How does Becker define culture? Then, based on everything we have covered, write your own definition of culture. 2. What does it mean to say that culture is a ‘to

Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies Author(s): Ann Swidler Source: American Sociological Review, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Apr., 1986), pp. 273-286 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2095521 . Accessed: 10/01/2011 13:50

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CULTURE IN ACTION: SYMBOLS AND STRATEGIES*

ANN SWIDLER Stanford University

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 inde- pendently 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 cul- ture’s effects on action is fundamentally mis- leading. 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, de- bate has raged for several academic genera- tions 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 func- tioning member of a society, have been dis- placed in favor of defining culture as the pub- licly 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.

The recent resurgence of cultural studies has skirted the causal issues of greatest interest to sociologists. Interpretive approaches drawn from anthropology (Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Claude Levi- Strauss) and literary criticism (Kenneth Burke, Roland Barthes) allow us better to describe the features of cultural products and experiences. Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault have of- fered new ways of thinking about culture’s re- lationship to social stratification and power. For those interested in cultural explanation (as opposed to “thick description” [Geertz, 1973a] or interpretive social science [Rabinow and Sullivan, 1979]), however, values remain the major link between culture and action. This is not because sociologists really believe in the values paradigm. Indeed, it has been thor- oughly criticized.’ But without an alternative formulation of culture’s causal significance, scholars either avoid causal questions or admit the values paradigm through the back door.

The alternative analysis of culture proposed here consists of three steps. First, it offers an image of culture as a “tool kit” of symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views, which people may use in varying configurations to solve dif- ferent kinds of problems. Second, to analyze culture’s causal effects, it focuses on “strate- gies of action,” persistent ways of ordering action through time. Third, it sees culture’s causal significance not in defining ends of ac- tion, but in providing cultural components that are used to construct strategies of action.

* Address all correspondence to: Ann Swidler, Department of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305.

A much earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, September 1982. For helpful comments (including dissents) on earlier drafts and thoughtful discussion of the issues raised here, I would like to thank Robert Bellah, Bennett Berger, Robert Bell, Ross Boylan, Jane Collier, Paul DiMaggio, Frank Dobbin, James Fernandez, Claude Fischer, Elihu M. Gerson, Wendy Griswold, Ron Jepperson, Susan Krieger, Tormod Lunde, John Meyer, John Padgett, Richard A. Peterson, Jonathan Rieder, Theda Skoc- pol, Peter Stromberg, Steven Tipton, R. Stephen Warner, Morris Zelditch, Jr., and two anonymous reviewers.

I See Blake and Davis (1964) and the empirical and theoretical critique in Cancian (1975).

American Sociological Review, 1986, Vol. 51 (April:273-286) 273

274 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

The paper proceeds, first, by outlining the failures of cultural explanation based on values. It then argues for the superior intuitive plausibility and explanatory adequacy of the alternative model. Finally, it suggests research approaches based on seeing culture in this new way.

CULTURE AS VALUES

Our underlying view of culture derives from Max Weber. For Weber, human beings are motivated by ideal and material interests. Ideal interests, such as the desire to be saved from the torments of hell, are also ends-oriented, except that these ends are derived from sym- bolic realities.2 In Weber’s (1946a [1922- 3]:280) famous “switchmen” metaphor:

Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very fre- quently the “world images” that have been created by “ideas” have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.

Interests are the engine of action, pushing it along, but ideas define the destinations human beings seek to reach (inner-worldly versus other-worldly possibilities of salvation, for example) and the means for getting there (mystical versus ascetic techniques of salva- tion).

Talcott Parsons adopted Weber’s model, but blunted its explanatory thrust. To justify a dis- tinctive role for sociology in face of the economist’s model of rational, interest- maximizing actors, Parsons argued that within a means-ends schema only sociology could account for the ends actors pursued.3 For Weber’s interest in the historical role of ideas,

Parsons substituted global, ahistorical values. Unlike ideas, which in Weber’s sociology are complex historical constructions shaped by in- stitutional interests, political vicissitudes, and pragmatic motives, Parsonian values are ab- stract, general, and immanent in social sys- tems. Social systems exist to realize their core values, and values explain why different actors make different choices even in similar situa- tions. Indeed, Parsons does not treat values as concrete symbolic elements (like doctrines, rituals, or myths) which have histories and can actually be studied. Rather, values are es- sences around which societies are constituted. They are the unmoved mover in the theory of action.

Parsons’ “voluntaristic theory of action” de- scribes an actor who makes choices in a situa- tion, choices limited by objective conditions and governed by normative regulation of the means and ends of action (Warner, 1978:121). A “cultural tradition,” according to Parsons (1951:11-12), provides “value orientations,” a “value” defined as “an element of a shared symbolic system which serves as a criterion or standard for selection among the alternatives of orientation which are intrinsically open in a situation.” Culture thus affects human action through values that direct it to some ends rather than others.

The theory of values survives in part, no doubt, because of the intuitive plausibility in our own culture of the assumption that all ac- tion is ultimately governed by some means- ends schema. Culture shapes action by defin- ing what people want.

What people want, however, is of little help in explaining their action. To understand both the pervasiveness and the inadequacy of cul- tural values as explanations, let us examine one recent debate in which “culture” has been invoked as a major causal variable: the debate over the existence and influence of a “culture of poverty.”4

2 In The Sociology of Religion (1963[1922]:1), Weber insists that “[t]he most elementary forms of behavior motivated by religious or magical factors are oriented toward this world.” Religious behavior remains ends-oriented, except that both the means and the ends increasingly become purely symbolic (pp. 6-7):

Since it is assumed that behind real things and events there is something else, distinctive and spiritual, of which real events are only the symp- toms or indeed the symbols, an effort must be made to influence, not the concrete things, but the spiritual powers that express themselves through concrete things. This is done through actions that address themselves to a spirit or soul, hence done by instrumentalities that “mean” something, i.e., symbols.

3See the summary chapter of The Structure of Social Action (Parsons, 1937:697-726), where Par- sons explicitly poses the theory of action as a cor- rection to utilitarian views of action.

4I make no attempt to evaluate the empiricial merits of the culture-of-poverty argument. Insofar as the argument is waged on both sides as one about who is to blame for poverty, it is sociologically wrong-headed, since both sides seem to agree that structural circumstances are ultimately at fault. Furthermore, neither side seems to have a very clear notion about how such a culture would work, if only in the sense that neither makes a claim about how long it would take to change cultural patterns in the face of new structural opportunities, or, for those who make the structural argument, how fast action might adjust to opportunity. I use the culture-of- poverty argument not because I am sympathetic to its substantive claims, but because it is so familiar and its basic arguments are so characteristic of other cultural explanations.

CULTURE IN ACTION 275

The Culture of Poverty

Why doesn’t a member of the “culture of pov- erty” described by Lewis (1966) or Liebow (1967) (or an Italian street-corner youth of the sort Whyte [1943] described) take advantage of opportunities to assimilate to the dominant culture in conduct and dress, acquire the ap- propriate educational credentials, and settle down to a steady job? Much of the argument has revolved around whether the very poor “really” value the same things that more se- cure middle- and working-class people do. Valentine (1968:69) quotes Oscar Lewis’s de- scription of the culture of poverty which, typi- cally, stresses the centrality of cultural values:

By the time slum children are age six or seven, they have usually absorbed the basic values and attitudes of their subculture and are not psychologically geared to take full advantage of changing conditions or in- creased opportunities which may occur in their lifetime. (Lewis, 1966:xlv)

Valentine (1968) counters Lewis by claiming that distinctive lower-class behavior can be better explained by structural circumstances, and that many of the values Lewis cites as typical of the poverty subculture (male domi- nance, for example) characterize the larger so- ciety as well (pp. 117-19). Liebow (1967), in turn, claims that street-corner men value the same things that men in the dominant society do, but that their behavior is a defensive cul- tural adaptation to structural barriers.

The irony of this debate is that it cannot be resolved by evidence that the very poor share the values and aspirations of the middle class, as indeed they seem to do. In repeated sur- veys, lower-class youth say that they value education and intend to go to college, and their parents say they want them to go (Jencks et al., 1972:34-5). Similarly, lower-class people seem to want secure friendships, stable marriages, steady jobs, and high incomes. But class similarities in aspirations in no way resolve the question of whether there are class differences in culture. People may share common aspira- tions, while remaining profoundly different in the way their culture organizes their overall pattern of behavior (see Hannerz, 1969).

Culture in this sense is more like a style or a set of skills and habits than a set of preferences or wants.5 If one asked a slum youth why he did

not take steps to pursue a middle-class path to success (or indeed asked oneself why one did not pursue a different life direction) the answer might well be not “I don’t want that life,” but instead, “Who, me?” One can hardly pursue success in a world where the accepted skills, style, and informal know-how are unfamiliar. One does better to look for a line of action for which one already has the cultural equipment.

Indeed, the skills required for adopting a line of conduct-and for adopting the interests or values that one could maximize in that line of conduct-involve much more than such mat- ters as how to dress, talk in the appropriate style, or take a multiple-choice examination. To adopt a line of conduct, one needs an image of the kind of world in which one is trying to act, a sense that one can read reasonably accu- rately (through one’s own feelings and through the responses of others) how one is doing, and a capacity to choose among alternative lines of action. The lack of this ease is what we experi- ence as “culture shock” when we move from one cultural community to another. Action is not determined by one’s values. Rather action and values are organized to take advantage of cultural competences.

The culture-of-poverty example suggests a misdirection of our explanatory efforts. Stu- dents of culture keep looking for cultural values that will explain what is distinctive about the behavior of groups or societies, and neglect other distinctively cultural phenomena which offer greater promise of explaining pat- terns of action. These factors are better de- scribed as culturally-shaped skills, habits, and styles than as values or preferences.

The Protestant Ethic

These causal issues appear again when we turn to the paradigmatic sociological argument for the importance of culture in human action- Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1958a [1904-51]).6 Weber sought to explain rational, capitalist economic behavior by arguing that culture, in the shape

5 What I mean here is similar to what Bourdieu (1977) calls “practices.” He says, for example,

What is called the sense of honor is nothing other than the cultivated disposition, inscribed in the body schema and in the schemes of thought, which enables each agent to engender all the practices

consistent with the logic of challenge and riposte, and only such practices, by means of countless inventions, which the stereotyped unfolding of ritual would in no way demand (p. 15). 6 There has been no apparent slackening of inter-

est in the Protestant ethic. Recent theoretical reas- sessments by Marshall (1982) and Poggi (1983) testify to the still powerful appeal of Weber’s theoretical questions, and the rich, new historical studies of Marshall (1980), Fulbrook (1983), Camic (1983), and Zaret (1985), among others, show the continuing fas- cination exerted by demanding, ideological Protes- tants.

276 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

of Calvinist doctrine, created a distinctive frame of mind which encouraged rationalized, ascetic behavior. The doctrine of predestina- tion channeled the desire to be saved into a quest for proof of salvation in worldly conduct, thus stimulating anxious self-examination and relentless self-discipline. Ends created by ideas (that is, the desire for salvation) powerfully influenced conduct.

If we take seriously the causal model Weber offers (both in The Protestant Ethic and in his theoretical writings on religion), however, we cannot understand his larger claim: that the ethos of Protestantism endured even after the spur of the Calvinist quest for proof of salva- tion had been lost.7 If ideas shape ethos, why did the ethos of ascetic Protestantism outlast its ideas?

Weber argues for continuity between the de- sire of early Calvinists to know whether they were saved or damned and the secular ethic of Benjamin Franklin. We recognize other con- tinuities as well: in the Methodist demand for sobriety, humility, and self-control among the working class; and even in the anxious self- scrutiny of contemporary Americans seeking psychological health, material success, or per- sonal authenticity.

How, then, should we understand continuity in the style or ethos of action, even when ideas (and the ends of action they advocate) change? This continuity suggests that what endures is the way action is organized, not its ends. In the Protestant West (and especially in Puritan America), for example, action is assumed to depend on the choices of individual persons, so that before an individual acts he or she must ask: What kind of self do I have? Saved or damned? Righteous or dissolute? Go-getter or plodder? Authentic or false?

Collective action is also understood to rest on the choices of individual actors. Groups are thus seen as collections of like-minded individ- uals who come together to pursue their com- mon interests (Varenne, 1977). Even large- scale social purposes are presumed best ac- complished through movements of moral re- form or education that transform individuals (McLoughlin, 1978; Boyer, 1978; Gusfield, 1981). To call this cultural approach to action the “value” of individualism, as is often done,

misses the point, since this individualistic way of organizing action can be directed to many values, among them the establishment of ‘community” (Varenne, 1977; Bellah, et al., 1985). This reliance on moral “work” on the self to organize action has, then, been a more enduring feature of Protestant culture than the particular ends toward which this work has been directed. Such examples underline the need for new ways of thinking about cultural explanation.

These two cases illustrate the chronic diffi- culties with traditional efforts to use culture as an explanatory variable and suggest why many have written off the effort altogether.

CULTURAL EXPLANATION

If values have little explanatory power, why expect culture to play any causal role in human action? Why not explain action as the result of interests and structural constraints, with only a rational, interest-maximizing actor to link the two?

The view that action is governed by “inter- ests” is inadequate in the same way as the view that action is governed by non-rational values. Both models have a common explanatory logic, differing only in assuming different ends of action: either individualistic, arbitrary “tastes” or consenual, cultural “values.”18

Both views are flawed by an excessive em- phasis on the “unit act,” the notion that people choose their actions one at a time according to their interests or values. But people do not, indeed cannot, build up a sequence of actions piece by piece, striving with each act to maximize a given outcome. Action is neces- sarily integrated into larger assemblages, called here “strategies of action.”9 Cul-

7Weber himself attempts to deal with this issue from the beginning, first in the Protestant Ethic, by trying to assimilate non-Calvinist varieties of Prot- estantism to the Calvinist model, and second in his essay on the Protestant sects (Weber, 1946b[1922- 23]) where he argues that market incentives sus- tained habits of conduct from which the spirit had gone. But that argument is not sufficient if it is in fact the spirit which has lasted.

8 See Warner (1978) for an elegant explication and critique of this line of argument in the work of both Talcott Parsons and his critics.

9 Bourdieu (1977) also emphasizes the idea of strategies, and the term is central to a whole tradition in anthropology, which, nonetheless, sees strategies as oriented to the attainment of “values” (see Barth, 1981). Very valuable are Bourdieu’s critique of the idea of culture as “rules” and his insistence that we can understand the meaning of cultural traditions only if we see the ways they unfold and can be altered over time. For him, cultural patterns provide the structure against which individuals can develop particular strategies (see the brilliant analysis of mar- riage in Bourdieu, 1977:58-71). For me, strategies are the larger ways of trying to organize a life (trying, for example, to secure position by allying with pres- tigious families through marriage) within which par- ticular choices make sense, and for which particular, culturally shaped skills and habits (what Bourdieu calls “habitus”) are useful.

CULTURE IN ACTION 277

ture has an independent causal role because it shapes the capacities from which such strat- egies of action are constructed.

The term “strategy” is not used here in the conventional sense of a plan consciously de- vised to attain a goal. It is, rather, a general way of organizing action (depending upon a network of kin and friends, for example, or relying on selling one’s skills in a market) that might allow one to reach several different life goals. Strategies of action incorporate, and thus depend on, habits, moods, sensibilities, and views of the world (Geertz, 1973a). People do not build lines of action from scratch, choosing actions one at a time as efficient means to given ends. Instead, they construct chains of action beginning with at least some pre-fabricated links. Culture influences action through the shape and organization of those links, not by determining the ends to which they are put.

Our alternative model also rests on the fact that all real cultures contain diverse, often conflicting symbols, rituals, stories, and guides to action.’0 The reader of the Bible can find a passage to justify almost any act, and traditional wisdom usually comes in paired ad- ages counseling opposite behaviors. A culture is not a unified system that pushes action in a consistent direction. Rather, it is more like a “tool kit” or repertoire (Hannerz, 1969:186-88) from which actors select differing pieces for constructing lines of action. Both individuals and groups know how to do different kinds of things in different circumstances (see, for example, Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984). People may have in readiness cultural capacities they rarely employ; and all people know more cul- ture than they use (if only in the sense that they ignore much that they hear).” I A realistic cul-

tural theory should lead us to expect not pass- ive “cultural dopes” (Garfinkel, 1967; Wrong, 1961), but rather the active, sometimes skilled users of culture whom we actually observe.

If culture influences action through end values, people in changing circumstances should hold on to their preferred ends while altering their strategies for attaining them. But if culture provides the tools with which persons construct lines of action, then styles or strate- gies of action will be more persistent than the ends people seek to attain. Indeed, people will come to value ends for which their cultural equipment is well suited (cf. Mancini, 1980). To return to the culture of poverty example, a ghetto youth who can expertly “read” signs of friendship and loyalty (Hannerz, 1969), or who can recognize with practised acuity threats to turf or dignity (Horowitz, 1983), may pursue ends that place group loyalty above individual achievement, not because he disdains what in- dividual achievement could bring, but because the cultural meanings and social skills neces- sary for playing that game well would require drastic and costly cultural retooling.

This revised imagery-culture as a “tool kit” for constructing “strategies of action,” rather than as a switchman directing an engine prop- elled by interests-turns our attention toward different causal issues than do traditional per- spectives in the sociology of culture.

When do we invoke cultural explanation? And just what is it that we take culture to explain? Usually, we invoke culture to explain continuities in action in the face of structural changes. Immigrants, for example, are said to act in culturally determined ways when they preserve traditional habits in new circum- stances (Thomas and Znaniecki, 1918). More generally, we use culture to explain why dif- ferent groups behave differently in the same structural situation (compare, for example, the argument of Glazer and Moynihan [1970] to Lieberson [1981] or Bonacich [1976]). Finally, we make the intuitively appealing but theoreti- cally vacuous assumption that culture accounts

I0 The problem of cultural “dissensus” or diversity has recently received some explicit theoretical at- tention (Fernandez, 1965; Stromberg, 1981; New- comb and Hirsch, 1983; Rosaldo, 1985). However, these advances are partially offset by the vogue for theories of “hegemony” among Marxists and by semiotic approaches which see cultures as codes within which any meaning must be communicated (see Stromberg, 1985).

11 Writing of the simultaneous participation of ghetto dwellers in mainstream and ghetto subcul- tures, Ulf Hannerz (1969:186) notes:

[M]an is not a mindless cultural automaton. … First of all, when people develop a cultural rep- ertoire by being at the receiving end of cultural transmission, this certainly does not mean that they will put every part of it to use. Rather, the repertoire to some measure constitutes adaptive potential. While some of the cultural goods re- ceived may be situationally irrelevant, such as most of that picked up at the movies, much of that

derived from school, and even some of that en- countered within the ghetto community, other components of an individual’s repertoire may come in more useful.

Bourdieu (1977:82-3) also emphasizes how a “habitus” provides resources for constructing di- verse lines of action. A habitus is “a system of last- ing, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversi- fied tasks, thanks to analogical transfers of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems … (emphasis in original).

278 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

for any observed continuities in the way life of particular groups.

Does culture account for continuities in ac- tion independent of structural circumstance? It does, but in ways different from those the con- ventional approach would predict.

Let us return to the explanatory prob- lems raised by Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic, this time examining Weber’s larger comparative-historical project. In his compar- ative studies of China and India (1951 [1916]; 1958b [1916-17]) and his general sociology of religion (1963 [1922]), Weber argued that reli- gious ideas m

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