Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action." Two models of cultural influence are developed, for settled and unsettled cultural periods. In settled periods, culture independently influences action, but only by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action. In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run. This alternative view of culture offers new opportunities for systematic, differentiated arguments about culture's causal role in shaping action. The reigning model used to understand culture's effects on action is fundamentally misleading. It assumes that culture shapes action by supplying ultimate ends or values toward which action is directed, thus making values the central causal element of culture. This paper analyzes the conceptual difficulties into which this traditional view of culture leads and offers an alternative model. Among sociologists and anthropologists, debate has raged for several academic generations over defining the term "culture." Since the seminal work of Clifford Geertz (1973a), the older definition of culture as the entire way of life of a people, including their technology and material artifacts, or that (associated with the name of Ward Goodenough) as everything one would need to know to become a functioning member of a society, have been displaced in favor of defining culture as the publicly available symbolic forms through which people experience and express meaning (see Keesing, 1974). For purposes of this paper, culture consists of such symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life. These symbolic forms are the means through which "social processes of sharing modes of behavior and outlook within [a] community" (Hannerz, 1969:184) take place.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2095521.pdf

Culture in action: symbols and strategies*

The demarcation of science from other intellectual activities-long an analytic problem for philosophers and sociologists-is here examined as a practical problem for scientists. Construction of a boundary between science and varieties of non-science is useful for scientists' pursuit of professional goals: acquisition of intellectual authority and career opportunities; denial of these resources to "pseudoscientists"; and protection of the autonomy of scientific research from political interference. "Boundary-work" describes an ideological style found in scientists' attempts to create a public image for science by contrasting it favorably to non-scientific intellectual or technical activities. Alternative sets of characteristics available for ideological attribution to science reflect ambivalences or strains within the institution: science can be made to look empirical or theoretical, pure or applied. However, selection of one or another description depends on which characteristics best achieve the demarcation in a way that justifies scientists' claims to authority or resources. Thus, "science" is no single thing: its boundaries are drawn and redrawn inflexible, historically changing and sometimes ambiguous ways.

Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists

We constructed a theory of the universal types of values as criteria by viewing values as cognitive representations of three universal requirements: (a) biological needs, (b) interactional requirements for interpersonal coordination, and (c) societal demands for group welfare and survival. From these requirements, we have derived and presented conceptual and operational definitions for eight motivational domains of values: enjoyment, security, social power, achievement, sehxiirection, prosocial, restrictive conformity, and maturity. In addition, we have mapped values according to the interests they serve (individualistic vs. collectivist) and the type of goal to which they refer (terminal vs. instrumental). We postulated that the structural organization of value systems reflects the degree to which giving high priority simultaneously to different values is motivationajly and practically feasible or contradictory. To test our theory, we performed smallest space analyses on ratings given by subjects from Israel (N = 455) and Germany (N = 331) of the importance of 36 Rokeach values as guiding principles in their lives. Partitioning of the obtained multidimensional space into regions revealed that people do indeed discriminate among values according to our a priori specifications of goal types, interests served, and motivational domains in both societies. Moreover, the motivational domains of values are organized dynamically in relation to one another in both societies, as predicted by the patterns of compatible or contradictory motivation and practical consequences. We have noted additional values and domains possibly needed for a universal scheme as well as potential applications of this approach for comparing the meanings, structure, and importance of values across cultures, for analyzing relations between social structure and values, and for predicting and interpreting relations of values to attitudes and behavior.

Toward A Universal Psychological Structure of Human Values

The authors are jointly responsible forthe theoretical argumentand analysis. M. Craig Brown suggested the topic of civil service reform. Maureen J. McConaghy, Nancy Brandon Tuma, Glenn R. Carroll, and P. Y Liu provided methodological advice, Sharon Stevens aided early computational work. Both of us are grateful to Phillip Bonacich for his advice throughout the research, and to Marshall W. Meyer, John W. Meyer, William G. Roy, Herman Turk, Richard A. Berk, David McFarland, Oscar Grusky, and Jeffrey Pfeffer fortheir helpful comments on an eariner draft. This paper investigates the diffusion and institutionalization of change in formal organization structure, using data on the adoption of civil service reform by cities. It is shown thatwhen civil service procedures are required bythe state, they diffuse rapidly and directly from the state to each city. When the procedures are not so legitimated, they diffuse gradually and the underlying sources of adoption change overtime. In the lattercase, early adoption of civil service by cities is related to internal organizational requirements, with city characteristics predicting adoption, while late adoption is related to institutional definitions of legitimate structural form, so that city characteristics no longer predict the adoption decision. Overall, the findings provide strong support for the argument that the adoption of a policy or program by an organization is importantly determined by the extent to which the measure is institutionalizedwhether by law or by gradual legitimation.

/pdf/institutional-sources-of-change-in-the-formal-structure-of-2jhnjuwh9d.pdf

Institutional Sources of Change in the Formal Structure of Organizations: The Diffusion of Civil Service Reform, 1880-1935

Emotional labor is the display of expected emotions by service agents during service encounters. It is performed through surface acting, deep acting, or the expression of genuine emotion. Emotional labor may facilitate task effectiveness and self-expression, but it also may prime customer expectations that cannot be met and may trigger emotive dissonance and self-alienation. However, following social identity theory, we argue that some effects of emotional labor are moderated by one's social and personal identities and that emotional labor stimulates pressures for the person to identify with the service role. Research implications for the micro, meso, and macro levels of organizations are discussed.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/258824.pdf

Emotional Labor in Service Roles: The Influence of Identity

In the history of sociological theory, Talcott Parsons holds a very special place. His The Structure of Social Action (1937), was a pioneer work that has influenced many social scientists. The present work, The Social System, presents a major scientific and intellectual advance towards the theory of action first outlined in his earlier work.

The Social System.

The nature of human nature

Lack of agreement concerning instincts.-William James made current the doctrine that man has more instints than the animals. Later discussion has revealed much disagreement concerning the definition of instincts and even more uncertainty concerning their number. Lists range from forty, thirty, twenty-six, twenty, fifteen, to four, two and one. The confusion is probably due to tye hypothetical nature of instincts. The genetic explanation of instincts.-The genetic explanation is a sort of mythological effort and has resulted in rather ludicrous stories which pass as explanations. The corrective lies in the study of ethnology by which a comparison of different human customs will reveal the fact that much which seemed at first to be native is really the result of social customs. Instincts are hypotheses: social attitudes are data.-Instincts emphasize similarities which often have no existece. Sociology has at hand empirical data in the form of attitudes, desires, and wishes, whose classification and explanati...

Are Instincts Data or Hypotheses

Frustration and Regression. An Experiment with Young Children.

The primary-group concept has been assumed to be identified by three criteria: face-to-face association, temporal priority in experience, and the feeling of the whole for which "we" is the natural expression. But since some face-to-face groups are not primary groups (e.g., formal institutions) and since some primary groups are not face-to-face (e.g., a widely scattered kinship group), the spatial contiguity is not essential. Temporal priority is not essential, since many primary groups are formed by adults. These are accidents, the essence of the primary group being the relation which corresponds to ideas, images, and feelings of a specific and easily identified character. A family is a primary group only if these relations exist. Discipline in school and home may follow institutional forms or primary group patterns, but the family is not a primary group merely because of a common dwelling. The essence of the primary group is its functional and emotional character. Temporal priority and spatial contiguity...

Ellsworth Faris

Papers

The Social System.

The nature of human nature

Are Instincts Data or Hypotheses

Frustration and Regression. An Experiment with Young Children.

The Primary Group: Essence and Accident