7. The production of perspective

7. The production of perspective

The production of culture perspective focuses on the ways in which the content of symbolic elements of culture are significantly shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved. The initial focus was on the production of expressive symbols such as art works, scientific research reports, popular culture, religious practices, legal judgments, journalism, and other parts of the culture industries. Now the perspective is also applied to many situations where the manipulation of symbols is a byproduct rather than the purpose of the collective activity. In the 1970s, when the production of culture emerged as a self conscious perspective, it challenged the then dominant idea that culture values and social structure mirror each other, a view held by most Marxists and functionalists – among them Talcott Parsons. Breaking from the mirror view, the production perspective sees culture and social structure as elements in an ever changing patchwork. Research in the perspective draws freely on theories and methods developed in other branches of sociology. It is, however, distinctive in focusing on the consequences of social activities for the symbolic elements of culture.

Cultural production systems change slowly, but occasionally there is rapid change altering the aesthetic expression of a cultural expression. Such change is illustrated by the study that helped inspire the production perspective in culture, Howard and Cynthia White’s 1965 study Canvases and Careers. It showed the transformation of the nineteenth century French art world and the consequent emergence of Impressionist art. Six production factors are identified as making possible rapid cultural change. These include changes in law and regulation, technology, industrial structure, organizational structure, occupational careers, and the consumer market. The workings of these facts should be considered together as part of an interdependent production network.

The production perspective has proved a useful model for organizing ideas and research in five areas where the production of culture is itself not consciously sought. First, it has spawned the culture industries model in academic management research and become the prime model of post bureaucratic organization. Second, studies of the autoproduction of culture show that people produce identities and life styles for themselves from elements of traditional and mass mediated symbols. Third, studies show that cultural omnivorousness is replacing highbrow snobbery as people show their high status by consuming not only the fine arts but also appreciating many, if not all, forms of popular culture. Fourth, studies focused on resistance and appropriation show how young people take the products tendered to them by the culture industries and recombine them in unique ways to show their resistance to the dominant culture and to give expression to their own identities. Fifth, much of what is taken to be subcultural resistance is actually fabricated by the consumer industry. The contrast between the artifice of manufacture and the fan’s experience of authenticity is arguably the most important unresolved paradox of cultural sociology.

Conclusion: The production of culture perspective focuses on how the symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved. After tracing the consolidation of the perspective in the late 1970s, we introduce six facets of production (technology, law and regulation, industry structure, organization structure, occupational careers, and market) and use them to theorize within the production perspective a wide range of research. Third, we show the utility of the facet model in coherently theorizing a research study based in a quite different perspective. Fourth, we explore the recent application of the production perspective in organizational research. Fifth, we outline the recent extension of the production perspective to autoproduction, the study of identity formation, and meaning in informal relations. Finally, we discuss criticisms of the perspective and suggest opportunities for research.

8. "Culture" has been extended in use in politics

Even though culture is no longer dismissed as a viable explanation of economic performance, given past embarrassments such as the diagnosis of stagnation in China, it is evident that cultural explanations cannot be freestanding but must be grafted onto rational choice analysis. Recent interchanges between economics and social psychology are broadening what is accepted as rational behavior. As yet, these developments lack an overarching intellectual framework. Behavioral economics, although well established, has primarily explored generic biases in decisions that could have arisen from evolutionary processes, such as fast thinking, or in values, such as group favoritism. Being universal, these biases have little to contribute to the analysis of differences in economic performance. The foundation for a further stage in behavioral economics, focusing on decision processes that are soft-wired by culture, is the work of Akerlof & Kranto on “identity economics.” From this foundation, I discuss the building blocks of a culture, how they are transmitted, and how they evolve, and I present some recent formal models in which values are primary in determining institutions and policies.

Two key mechanisms for influence and coordination are changes in motivations and changes in knowledge. People are motivated not only by the individualism of material well-being but also by being socialized into other-regarding values; they learn about the world through individual direct observation and from narratives related by others. These two aspects of behavior are included in a revised rational choice framework.

Other-regarding values include such feelings as esteem, fairness, and hatred. Peer esteem is generated by performance of actions that are well regarded by others because they conform to their norms. Self-esteem is generated through actions that conform to norms that have been internalized and so have become part of a moral ought, not a private want. That process of internalization is intrinsically social. Other people's values are the external concepts that are being internalized. Similarly, the narratives that purport to describe how the world works depend on which interactions happen. Children learn from their parents; everyone learns from peer groups. Different people learn different things, some of which are false.

People may still behave rationally, maximizing utility within perceived constraints. However, other-regarding values are part of the utility that they are maximizing, and the perceived constraints to which the maximization problem is subject may have been postulated by narratives that are mistaken. A culture manifests the behavior generated by its specific values and narratives, and that behavior may be dysfunctional. It also transmits itself to new members and thus may be highly persistent. An early and influential formal model that demonstrated the importance of cultural values for outcomes was that of Greif, contrasting two groups of eleventh-century Mediterranean traders. One group, Genovese merchants, had individualistic values that Greif traced back to Christian concepts of the direct relationship of the individual to God. The other group, Jewish Maghrebi merchants, had collectivist values that he traced back to Islam. Using detailed historical evidence, he showed that the Maghrebi had a material advantage, protection from defaults by agents in remote trading locations. Through formal modeling, he derived this outcome from the difference in values. In an extension important for political science, he suggested that this cultural advantage became a cul-de-sac. Their collectivist, trust-based solution to the difficulties of long-distance trade locked the businesses of Maghrebi merchants into single-family, single-generation organizations. By contrast, the greater difficulties faced by Genovese merchants gave them an incentive to build multifamily, multigeneration organizations that relied on state-provided contract enforcement. Ultimately, these reaped larger-scale economies that outcompeted the Maghrebi merchants. This illustrates the thesis of Cook et al. Formal institutions may be a superior alternative to trust but may not develop if informal networks reduce the need for them. In the Greif model, values are exogenous. I now turn to two new models in which they are endogenous. They capture both the importance of other-regarding values for political outcomes and how these values can themselves be endogenized through an explicit process of cultural transmission. Besley & Persson suppose that different societies have exogenously different initial proportions of people who hold such values. Hence, should the government breach democratic rights, the scale of protest would differ between societies. Because the probability that a protest succeeds depends on its scale, in societies that are initially well-endowed with democratic values, protest is more likely to succeed. This generates a feedback from the political outcome to the utility of the protester. The protester who values democratic rights feels happier if they are upheld than if they are undermined.

Conclusion: Returning to our starting point, a politically salient organization, such as a tax administration that is dysfunctional or a society that is impoverished, may be trapped not only by the self-interest of a powerful elite but also by the behavioral consequences of its norms, values, and narratives. In turn, people acquire these packages of mental constructs through the identities they acquire in social networks. Culture is endogenous but often stable. Networks, as well as interests, become focal points for political analysis.