Showing papers on "Cultural analysis published in 1992"

Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class

Abstract: Drawing on remarkably frank, in-depth interviews with 160 successful men in the United States and France, Michele Lamont provides a rare and revealing collective portrait of the upper-middle class--the managers, professionals, entrepreneurs, and experts at the center of power in society. Her book is a subtle, textured description of how these men define the values and attitudes they consider essential in separating themselves--and their class--from everyone else. Money, Morals, and Manners is an ambitious and sophisticated attempt to illuminate the nature of social class in modern society. For all those who downplay the importance of unequal social groups, it will be a revelation. A powerful, cogent study that will provide an elevated basis for debates in the sociology of culture for years to come.--David Gartman, American Journal of Sociology A major accomplishment! Combining cultural analysis and comparative approach with a splendid literary style, this book significantly broadens the understanding of stratification and inequality. . . . This book will provoke debate, inspire research, and serve as a model for many years to come.--R. Granfield, Choice This is an exceptionally fine piece of work, a splendid example of the sociologist's craft.--Lewis Coser, Boston College

Symbolic Ties That Bind

Abstract: Place attachment is the symbolic relationship formed by people giving culturally shared emotional/affective meanings to a particular space or piece of land that provides the basis for the individual’s and group’s understanding of and relation to the environment. This chapter applies this definition of place attachment in order to identify a range of types of place attachment in cultural terms, and to present ethnographic examples of each type. It is argued that while there are often strong individualistic feelings that may be unique to specific people, these feelings are embedded in a cultural milieu. Thus, place attachment is more than an emotional and cognitive experience, and includes cultural beliefs and practices that link people to place. This discussion is illustrated with examples of how these often overlapping place attachment processes occur in the central plaza of San Jose, Costa Rica. Future research directions for a cultural analysis of place attachment are suggested as part of the conclusion.

Cultural studies as critical theory

Abstract: What is cultural studies? popular culture as serious business Marxist theories of culture the Frankfurt School's aesthetic politics the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies poststructuralism and postmodernism on culture feminist cultural studies needs, values and cultural criticism deprogramming the cult of cultural studies cultural studies as everyday life in the society of the spectacle.

The individual and organizational culture: strategies for action in highly‐ordered contexts*

Abstract: Writers in the management literature use one of three general concepts of culture: homogeneous organizational culture, heterogeneous subgroup cultures, and ambiguous cultures. In spite of their differences, each of these conceptualizations focuses attention primarily on the context in which the individual member of an organization acts, and suggests that the latitude for individual action increases as the orderliness of that context decreases. In doing so, the culture literature has underestimated the role of individual actors as active agents in their contexts, regardless of the degree of orderliness prevailing in them. By incorporating a more dynamic perspective of action into the cultural analysis of organizations, this article develops a framework which focuses attention on how individuals not only adhere to, but also depart from even highly-ordered organizational and subgroup cultures. This framework is then used to investigate managerial interactions during a planning meeting in HAPCO (a pseudonym), a Fortune 500 company. Two general conclusions emerge from these analyses. First, the normative force of HAPCO culture suppresses conflict, as well as the discussion of alternative ideas during decision-making meetings. Thus, this particular organizational culture severely limits the range of individual action. Second, even in large, highly-ordered organizations such as HAPCO, culture never completely dominates action because individuals comment critically on their situation. Consequently, individuals possess the capacity not only to adapt to, but also to challenge and depart from cultural rules. Four general types of strategies for individual action are empirically observed and conceptually distinguished.

A Path Not Taken: A Cultural Analysis of Regrets and Childlessness in the Lives of Older Women

Abstract: This paper explores regrets about childlessness in 90 older women interviewed using qualitative methods. Regrets were discussed in the context of the changing meaning of childlessness over the life course. We found that issues of regret are situated in a cultural system that renders childless women marginal. We argue that regrets should be understood in a wider cultural context that incorporates the cultural construction of the self over time.

Ethnography in anthropology and its value for education

Abstract: (1992). Ethnography in anthropology and its value for education. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 31, Qualitative Issues in Educational Research, pp. 116-125.

Foucault and Literature: Towards a Geneaology of Writing

Abstract: The writings of the French historian, literary critic and philosopher Michel Foucault have been of immense importance to developments in literary studies since the late 1970s. He, more than anyone, stands behind the new historicism' and cultural materialism' that currently dominate international literary studies. Simon During provides a detailed introduction to the whole body of Foucault's work, with a particular emphasis on his literary theory. His study takes in Foucault's early studies of transgressive' writing from Sade and Artaud to the French new novellists' of the 1960s, and his later concern with the genealogy of the author/intellectual, writing and theorizing within specific, historical mechanisms of social control and production. Foucault and Literature offers a critique both of Foucault and of the literary studies that have been influenced by him, and goes on to develop new methods of post-Foucauldian literary/cultural analysis.

The Cultural Topography of Wealth: Commodity Paths and the Structure of Property in Rural Lesotho

Abstract: Discussions of poverty and wealth often assume that wealth is a measurable substance, the possession of which can be indexed on a linear scale, from high to low. This article contests this implicit assumption, arguing that wealth-holding is always complicated by the fact that exchange is culturally regulated, and guided along approved paths. An analysis of domains of wealth in a rural Lesotho village illustrates the point. Wealth-holding here is clearly unequal, but cultural, legal, and moral paths governing economic exchanges between different categories ofproperty mean that the holdings of different households are in important ways incomparable, and that their wealth is different in kind, and not only in amount. The attempt to locate households economically in such a setting thus requires mapping a politicocultural "topography" of channels facilitating the flow of commodity exchange, dams obstructing, slowing, or filtering it, and furrows temporarily diverting the flow from one channel or dam into another. A meaningful ranking of wealthholding must include a cultural analysis of commodity paths and the structure ofproperty. O NE OF THE MOST UNWHOLESOME EFFECTS of the de facto separation of applied from academic anthropology has been the tendency for many practical, real-world issues to be treated in isolation from classical theoretical debates in academic anthropology. Applied discussions of poverty and wealth in the Third World deal exhaustively (and with good reason) with questions of measurement and assessment, but rarely are these discussions connected to more theoretical anthropological concerns with the way property rights, commodity exchanges, or the semiotics of consumption are structured within a larger social and cultural order. Yet it is clear that the question of wealth cannot be separated from the wider sociocultural context within which different categories of wealth acquire their meaning, and within which exchange between such meaningful categories is prescribed, enabled, or prohibited. The use of wealth and poverty as universal categories is widespread in development studies. It is implicit in the practice of poverty assessment, and in such policy statements as USAID's claim to target the "bottom 30%" of the population as beneficiaries. It is explicit in practical discussions of applied development research methodology (e.g., Grandin 1988; Raikes 1990), and in most of the best anthropological writing on the sub

Developing Cultural Self-Awareness: The First Step in Values Clarification for Early Interventionists

Abstract: This article presents a discussion of the need for early interventionists to develop awareness of certain cultural assumptions underlying their practice. A wide range of literature on cultural differences is used to identify five areas of potential dissonance between professionals and families from culturally diverse backgrounds: interpretations of the meaning of disability; concepts of family structure and identity; goals of education; parent-child interaction, and communication style. It is argued that awareness of one's own cultural beliefs in these areas is an essential first step in developing effective collaboration with culturally different families.

The impact of ownership and capital structure on managerial motivation and strategy in management buy‐outs: a cultural analysis

Abstract: This study examines, from a cultural perspective, owner-managers’and other stakeholders’interpretations of the partial fusion of ownership and control through high leverage in eight UK management buy-outs (MBOs). Owner-control and debt-control are interpreted as having positive effects on managerial motivation, organizational decision-making processes and implementation of cost reduction strategies and negative ones on fundamental changes in strategy and acquisition. These interpretations accord broadly with agency theory propositions but show that owner-managers place less emphasis on wealth incentive effects and more emphasis on the enabling and facilitating roles of collective ownership and the freedom it gives from inappropriate corporate control.

Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies: A Post-Script

Abstract: "Cultural Studies" is a broadly international collection aiming to help shape research and teaching through the 1990s and beyond. The book investigates contemporary commitments of the field: its historical and intellectual positions, political and scholarly preoccupations, and the kinds of interventions it aims for now and in the future. "Cultural Studies" offers a number of specific cultural analyses while simultaneously defining and debating the common body of assumptions, questions and concerns that have helped create the field. Topics addressed include race and minority discourses; ethnicity and post-colonialism; post-modernism; feminism; cultural policy; the place of history in cultural studies; the politics of representation; popular culture; aesthetics; ethics; and technology. At the same time, "Cultural Studies" explores such diverse forms of cultural phenomena as rock music, Chicano art, detective novels, African-American writing, architecture, reproductive freedom, "sati", Star Trek fandom, and New Age technology. Contributors interrogate their own theoretical and methodological commitments. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics in the field of cultural studies

Applied Anthropology and Post-Modernist Ethnography

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between applied anthropology and interpretive or post-modernist ethnography. At first glance these fields do not seem to be of relevance to one another, since one is focused on practical outcomes and the other on theoretical contemplation. But in fact they do share common theoretical, methodological, and ethical concerns, and a collaboration would be fruitful. The meticulous, self-critical recording of the process of cultural representation as exercised by post-modernist ethnography could be a source of guidance for interventions in applied anthropology. On the other hand, the conclusions of interventionist applied anthropology could contribute to solving some of the dilemmas identified, but as yet unresolved, by interpretive anthropology. It is suggested that post-modernist applied anthropologists neither attempt to solve a posed problem as applied anthropologists do, nor attempt to represent a cultural system through their own writing as is conventionally practiced...

Criminality, Social Control, and the Early Modern State: Evidence and Interpretations in Scandinavian Historiography

Abstract: People in the Icelandic Sagas, and with them the narratives themselves, are impelled by powerful human passions: love, hate, pride, envy, fidelity. This is easy to see and easy to explain. In stories that are intended to captivate their audience, it is vital to spellbind listeners of both sexes and all ages with the excitement of eternal existential problems. Yet there are other features in the sagas that modern cultural analysis has considered less dependent on the requirements of the literary genre and thus more revealing expressions of the Scandinavian mentality. These include the legalism that pervades the sagas (see, e.g., Gurevich 1985; Hastrup 1985; Byock 1988). One is struck by the extent to which people think and argue in legal terms. This applies to men in conflict, to men demonstrating their power and influence.

The Sociology of Culture: Four Good Arguments (and One Bad One):

Abstract: As recently as fifteen years ago, work in the sociology of culture took place in relative isolation. The field consisted of a handful of individuals roaming around like a scattered clan of hunter-gatherers, investigating such phenomena as the cultural practices of poor people, the system of literary reference, the values of revolutionaries, the structure of popular movies, or the organization of art markets. Such investigations, generally animated by either Marxian or functionalist assumptions, produced significant results, both theoretically and empirically. Especially notable were the theoretical advances produced by the Birmingham School's combination of Marxism, feminism, and semiotics; the increasing methodological sophistication shown in cultural analysis, especially through the application of network approaches and hermeneutics; and the substantive advances in understanding cultural organizations and markets made by the production-of-culture school. What these investigations and advances did not produce, however, was debate, at least not within the field of the sociology of culture itself. Few forums existed in which students of culture came together to discuss and disagree. Engagement and disagreement, essential to any field's development, came about with the institutionalization of cultural studies that occurred in the 1980s. This institutionalization took a number of concrete forms. One was the formation of a culture section in the American Sociological Association in 1987, which mushroomed into being one of the largest ASA sections. Subfields like the study of organizational cultures boomed (for a somewhat skeptical account of this growth, see Alvesson 1990). New journals appeared, such Theory, Culture, and Society in 1982 and Cultural Studies in 1987 (both journals reflecting the continued influence of the Birmingham School). Other journals shifted their attention, as when the editors of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Literature, the Media and the Arts turned from concentrating on linguistics towards a greater emphasis on psychological and especially sociological studies; this shift was spearheaded by Cees van Rees, a sociologist and part of the Tilburg group of scholars studying literary institutions, who became Poetics' editor in 1991. Moreover, the mainstream sociology journals began publishing a growing number of cultural studies. To give a crude indication of the field's growth, comparing the 1976-78 and the 1989-91 coverage of 'culture' (including 'cultures' and 'cultural') in the volumes of the Social Sciences Citation Index, one finds that, while the total citations (measured by numbers of columns) have increased by only 5 per cent, the citations involving culture have increased 41 per cent. Why this institutionalization took place, why cultural studies and cultural variables moved from the margins toward the center of the discipline, is far from clear. A generational theory would point to the extraordinary influence of Clifford Geertz and E. P. Thompson upon graduate students in the 1970s; members of that cohort are now moving into the forefront of the discipline, and bringing their cultural interests with them. A more dialectical approach would (C) Scandinavian Sociological Association, 1992

Understanding others : cultural and cross-cultural studies and the teaching of literature

Abstract: Inevitably, reading is one of the requirements to be undergone. To improve the performance and quality, someone needs to have something new every day. It will suggest you to have more inspirations, then. However, the needs of inspirations will make you searching for some sources. Even from the other people experience, internet, and many books. Books and internet are the recommended media to help you improving your quality and performance.

Methodological Notes on the Study of Political Culture

Abstract: power-related facets of evolving human relations and social movements, the paper presents some methodological principles, inspired by the structurationist approach, to overcome existing impasses in political culture research. In general, it is argued that empirical research in political culture must integrate theoretical, ethical, and practical concerns. More specifically, the case is made for greater depth in the treatment of the individual and consciousness in the process of cultural production, for an extension of empirical investigations beyond the legal-institutional aspects of politics, for a more thorough exploration of the relationship between social scientific and lay understandings, and for a more sophisticated treatment of time and space in political cultural analysis.

Academic Conferences as Ceremonials: Opportunities for Organizational Integration and Socialization

Abstract: Academic conferences are cultural ceremonials that serve as occasions for professional learning as well as organizational and professional socialization. A cultural analysis of the different structures and processes of the annual conferences held by two academic organizations (the Academy of Management and the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society) illustrates the integral role that conferences play in the formation and affirmation of each organization's cultural values, beliefs, and practices. This comparison of academic ceremonials also identifies the presence of two alternative modes of organizational and professional socialization and explores their implications for each organization, the academic profession, and management education.

A Cultural Analysis of the Economy of Affection and the Uncaptured Peasantry in Tanzania

Abstract: The author reviews and comments upon Goran Hydens thesis of the economy of affection and the uncaptured peasantry in East Africa. Hyden hold that villagers and city-dwellers are linked in webs of kinship and tribal obligation which mitigate against the accumulation of wealth or capital necessary to form either industrial modes of production or class-based societies. The high value placed on personal relationships virtually demands a peasant mode of production. In contrast to former European and Asian scenarios uncultivated arable land remains available. Peasants may therefore participate to varying degrees in both the market economy and the traditional socioeconomic system as they desire without being trapped in capitalist production. Together however the availability of land and the economy of affection may combine as the most significant force thwarting economic development in Tanzania. Applying a methodological framework recently suggested by Wendy Griswold for the sociology of culture the author reviews and reformulates part of Hydens analysis. The intentions of creative agents the reception of cultural objects over time and space understanding the intrinsic values of cultural objects and the significance of perpetuating social groups are discussed.

Anthropology and Colonial Discourse: Aspects of the Demonological Construction of Sinhala Cultural Practice

Abstract: This article forms part of a larger investigation in which I explore aspects of the discursive relation between anthropology and colonial discourse. Stated broadly, my concern is that this relation, although often enough recognized or asserted in a general sort of way, has not been adequately interrogated, indeed has not been adequately formulated. The question, precisely how an identifiably colonial discourse continues to exercise a specifiably discursive hegemony2 in the contemporary construction of anthropological objects, has, it seems to me, received far less analytical attention than it properly deserves. No one would wish to deny, I don't think, that anthropology today is an enterprise increasingly self-conscious about its colonial legacy, and as a consequence is less and less naive about the language of representation it employs. I wish to suggest in the course of this article, however, that, although it is indeed arguable that a humanism of nonpejorative terminology and an impressive level of theoretical sophistication have come to characterize the construction of anthropological objects, what bears more systematic investigation is really whether the colonial problematic3 itself-that is to say, the interrelated set of distinctive ideological or discursive presuppositions that established the contours of visibility of native practices and thus the possibility in the first place for their constitution as objects of Western discourse-has been effectively displaced. It is at this, as it were, internal and more fundamental level, the level of the problematic, that I wish to think about the connection between colonial and anthropological discourses. For colonial problematics, I will argue, can and do travel-in a variety of updated conceptual languages-in contemporary anthropology. Specifically, my concern in this article focuses on the anthropology of a group of Sinhala practices performed in the south and southwest of the island of Sri Lanka. These practices are known to Sinhalas as yaktovil, and they are employed by Sinhala adepts to rid victims of the influence of the eyesight (distiya) of malevolent supernatural figures called yakku (sing., yaksaya, or yaka). This anthropology, I have suggested elsewhere,4 has, by and large, constructed its accounts and analyses of these Sinhala practices in and through the conceptual-metaphors of "demonism," "possession," and "exorcism."5 There I was princi-

Manhood, Femaleness, and Power: A Cultural Analysis of Prehistoric Images of Reproduction

Abstract: Ideologies of reproduction are social facts, collective representations, of the dramatic ways in which human beings construct and appropriate gender for the imaging of social reality. Such symbolic universes are often centered on the body (Foucault 1980; Martin 1989; Turner 1984; Douglas 1973). As a template of cultural signification, the body becomes a model through which the social order can be apprehended. For instance, gender hierarchies are sometimes envisioned by means of an anatomical or physiological paradigm (Needham 1973; Hugh-Jones 1979; Theweleit 1987). However, the operation of societal power is generally focused on women's bodies and bodily processes. Women, according to a widespread (and controversial) paradigm, are grounded in nature by virtue of the dictates of their bodies: menstruation, pregnancy, birth (Levi-Strauss 1966, 1969; Ortner 1974; Ardener 1975; Mac-Cormack and Strathern 1986).

The Cultural Policy Debate Revisited

Abstract: The cultural policy debate is revisited by presenting relevant opinions of some critics, and analysing the implications of including policy in cultural studies. It is suggested that a policy orientation in the institutional, textual and reception studies areas of cultural studies would result in significant changes in social and cultural activism.

Communications and Cultural Analysis: A Religious View

Abstract: Introduction The Problem of Popular Culture What Is Culture? Cultural Reproduction among the Young Cultural Production as an Avenue to Cultural Analysis A Theory of Images in Cultural Systems Metaphoric Images as Signifiers Hegemony and the Possibilities of Contestation Bibliography Index

‘To Teach Them How to Live’ The Politics of Public Health from Tuberculosis to AIDS

Abstract: The AIDS crisis has aroused considerable interest in the critical examination of public health. Much of this work has come from the perspective of ‘cultural analysis’, combining postmodernist theories with the politics of radical pluralism’. This work constitutes a rejection of Marxist state theory, and indeed has directed attention away from the state as an object of inquiry. This article is a response to ‘cultural analysis’, which uses an historical examination of public health in Canada to shows the ways in which it has been oriented around the state, reflecting the character and limits of social policy.

Dining Out in the Urban Context

Abstract: Offers a brief sociological sketch of some current issues in the cultural analysis of food and eating as they apply to dining out. Seeks to demonstrate the importance to everyday life of the hospitality industry in terms of consumption, employment and environmental issues.