture, in other words, offers delineations of the good and the bad. The more variegated and complex a society, the greater the range of images. Popular culture is popular because it simplifies and exemplifies ever-changing possibilities about which we need to be informed so that we can keep our repertoires up to date as we construct our selves. There are many ways of knowing and most knowledge of a culture is intuitive, learned through emotional rather than intellectual or strictly cognitive processes. The power of cultural models lies in the human need to belong, to have a place in society, to know who we are and to find approval
Aggregate Approaches to Beliefs and Social Cognition
John Martin
Rutgers University
This paper examines a tradition of empirical research that makes use of aggregate data on the distribution of beliefs and attitudes across a sample of respondents to infer the existence of some form of cognitive ordering of beliefs. This approach is called "associationist" in that the non-independence between two or more beliefs in the aggregate is taken as an indicator of the cognitive association between these beliefs within the mind of a respondent. This cognitive order is generally envisioned as a latent but real connection between two cognitive elements, such that a change in one will produce a psychic impetus towards a change in the other. This paper demonstrates that this approach has been marred by two fundamental paradoxes: the first is that the conception of cognitive association that is relied upon is one having to do with change, while the model of the belief system that go along with this is fundamentally static; the second is that an aggregate property is used as the basis of statements about individual cognition, while that property (non-independence) tends to disappear as we approach the individual level.
This paper proposes that this research tradition, however, can be salvaged by examining the dispersion of persons in a multidimensional space of potential beliefs; the absence of . uniformity in this distribution is then indicative of some form of social organization, which may be quantified and/or described. But it also argues that far from being a compositional artifact that must be ignored when understanding the cognitive portion of beliefs, the social distribution of persons in a belief space is itself what must be the referent of the word "belief' in any sociological sense; our ability to form beliefs is inseparable from our understandings of our position in the social world with its adjacencies, hierarchies, and oppositions.
What Does Contemporary Ritual Require?
Carolyn Marvin
Annenberg School for Communication
University of Pennsylvania
This paper stakes out preliminary territory for a theory of ritual in contemporary industrial societies. As gestural or body-based social communication, ritual is the fundamental form of group communication, essential to culture. The progressive historical repression of the body chronicled by observers like Norbert Elias is offered as a reason for the decline of ritual in its most formally patterned manifestations. Since the body cannot finally be denied, I address how ritual is re-formed and re-presented to support constitutive features of advanced industrial societies.
I hope to learn from conference colleagues what this has to do with a sociology of cognition and culture. Suffice it to say I believe a sociology of mind cannot exclude bodies, without which mind is impossible. More, I take it that no theory of the social in relation to cognition and culture can succeed without taking into account the ways in which groups are constituted from bodies.
Normative Timing and Sequencing of Life
Events:
The Impact of Culture on Mental Health
Julie McLaughlin
Rutgers University
There is a normative time in the lifecourse for making various life transitions. This ideal time is understood by members of the society and is reinforced by the specific age-based rituals linked to different transitions. Along with the prescription that certain events should occur at a certain time is the understanding that the events should follow a particular sequence. Individuals adopt these cultural ideals as their own preferences and attempt to organize their lives accordingly. However, people do not always fulfill the normative ideal in their own lives. Those who experience a life transition at an off-time or out of sequence not only face sanctions from others in their social group but must also acknowledge that they failed to attain their desired life trajectory. I propose that experiencing a normative event at an off-time or out of sequence will negatively affect one’s mental health. I also address methodological challenges that need to be addressed in order to study this topic.
Paul McLean
Rutgers University
In my research on strategic letter-writing and patronage in Renaissance Florence (see AJS, July 1998 for the most readily available representation of that work), I have tried to grapple with the issue of how it is people learn standard cultural practices and then utilize those practices improvisationally in the course of interaction--especially with an eye towards career advancement and friendship building. This has necessitated confronting the relationship between individual action and standardized, culture-wide practices, one aspect of the micro-macro divide. How are actors embedded in their culture and opportunistic in the use of its components? How do they learn not only standardized practices, but techniques and repertoires for assembling those practices or gestures in an effective, even idiosyncratic way? I turned to Goffman's ideas on framing to help out here, especially to the idea of presenting a reliable, nuanced portrait of self through largely standardized practices. I also tried to investigate whether or not different frames were correlated with different locations in underlying social classifications and network structures--hence to try to document the link between social structures and identities. To some extent, such structures were clearly important, but the evidence also showed that some actors located in relatively low status positions had managed to achieve fairly low-rhetoric, high intimacy writing practices in correspondence. Further, I felt it necessary to emphasize on the basis of the data that the framing of a particular relationship could vary in strength and type from one interaction episode to the next and from one pair of interactants to the next. So which part of the cultural toolkit actors open up changes in the course of their careers, and cannot simply be inferred from their placement in social structures.
Future research has two chief aims: 1) to expand the sample of letters to judge change in the toolkit over time, and hopefully to expand the possibilities for watching how relationships develop; 2) getting more ambitious in dealing with the theme of frames, moving beyond keyword analysis to more work on the syntax and semantics of letters, keying and switching devices, and figurative language.
Dreams and the Interpretation of News
Joshua Meyrowitz
University of New Hampshire
On first consideration, dreams and news would probably be placed near opposite ends of most classifications of experience. Dreams, after all, are individual psychological experiences that bear little relationship to external social reality, while news claims to be an objective description of reality. Yet this paper will argue that deeper analysis indicates that the processes Sigmund Freud identified in individual dreamwork bear a striking resemblance to the collective, social construction of "news." Both drearnwork and newswork involve the processing of recent occurrences into pre-existing frames of (often unconscious) patterns of thought Both drearnwork and newswork involve condensation, distortion, displacement, self-censorship, and other processes that yield wish-fulfilling latent content, even as the manifest content is often disturbing (bad dreams and bad news). The dreamwork/newswork parallels are especially striking in television news, which also shares with dreams the process of visual dramatization. Mainstream U.S. news treatment of incidents involving Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, and other countries, as well as the reporting on "terrorism" will be used to illustrate the dreamwork implicit in newswork.
Modeling Sociocultural Dynamics:
A Conjunctural Approach
Ann Mische
Rutgers University
One persistent objection to the use of quantitative models and techniques in cultural analysis is that such techniques de-situate cultural processes from social and temporal contexts. In standard statistical techniques, for example, individuals and their attributes are pulled out of the local settings in which they are associated and examined as abstract aggregations measured against hypothetical statistical distributions. Network analytic techniques attempt to improve upon this by focusing not on attributes, but rather on the structure of relations between elements (cultural or otherwise). However, while network analysis incorporates context as structured by network ties, it continues to abstract such ties out of the particular local settings in which they are activated. What I want to explore here are ways to employ quantitative tools in cultural analysis that are specifically designed to situate cultural processes within 1) local sociotemporal conjunctures; and 2) more global configurations of such conjunctures within a given field of interaction.
In my work, I am engaged in the development and application of a family of tools for representing complex interdependencies among different kinds and levels of social forms: e.g., individuals, organizations, cultural elements (narratives, identities, symbols), and/or events. This approach grows out of a technique known as "Galois lattice analysis," which is designed to show how relations between two sets of associated elements (e.g., groups and their members, actors and events, discourse and practice) are mutually co-constituted. Such lattices can be extended to include three (and potentially more) sets of elements, allowing us to show the three-way interpenetration between, for example, discursive elements, the actors and/or groups that express them, and the particular events (or social settings) in which they are expressed. I argue that this give us a way to examine the complex composition of sociocultural conjunctures, by showing how multiply associated sets of elements are linked through their co-occurrence in particular social settings. Lattices allow us to map these relationships both internally (i.e., in terms of what particular subsets of individuals, groups, and/or discourse appear together in a given setting) and externally (i.e.,in terms of the relationship of this particular conjuncture to others in the surrounding field). Moreover, they allow us to track changes in the composition of such settings over time, thus providing insight into the temporal dynamics of association and disassociation in given sociocultural field.
Niche Narratives: Telling Stories and Claiming Space
John W. Mohr
University of California, Santa Barbara
Under periods of social change, regions of institutional space (including the activities, resources, and meanings corresponding to that space) will often be claimed by different organizational agents through a process of jurisdictional conflict. A critical component of any such conflict is the way in which alternative interpretations are put forward regarding how that region of institutional space should be interpreted. Meaning making activities of this sort depend upon the construction of compelling organizational narratives. In this paper I look at the way in which competing organizational narratives are constructed regarding a contested region of institutional space. My goal is to formally analyze the way in which the narratives are constructed and to show how narrative logics are isomorphic to (and dually constituted by) the institutional logic of the organizational spaces in which they are generated.
Mental Weighing and Identity Attribution
Jamie Mullaney
Rutgers University
Research on identity suggests that a critical factor in identity concerns presentation or the behaviors actors perform in order to convince others of their identity. yet identity also involves the attributions others make on the basis of these behaviors. in this paper, i argue that all acts do not fare equally in the process of attribution. rather, individuals making attributions engage in a process of mental weighing as a way to determine which acts "count" toward identity and to what extent. While various components of the act contribute to its social weight--its presence or absence, markedness, frequency, context, and the manner in which it is performed--the lens through which the attributor views the act also influences the weighing process.
Richness of Representation and Richness of Social Responses
Cliff Nass
Stanford University
"The Media Equation" demonstrated that one could replicate a large fraction of the social psychological literature when one changes references to "attitudes or behaviors toward a person" with "attitudes or behaviors toward a simple, text-based computer." This paper will discuss a number of experimental results that address two extensions to this theory: 1) Will computers with more human-like characteristics, such as synthesized speech, pictorial representations of a face or body, and adaptation and personalization, elicit broader and deeper social responses? 2) Will one obtain the same results when one compares human-computer interaction to (imagined) computer-mediated communication; that is, will the belief that one is interacting with a person as opposed to a computer affect attitudes and behaviors? The answers to these questions allow us to change the question "What is human?" from ontological to psychological and sociological.
From the Cognitive Ground Up:
Classification and the Study of Workplace Behavior
Christena Nippert-Eng
Illinois Institute of Technology
This talk draws on three of the author's research projects: 1) a study on the boundary between home and work, 2) an exploration of telecommuting; and, most recently, 3) a reflection on the search for privacy at home and work. The talk focuses on the theoretical/methodological approach common to these projects. It is a distinctly synergistic approach linking thought and more visible forms of behavior. In demonstrating the connection between what is social and what is personal in both of these manifestations, this ethnographic approach to cognitive sociology provides a powerful tool for seeing and understanding individual and organizational behaviors in the world of work. It is especially useful in identifying some of the most seriously challenged assumptions of today's work organizations.
Jeff Olick
Columbia University
Despite repeated calls for sociology to embrace temporality and process (e.g. Abbott, Abrams, Elias, Sewell, Tilly), we have had a hard time doing so. We suffer, as Norbert Elias put it, from an almost irresistible urge-- one inscribed in the very languages we use—to reduce processes to states. Historical sociology remains a special topic, more oxymoron than the redundancy it should be. What are the cognitive and other impediments to temporalizing sociology?
Recently, I have been thinking about this problem from two distinct angles. The first derives from my interest in social memory. Work on social memory has often employed rather sterile dichotomies: memory is produced either in the present or in the past; memory is either durable or malleable; memory is either determining or determined. In contrast, I have sought ways to conceptualize remembering (in contrast to memory, which calls up static images of place or object) that appreciate its fundamental mediateness and fluidity. Remembering is a way of mediating between past and present, a fluid figurational process, in Elias' sense, in which past and present constitute each other dialogically rather than causally. As a result, models that conceptualize memory as an object-- as either independent or dependent variable-- ignore its fundamentally temporal character. Thinking about memory as a mediate process prevents us from treating "it" as a thing apart, one variable in a causal equation. Remembering is a fundamental way to experience temporality. As such, it is in many ways paradigmatic for social processes generally. Appreciating its figurational qualities thus brings into relief the temporality of social life. Attention to the varieties of of mnemonic practices and processes, I argue, is therefore a powerful way of temporalizing sociology.
My second angle on temporality comes from a concern with the search for "causal" explanation in historical sociology. Cultural sociologists have, for the most part, rejected "covering law" models of causation: claiming that some general "causal" mechanism operates in many different situations goes against the grain of the cultural sociologist's appreciation of rich ethnographic uniqueness. The "same" causal mechanism cannot operate in different unique cases. Cultural sociologists, as a result, favor narrative causation: identification of "proximate" causes in unique narrative sequences, prior conditions which are necessary and sufficient to a particular outcome. But, as Andy Abbott has recently argued, even identifying the boundaries of events or conditions to call proximate involves difficult reifications: How we carve up a flux can never be culturally or analytically neutral. In this context, it is interesting to me that one does not find much in the way of "causal" explanation-- of either the nomothetic or narrative kind-- in the writings of theorists like Giddens, Bourdieu, Elias, Bakhtin, and others who explicitly reject a "Kantian" worldview. Is a genuinely historical sociology-- one for which temporality is of the essence rather than an external condition-- incompatible with the search for "causal" explanation? And does abandoning causality lead us directly back to the idiographic search for understanding rather than explanation? Or is it possible to be post-causal rather than anti-causal? Causal explanation--be it nomothetic or narrative-- I argue inherently involves leeching time out of our accounts. But abandoning it need not lead us back to idiographic hermeneutics.
Mental Leveling and the Construction of Parity in Competitive Settings
Kristen Purcell
Rutgers University
This research focuses on the existence of shared cognitive schemata and their role in the production of collective perceptions of, and reactions to, social interactions. In particular, it examines the ways in which a single, widely shared mental structure can affect both thought and action across a broad spectrum of social domains, and in the process begins to dissect the dynamic relationship between mental structures and social structures.
By cataloguing the recent "emergence" of the level playing field metaphor in American culture, and examining a broad sample of its invocations in the American popular press, this research reveals that the cognitive structure embodied in the level playing metaphor is central to directing thought and action in and around competitive settings. Widespread references to "leveling the playing field" between social actors in domains as diverse as politics and business, entertainment and international trade, reveals four distinct categories of action occurring in apparent reaction to the perception of an unlevel playing field. These four forms of social leveling (partitioning, handicapping, standardizing, and calibrating) are each directed at restoring the perception of a level plane which underpins cultural notions of fair play and balanced competition. In (re)constructing competitive parity among participants in a particular setting, social leveling restores the perception of a level playing field and in the process validates the interaction in question.
These findings are notable to sociologists interested in the relationship between culture and cognition in that they contribute to our understanding of the relationship between structured social interactions and structured cognitive schemata. The "level playing field" represents at least one instance where the structural relationship inherent in a commonly shared and understood metaphor affects the perception and reproduction of a common interaction structure – that of the "fair" competitive encounter. In addition, this project proposes sampling on metaphor as a methodological device for identifying collective perceptions of prevailing interaction structures across a culture or thought community, a tool which might prove useful to cognitive and cultural sociologists alike.
Collective Memory in Cultures of Honor and Dignity: Judging the Past in Korea and the United States
Barry Schwartz
University of Georgia
Recent collective memory research has tracked differences in how members of a society interpret information about the past, how they interpret past events and actors across generations, and how generations struggle internally over alternative visions of the past. This research, however, has produced little understanding of how different cultural groupings remember and interpret events, and what it is about events that makes them worth remembering in the first place.
More than one thousand American and Korean undergraduates named the three events in their respective nations' history in which they take greatest pride and the three events they deem the most shameful. Students also responded to a series of questions tapping their attitudes and values about different social issues. These data are important not only for what they tell us about Korean and American judgements of the past but also for what they add to general understandings of collective memory: Why are recognition and recall activated differently in different societies? How does the context-dependency of cognition produce different meanings of the past.
"Collective memory," according to Paul DiMaggio, 'is the outcome of processes affecting, respectively, the information to which individuals have access, the schema by which people understand the past, and the external symbols or messages that prime these schemata." Analysis of students' reasons for naming certain events honorable or shameful suggest strongly that an eastern "culture of honor" and western "culture of dignity" prime the schemata organizing Koreans' and Americans' perceptions of the past. Since America's dignity culture emphasizes moral entitlement, students valorize historical events that establish and extend rights (evident in the reasons they give for their frequent naming of the 1775-1800 Founding Era and World War II) and devaluate events that abolish and restrict rights (evident in reasons they give for their naming of slavery and maltreatment of the American Indian). Since Korea's honor culture emphasizes the "clearing" (protection) of the national name, the most positive events selected, although seemingly trivial in geopolitical terms (the Olympics and other international sporting events), elevate Korea in the eyes of other countries; the most negative events diminish Korea's global stature and reveal its weakness and dependency (the IMF Crisis, the 1910-1945 Japanese occupation, the 1950-53 Korean War).
Universalistic American and particularistic Korean judgements of the past are intensified by contrasting clusters of categorizations and emotions. Koreans' conception of themselves as a "single-blood people," their sharp distinction between themselves and outsiders, their belief that humiliation is Korea's root experience, their acute national self-consciousness, their resentment against foreign powers (even supporters), their self-blame for allowing themselves to be abused, and, above all else, their overwhelming shame at their own weakness - contrast sharply with the American pattern, which emphasizes libertarian values historically affirmed and violated and promotes the kind of self-esteem (in success) and moral outrage (in victimization) through which these values sustain themselves.
The cognitive schemata of Korean and American memory are activated within different realms of emotion and evaluation. Moral judgements, applied to past and present events alike, stabilize not only cognitive categorizations but also the emotion attached to them.
Sociology and Historical Epistemology
Libby Schweber
Harvard University
The question of "how quantitatively oriented scholars can effectively study cultural meanings" can be read in one of two ways. It can be used to inquire into the use of quantitative methods in the study cultural meanings or it can be taken as an invitation to explore the cultural meanings contained in quantitative forms of analysis. My own work addresses the second of these questions. More specifically, I have been working on the problem of how to account for differences in statistical styles of reasoning in France and Britain in the course of the 19th century. The study involves an attempt to ground the relatively new field of historical epistemology in a sociological analysis of institutions. The term "historical epistemology" refers to the study of the conditions (epistemological criteria, type of statements, type of entities, instruments etc) for a truth claim. The institutions that I examine include rules concerning the circulation of ideas, instruments and practices, the institutional mechanisms by which they are enforced and the social networks and organizations with which they are associated.
From a theoretical perspective, the comparison of French and English population statistics is of interest as it draws attention to the problem of differences in seemingly similar forms of statistical work. Whereas French and British statisticians both worked with statistical rates and mortality tables and used the very new vocabulary of laws and causes, they interpreted and applied them differently. Similarities in form thus hid differences In interpretation and use. It is only by introducing a specifically sociological perspective, focusing on the institutionalized rules and organizations facilitating and/or obscuring the circulation and use of concepts, that these differences can be ascertained and explained.
A Social Cognition Approach to Understanding How Media Images of Crime and Violence Influence Social Perceptions and Judgment
L. J. Shrum
Rutgers University
The question of whether media images of crime and violence have effects on viewers has been a much-debated question. This debate is fueled by research that shows generally weak media effects when effects are uncovered as well as frequent null findings with respect to media influence.
My work takes the approach of trying to understand media influence as a function of how people make social judgments and the types of information that typically serve as inputs to these judgments. In particular, I focus on the encoding and recall of information that influences social perceptions and judgment.
This focus has led to the development of a model of media effects that can account for much of the conflicting findings of past research. In particular, the model is able to specify the conditions under which media effects would and would not be expected. The model is based on approximately a dozen empirical tests that address various critical aspects of the model.
In short, the theoretical reasoning supported by the model is that media effects are contingent on how people process information. When people make decisions that are spontaneous and with little thought (whether purposefully or not), media information tends to play a stronger role in the construction of these judgments than when decisions are given careful thought.
Emotional Culture, Gender, and Mental Disorder
Robin W. Simon
University of Iowa
My talk will focus on how the expression and experience of mental disorder are both affected by collective cultural systems of meaning rather than by universal disease processes. I will first discuss my current research which argues that sex differences in the expression of mental disorder in the U.S. (e.g., females higher rates of depression and males higher rates of substance abuse) can be attributed to America's emotional culture which consists of norms about appropriate feeling and expression for women and men. Here I will suggest that future research on gender and mental health should examine not just the social roles but also the socialization experiences of females and males that predispose them to respond to stress throughout the entire life course vis-a-vis internalizing and externalizing emotional disorders. I will next discuss how my recent work on gender differences in the expression of mental disorder is part of my larger program of research which argues that gender variation in the consequences of role-related stressors for mental health can be attributed to gender variation in the cultural meaning of social roles for individuals. Here I will draw on my prior work which suggests that work and family roles have different meanings for men and women and that differences in the meaning of social roles can help explain gender differences in the mental health impact of both acute and chronic stressors. I will conclude my talk by discussing methodological challenges facing researchers attempting to systematically incorporate culture into the study of mental health.
Microscopic Worlds, Miasmatic Theories, and
Myopic Vision:
Changing Conceptions of Air and Social Space
Ruth Simpson
Rutgers University
This project is about two complementary transitions. In part, it is about a transition in the way western societies conceive of social space. Western concepts of social space have changed from perceiving space as the social bond that connects individuals to perceiving space as the void that makes social bonds necessary. The project is also about the transition in styles of focusing that accompanied these shifting conceptions of social space. We have moved from a culture that was hyperopic – oriented to broad, holistic knowledge and explanations – to one that is myopic – adept at seeing explanations at the smallest imaginable levels. Exploring these two transitions – and, especially, their common undercurrents – is my primary objective in the project.
I pursue these issues by studying changing approaches to air and agent in theories of disease transmission. Specifically, I examine the transition in the 19th century from miasmatic theory, which argued that epidemics originated with toxic clouds of corrupted air, to germ theory, which attributed epidemics to the facilitated spread of microscopic parasites. Changing conceptions of social space are manifest in the different role air plays in these theories – from the very substance and source of infection in miasmatic theory to the irrelevant background in germ theory. Changing styles of focusing are apparent in the dimensions of the agent to which the theories attribute the spread of disease – a vast invisible entity in the case of miasmatic theory, and a tiny invisible entity in the case of germ theory. Thus, this project is also about theories of epidemics and the ways culture is reflected in and shapes scientific knowledge.
Discourse and Relative Identities
Bill Smith
Rutgers University
Researchers have noted the importance of talk and writing, as a form of codified speech, in the process of maintaining or ignoring group identities. Studies of discourse have demonstrated how non-essential boundaries between communities are either emphasized or suppressed. Some boundaries are emphasized for the purpose of asserting separate identities, while others are acknowledged for the purpose of downplaying their importance to allow the possibility of solidarity. These studies have shown where, how and why the groups treat the boundaries as they do. One area that has been under-explored, however, is an examination of groups that change their strategies over time as the relative positions of the groups evolve with respect to each other. To that end, this present study examines the journals of two groups of religious helping professionals who understand their primary difference with each other as their attitude toward the discipline of psychology.
Market Action and Exchange Categories
Lyn Spillman
Sociology, University of Notre Dame
Economic sociologists examine the structural embeddedness of economic action, but work on its cultural embeddedness is relatively sparse. I distinguish three ways in which markets are culturally embedded: objects of exchange, legitimate transaction partners, and norms of market exchange are all dependent on the construction of relevant cultural categories. Focusing on norms of market action, I argue that these norms derive from the category of exchange-in-general, and thus appeal to reciprocity and redistribution norms as well as competitive exchange for profit, as is normally assumed.
Signals and Interpretive Work: The Role af Culture in a Theory of Practical Action
Diane Vaughan
Boston College
This paper explores cognition by means of analogical theorizing: a Simmelian-based method of developing general theory by qualitative case comparison of similar events, activities, or phenomena that occur in distinctly different social settings. Three cases are compared: couples in deteriorating intimate relationships, managers and engineers at NASA making assessments of technical components of the space shuttle, and air traffic controllers reading information on radar screens. In each case, the focus is on how actors interpret and respond to signals of potential danger. The cases are compared, looking for analogies and differences, exploring the possibility of a grounded theory of signals and interpretive work. This comparison reveals macro-micro connections, showing the linkage between institutions, organizations, and action and meaning at the local level. Moreover, the analysis shows how culture mediates between these levels of analysis in the three cases.
The findings suggest the role of culture as a mediator in a Theory of Practical Action. The New Institutionalism has been questioned for its lack of attention to agency. In response, DiMaggio and Powell suggest that Bourdieu's notion of habitus, with its emphasis on social location of actors, be developed into a microsociology that complements the macrosociological work on which most institutional theorists concentrate. They call for a "Theory of Practical Action" that circumvents the limits of role theory by replacing role with position as the relevant concept. Position encompasses (but is not restricted to) role, but extends beyond role to "regularities of thought, aspirations, dispositions, patterns of appreciation, and strategies of action that are linked to the positions persons occupy in the social structure they continually reproduce" (1991: Introduction). At the same time that the cases compared here verify a Theory of Practical Action and indicate how culture operates as a mediator between levels of analysis, the variety of social settings compared suggest that reproduction is itself a variable. The paper closes with reflections about future research. and theorizing.
What Do We Expect From Time and Space in Emergencies?
Robin Wagner-Pacifici
Swarthmore College
Crises can be viewed as interstitial and transitional moments in society when the normal temporal and spatial parameters are loosened through uncertainty. Actors no longer know what to expect from these very fundamental orienting principles. How long will the crisis last? Where are its boundaries? Who can travel back and forth across the zone of crisis and the zone of normalcy? In such archetypically critical moments as standoffs, challenges, and surrenders, participants are more than usually self-conscious about things like deadlines, patience, borders and buffers.
I propose to discuss the semiotic, aesthetic, normative, and pragmatic features of temporal and spatial expectations in emergencies – when things may seem to go too slow or too fast, or when they seem to be expanding too far or constricting to much. By attending to crises, it is also proposed that "normal" expectations about time and space, and the appropriate situational navigation through social life with them, will be exposed.
The Concept of Mental Disorder: Intersection of Cognitive Universals and Cultural Particulars
Jerome C. Wakefield
Rutgers University
This paper presents an analysis of the concept of mental disorder as "harmful mental dysfunction." It is argued that this meaning representation is widely shared among professionals and lay people in our culture and among other cultures as well. The implications of the analysis are explored to identify what is universal (e.g., notions of human design and functional explanation) and what is culturally relative (e.g., judgments of harmfulness or social inappropriateness, power considerations in deployment of the concept) in judgments about mental disorder and in the cognitive structures underlying such judgments. The often-heard claim that "the concept of disorder is relative to culture" is assessed in the light of these points.
Harrison C. White
Columbia University
Degree of legitimacy characterizes a social context in minds according to network resonances among them from circulation of warranties and entailments. Legitimation, increase and decrease, is the dynamics. Measurable products include interpretive assessments, evaluations which however are not robust to a process of observation. Minds here are brains exfoliated into stable pattems across the sociocultural network-domains that they are constituting. Network ties are partially leached out and the local correlations they represent weakened in local range as the cost of the degree of legitimacy attained.
Temperature can serve as metaphor for this degree. Too cold and the interacting system freezes into immobility. Initial temperatures variously rise and fall toward some equilibrating median where a degree of long-range order is accompanied by some complementary local fluctuations. High temperature cuts both long-range and short-range order, converse to low temperature. Spin-glasses are physical instantiations of intermediate gooey formations resembling observed socio-cognitive ones with heavy path dependence. Conceive magnetic moments as the spinnings of charged 'minds' which align to extents indexed by temperature to the external field strength, here legitimation degree.
Richard Williams
Rutgers University
My focus on identity as distance is an attempt at keeping before us the idea that identity is fundamentally a set of relations between and among social groups that have been established and have to be maintained through the activities of social actors. To assert that identity is manifested as distance is thus to assert that the study of identity is fundamentally about the creation, the maintenance and the elimination of distance between and among groups. While there is no requirement that those three elements need always be the focus of attention in research on identity, there is value in acknowledging their presence as we attempt to capture the complexity of this fundamental feature of social life. I have been attempting to explore this idea in three settings. They are:
1) The creation of a white Racial Identity: This project is concerned with the creation of a white racial identity in the colonial period of American society. This was accomplished through the process of diminishing distances (economic, social and spatial) between the settler groups from northern Europe and establishing those distances between the settler population and the Native population of the "New World".
2) The creation of Spatial (Neighborhood) Identities: Concentrating on the creation of neighborhoods in Manhattan (e.g. the Upper West-Side, and Harlem) I show how social (race and class segregation) economic (the construction of housing and urban infrastructure) and cultural factors (the naming and renaming of streets) served to establish distinct neighborhood identities through the process of increasing the spatial distance among segments of the cities population.
3) Maintaining a white Racial Identity: The substance of this project is the manner in which spatial and social distances between ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ in Louisiana of the late 1930s were maintained. The usual suspects such as job segregation, denial of the right to vote, denial of access to public accommodations, housing segregation and even lynching were clearly present in the society. My conceptual concern, however, is with the fact that those activities were engaged in by many whites without being an overt challenge to their positive sense of self because of their belief that there was a natural distance between the ‘races’ that needed to be socially maintained.
Moral Inquiry in Cultural Sociology
Robert Wuthnow
Princeton University
Cultural sociology, perhaps more than any other specialty area within sociology, is positioned to play an important role in the study of values, beliefs, moral constructs, and other normative issues. These topics are central to the theoretical traditions on which cultural sociology is founded, and many cultural sociologists continue to be interested in them. However they are defined, moral constructs are generally framed discursively, depend on the symbolic creation and maintenance of cognitive maps, and are embedded in larger narrative traditions of values and beliefs. Yet cultural sociologists also have reason to distance themselves from moral inquiry. The study of moral topics may be confused with taking normative positions on these topics. The effort to establish itself as a respected field within sociology may be pursued by sharply distinguishing the approach and subject matter of cultural sociology from related fields in which normative arguments are more common, such as cultural studies and moral philosophy.
The paper argues that the distinction between empirical and normative approaches in cultural sociology is largely exaggerated. For various reasons that can themselves be subjected to examination, a few works receive attention as exemplars of moral inquiry. But closer consideration shows that nearly all research in cultural sociology includes a normative component as well as an empirical one. In contrast, there is a more useful distinction that helps to locate the distinctive contributions of cultural sociology. This is the distinction between autonomous moral selves and socially embedded moral actors. Popular understandings of morality, as well as traditional philosophical and theological approaches, generally emphasize autonomous moral selves. Morality is thus distinguished from social or political concerns insofar as emphasis is placed on personal virtues and vices, will power, character, and discretion. Cultural sociology differs in emphasizing the social contexts and the socially constructed meanings and understandings that guide individuals and groups. The paper concludes with some examples of the particular contributions that this perspective can make to the advancement of moral inquiry.
Taking Culture Seriously In Economic Sociology
Viviana Zelizer
Princeton University
The paper will lay out competing forms of cultural, structural, and economic reductionism in recent economic sociology and point to ways of synthesizing these disparate approaches to economic activity.
The Elephant in the Room: Notes on the Social Organization of Denial
Eviatar Zerubavel
Rutgers University
As a "sneak preview" to a book-length project on the social organization of attention, the paper expands on ideas I developed in my 1997 book Social Mindscapes regarding the social foundations of the mental process we call "focusing." My main goal here is to demonstrate that our common notion of relevance is, at least to some degree, a social one and therefore varies from one social situation to another. By examining the process of setting and abiding by relatively preset "agendas," I show how an entire collectivity (family, organization, society) can practically blind itself to some very obvious parts of reality that could have been physically perceived otherwise. In a way, the paper discusses one possible sociological equivalent of the psychological phenomenon of denial.
Autobiography in Time and Space
Robert Zussman
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
It is more or less conventional to observe that autobiography involves an organization of a life history in terms of a personal present: Life histories are constructed and deployed for the strategic purposes, both instrumental and expressive, of their narrators. Life histories, however, are organized not only in time but in space as well. Life histories are construction on socially structured occasions, located in the institutional structures of home, the workplace, the therapeutic office, and the correctional facility, among many others. Each of these different locations generates autobiographies of different sorts, varying both in content and in form.