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

Experience and enlightenment: Socialization for cultural change in eighteenth-century Scotland

Culture in action: symbols and strategies*

The histories of all modern scientific and intellectual fields are marked by dynamism. Yet, despite a welter of case study data, sociologists of ideas have been slow to develop general theories for...

A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements:

The history of consumption is fast becoming a vital area of academic research. For the social sciences, in general, this new field promises new insight into the “great transformation” of Western society. For consumer research, in particular, it promises the opportunity to create new perspectives, sources of data, and theoretical concepts. The purpose of this paper is to review recent literature on the history of consumption, and to offer a consumer guide for those who wish to use it in the study of modern consumer behavior and policy.

The history of consumption: A literature review and consumer guide

Introduction 1. Ligon: 'Sweete negotiation' 2. Rochefort: French collusions to negotiate 3. Grainger: creolizing the muse 4. Schaw: a 'saccharocracy' of virtue 5. Beckford: the aesthetics of negotiation 6. Lewis: personalizing the 'negotium' Postscript and prospect Notes Bibliography Index.

The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism

This article explores the influence of Stoicism and religion on Adam Smith. While other commentators have argued either that the main influence on Smith was Stoicism or that it was religion, the two influences have not been explicitly linked. In this article I attempt to make such a link, arguing that Smith can be seen as belonging to the strand of Christian Stoicism chiefly associated with his teacher, Francis Hutcheson. Finally, some comments are made about the implications of this interpretation for current understanding of the work of Adam Smith.

Experience and enlightenment: Socialization for cultural change in eighteenth-century Scotland

Citations

Culture in action: symbols and strategies*

A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements:

The history of consumption: A literature review and consumer guide

The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism

Adam Smith, Stoicism and religion in the 18th century:

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