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2/27/2021 Week 4 reading response: Social structure: status groups, institutions and cultures

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Week 4 reading response: Social structure: status
groups, institutions and cultures

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Answer each question below based on your understanding of the assigned readings.
Each response should be approximately 250 words, which is roughly one page double-
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double-spaced every week. Ignoring these length requirements is the easiest way to lose
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Questions are worth 3 points each, for a total of 6 points.
Please NUMBER each response.

Readings: Khan textbook, Chapters 3 and 5

Questions:

1) Explain how the self is a socially constituted being, drawing on either Mead or Cooley’s
insights. Does the process of socialization limit the possibility of human agency?

3) Is McDonaldization a form of cultural imperialism? Discuss Ritzer’s concept of
McDonaldization and what may be lost culturally when the values and norms of rationalization
come to dominate other cultures.

Grading Rubric
These are analytical reading questions – I am asking you to complete the reading, to think about
its meaning and significance, and to begin to apply key concepts from this reading. These are
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be sure to demonstrate a real engagement with the ideas from the assigned reading.
Please do not quote from the readings – translate everything into your own words.

If your discussion of the ideas is lacking – i.e. it is superficial or vague, and/or shorter than the
required length – I will deduct a portion of the points and explain this deduction in the
Comments section of the assignment. If it is clear to me that you did not complete the reading,
your response will earn zero points. As always, any submissions containing plagiarism will
receive zero points.

2/27/2021 Week 4 reading response: Social structure: status groups, institutions and cultures

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Week 4 reading response: Social structure: status groups, institutions and
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Social

Structure and the Individual

1

Social Structure and

the Individual

Judith Halasz, State University of New York at New Paltz

Peter Kaufman, State University of New York at New Paltz

Social Structure and the Individual

2

Social Structure and the Individual

J U D I T H H A L A S Z , S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K A T N E W P A L T Z

P E T E R K A U F M A N , S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K A T N E W P A L T Z

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Statuses

Roles

Networ ks

Institutions

THE INDIVIDUAL

Agents of s ocialization

INDIVIDUAL AGENCY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Social Structure and the Individual

3

INTRODUCTION

 Why do people act the way they do?

 Are we forced into our actions and behaviors? Or do we freely choose how to act and behave?

A Beta Theta Pi Fraternity chapter. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

On February 4, 2017, a sophomore at Penn State University died after a night of drinking and hazing

during a pledging ritual at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house. Timothy Piazza, the nineteen-year-old

engineering student who died that night, and the eighteen fraternity brothers who were charged with his

death did not expect Pledge Night to end so tragically. Timothy hoped he would be joining the Beta Theta Pi

brotherhood, while the fraternity thought they would be welcoming the spring 2017 class of brothers. No one

expected anyone to die or to be charged with manslaughter.

In some respects, what occurred at Penn State is not very different than what occurs on many college

campuses across the country, especially at fraternity parties. Students played drinking games such as beer

pong; they participated in drinking challenges such as The Gauntlet, where pledges had to move from one

station to the next and consume different types of alcohol; and they engaged in binge drinking, consuming

excessive amounts of alcohol in a short amount of time.

But as Eric Barron, President of Penn State University, noted, the details of Timothy’s death are

“heart-wrenching and incomprehensible.”1 Barron’s comments were based on a grand jury investigation into

the death.2 The details from this report, many of which came from videos captured on security cameras

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Beta_Theta_Pi%2C_Georgia_Tech_fraternity%2C_Atlanta%2C_USA

Social Structure and the Individual

4

within the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house, point to a series of bad decisions, negligent behavior, and

remorseful actions.

Most troubling was the fact that the fraternity brothers did not immediately seek medical attention for

Timothy. Even after he consumed so much alcohol that he became unconscious and unresponsive, even after

falling repeatedly down stairs and landing on his head, and even after his body was noticeably bruised,

swollen, and bloodied, it was nearly twelve hours before someone finally called for an ambulance. By then it

was too late. Timothy had a blood-alcohol level of nearly .40, a lacerated spleen, a fractured skull, and

multiple brain injuries. He died soon after arriving at the emergency room.

Timothy Piazza’s tragedy speaks to many of the themes we will discuss in this chapter: Where do we

learn how to behave in different situations? What effect do groups have on who we are and what we choose

to do? How do we develop preferences, aspirations, and attitudes? Do we have total free will to select a

course of action or are our behaviors influenced by external pressures?

These questions are all relevant to what happened that night at the Beta Theta Pi house. Why, for

example, did it take so long for these college students to seek help when they knew Timothy was in trouble?

What was it about the situation that may have influenced their decision to wait nearly twelve hours before

calling an ambulance? Was a group dynamic at work? Was there an unspoken set of rules that interfered with

the judgment of some of the brothers? If these eighteen men saw someone in Timothy’s condition elsewhere

on campus or in public, would they be so negligent about finding immediate help?

And what about Timothy and the other recruits? Why did they wish to join Beta Theta Pi? How did

they come to see being a member of this fraternity as such a valuable resource that they were willing to

participate in this hazing ritual? Assuming these young men knew about the dangers of binge drinking, why

did they still consent to follow the drinking demands of the pledge leaders? What identity where they hoping

to secure by participating in these dangerous acts? What might they have given up if they had refused and

left early that night?

The question of why we act the way we do is complicated and multi-faceted. Throughout this

chapter, we will look at how our individual actions are strongly influenced by external factors. We focus on

the rules we are expected to follow and the resources we have at our disposal or seek to acquire. But as we

discuss in the last section, this is not a one-way relationship. Our individual behaviors and actions emerge

from these larger structural dimensions, but also help to produce and perpetuate them.

We begin by examining one of the most important sociological concepts: social structure.

Social Structure and the Individual

5

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

 What is social structure?

 What statuses do we hold?

 What roles do we fill?

 Why are groups, networks, and institutions important?

Imagine you are in a classroom. How can you exit the room? The only openings are doors and windows.

Those are structural elements of the

classroom that limit your actions. What if

the doors and windows were blocked?

Could you bust through the walls? Could

you find a way to overcome the structure

of the room?

You can think of social structure as

the boundaries people confront as they

make decisions about their individual and

collective actions. Structure often limits

the choices people can make, but it also

enables some to have choices that others

may not have. In either case, structure does

not determine our actions, but it does have a significant influence on the behaviors we choose.

When we talk about structural boundaries, we are referring to the rules and resources that guide our

behavior.3 Rules can be both formal (such as school dress codes and laws) and informal (such as whether you

shake someone’s hand to greet them or kiss them on the cheek). Resources are things we may have or that

we acquire, such as money, education, and status, which are valuable or allow us to accomplish goals. Even

race, gender, religion, nationality, ability, and age are structural resources.

A good example of how structural boundaries influence our actions can be found in the animated film

Kung Fu Panda. In this much-beloved blockbuster, a rotund and clumsy noodle-maker named Po transforms

into the Dragon Warrior, challenging social expectations for giant pandas like himself.4 To become a martial

arts master, Po must confront various structural hurdles. For example, his adoptive father, Mr. Ping the

goose, could teach Po the family business of noodle-making, but lacks the knowledge to train Po in kung fu.

Only by accidentally winning a contest does Po land the opportunity to train with Master Shifu at Jade

Palace, a resource very few have access to. Po must convince Shifu and the skeptical martial arts students

that he has the capacity to be the Dragon Warrior even though his pudgy figure does not conform to the

typical appearance of a kung fu fighter. Ultimately, Po transforms limitations into resources, using his large

(Source)

https://pixabay.com/en/child-school-girl-children-830988/

Social Structure and the Individual

6

belly as a weapon, his insatiable appetite as a motivational tool to complete his training, and his perseverance

to win the others’ respect. In this film, we see how a

character’s trajectory is shaped by informal and formal rules,

the resources they have and seek to acquire, and the choices

they make each step of the way.

Rules and resources emerge in various elements of

social structure, such as the social statuses, roles, groups,

networks, and institutions that organize the way people go

about their lives. As we discuss below, each of these elements

of social structure shapes our lives in distinct ways. In some

cases, they work together, such as when a student whose

parent is a graduate of a highly prestigious university has a

better chance of being accepted to that school than a student

without a family connection to it. In that case, the applicant’s

network (family) leads to connections with an institution (the

college) that may influence future chances in the labor

market. In other cases, elements of social structure may have

contradictory effects on us. For instance, women in high-

status professions often encounter gendered expectations that

undercut their career progress. Their role as women interacts

with their presence in a high-status occupation to put them at

a disadvantage. To understand how social structure plays a role in behavior and outcomes, we take a closer

look at each element of structure.

Status es

Table 1: Some Statuses of Several Famous Individuals

Status Mark Zuckerberg Homer Simpson Jennifer Lopez Neil deGrasse Tyson

Race-ethnicity White White Latina African-American

Sex Male Male Female Male

Class Extremely wealthy Working class Wealthy Wealthy

Occupation CEO of Facebook Nuclear power plant worker Celebrity entertainer Astrophysicist

Education

College dropout High school graduate College dropout Ph.D.

What do celebrity singer-entertainer Jennifer Lopez, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Facebook

founder Mark Zuckerberg, and hapless cartoon dad and nuclear power plant worker Homer Simpson have in

common? What sets them apart from each other? Their shared and differing identities point to social

Kung Fu Panda, 2011. (Source)

Social Structure and the Individual

7

statuses, or a person’s or group’s socially determined positions within a larger group or society. As we can

see from Table 1, a person can hold more than one status at the same time.

As you look at Table 1, think about the following questions: How did they get these statuses? How do

these statuses shape their actions? What resources do these statuses provide each of them? What other

statuses do they hold?

Some of the statuses are the result of choices these individuals made, including their profession and

education, while other statuses, such as race and sex, are part of their identities regardless of the choices they

made. We can think about two broad categories of statuses—ascribed and achieved. An achieved status

results at least in part from your efforts. Occupation, level of education, class, and marital status are

generally achieved statuses. When a pledge is accepted as a member of a fraternity or sorority, the pledge

achieves the status of brother or sister and gains an important structural resource that can be leveraged not

only during college, but throughout life. For instance, their former brothers or sisters may later serve as

important contacts for career opportunities. By contrast, an ascribed status is assigned to you by society

without regard for your unique talents, efforts, or characteristics; this often happens at birth. Like achieved

statuses, ascribed statuses such as race, ethnicity, sex, and age place individuals in social hierarchies, or

ranking systems. Ascribed statuses also influence the resources society makes available to individuals.

Ascribed statuses such as race or sex are difficult to change, but their social meanings can be

transformed. Consider the meanings of hairstyles and what they tell us about racial hierarchies. According to

feminist scholar Cheryl Thompson, “For young Black girls, hair is not just something to play with, it is

something that is laden with messages, and

it has the power to dictate how others treat

you, and in turn, how you feel about

yourself.”5 Do you straighten it, braid it,

add weaves, get dreadlocks, or wear it

natural? These choices are not simply a

matter of individual taste; beauty standards

are structural rules that reinforce a

hierarchy based on which types of physical

features are most valued. In the U.S., the

market for hair straightening products has

boomed for over a century, reflecting the

dominance of White beauty standards in

our culture.

Even if a dominant beauty standard

exists, not everyone will follow the

structural rule. For example, by the 1960s,

more Black women began to wear their

hair natural, encouraged by the growing
Natural hair. (Source)

https://pixabay.com/en/selfie-african-american-hair-774399/

Social Structure and the Individual

8

Black Is Beautiful movement. One of Cheryl Thompson’s interviewees, Ruth Smith, an immigrant from

Trinidad who owns a natural hair salon in Toronto, discusses this challenge to White beauty standards:

“When you can look in the mirror and you can see your natural kinky Afro or locs and it’s yours and you can

say, ‘you know what, I like that’ and you know why you have to like it, because that’s what it is; when you

get to the point, that’s when you start to see your true beauty.”6 By embracing their natural hair, Smith and

her clients may help change beauty standards.

At the same time, many women of color recognize that hairstyles involve more than just beauty. As

scholar Noliwe Rooks explains, a hairstyle “could lead to acceptance or rejection from certain groups and

social classes, and its styling could provide the possibility of a career.”7 For many years, natural hairstyles

were viewed as unprofessional. This made it more difficult for women of color to enter lucrative, high-status

professions such as law, finance, and business consulting unless they conformed to dominant beauty

standards. These industries have an informal rule that women of color are expected to straighten their hair or

wear weaves or a wig.

While this rule is increasingly flexible, it still impacts women’s choices since working in a prestigious

profession offers access to valuable structural resources (a high salary, the ability to network with high-status

colleagues who may provide leads on even better opportunities, and influence in the community). As Rooks

highlights, their appearance affects how Black women are perceived, treated, and given opportunities.

Appearance is an individual choice that impacts how we feel about ourselves, how we’re viewed by others,

and even our opportunities. As we can see from this example, an ascribed status (such as race) often

influences your achieved status (such as your career).

Figure 1: Median Annual Earnings by Education Level, U.S. Population Age 25 and over, 20

15

Source: American Community Survey 2015

$21,32

0

$29,004
$34,377

$50,9

30

$67,286

$0

$10,000

$20,000

$30,000

$40,000

$50,000

$60,000

$70,000

$80,000

Less than high
school graduate

High school
graduate

Some college or
associate’s

degree

Bachelor’s degree Graduate or
professional

degree

E
a
rn

in
g
s

Education

Social Structure and the Individual

9

Seeing social status as a structural resource has a long tradition in sociology. According to Max

Weber, your social status is closely related to your life chances, or opportunities to provide yourself with

material goods, positive living conditions, and favorable life experiences.8 Occupying a high status in society

improves your life chances, provides more structural resources, and brings greater access to social rewards.

For example, American children who do very well academically are more likely to enroll in college,

complete a bachelor’s degree, attend a selective institution, or get a graduate degree if they are from affluent

families than if they are from low-income families.9 Academic ability alone does not account for their level

of educational attainment, or we would expect children from poorer families to do just as well as their richer

counterparts. Why does this matter? Take a look at Figure 1; college graduates typically out-earn high school

graduates by a wide margin. Affluent people can afford to continue their education after high school and pass

those benefits on to their children through extracurricular activities, tutoring, and travel. By contrast, people

in the lower social classes must devote a larger proportion of their limited resources to necessities such as

housing, food, and transportation. They have fewer resources for extra tutoring, music or athletic lessons that

might help a student stand out on college applications, or to support an adult child during several years of

college. For both populations, social structure influences the life chances and opportunities of individuals,

even if both sets of parents are equally eager for their children to attend college and both sets of children are

equally academically capable of succeeding. 10

Figure 2: Violent Crime Victimization Rate per 1,000 People by Household

Income

, 2008-20

12

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, 2008-2012

Income is related to other aspects of your life chances, such as health and crime. Residents in poor

neighborhoods face greater exposure to environmental hazards, which contribute to health problems. Not

40.6

29.1

20.9

18.1

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

Less than $15,000 $15,000-24,999 $25,000-74,999 $75,000 or more

C
ri

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,0

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Income

Social Structure and the Individual

10

surprisingly, poor people suffer from serious, chronic illnesses such as asthma, diabetes, and heart disease

more frequently than wealthier people. Poor children face higher infant mortality and obesity rates than their

affluent counterparts.11 And according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2015 National Crime

Victimization Survey, people in low-income families are more likely to be assaulted, raped, or robbed than

are affluent people.12 These examples further demonstrate the various ways that social structure, particularly

status (in this case, social class), helps some individuals and hinders others.

Roles

Each status includes expectations about how someone with that status is supposed to behave and how

others are supposed to behave toward them. A social role is a set of expectations about the behavior and

attitudes of people who

occupy a particular social status.

Social roles contribute to social stability by enabling us to anticipate the behavior of others and to

adapt our own actions accordingly. However, social

roles can be problematic because they can limit

interactions and relationships. For example, if we

view a person as only a “police officer” or a “boss,”

then we may have difficulty also seeing them as a

neighbor or a friend.

Or consider Beyoncé, who juggles multiple,

and sometimes conflicting, roles for her various

statuses: singer, songwriter, dancer, actress, model,

businesswoman, activist, philanthropist, parent,

daughter, sister, and wife. Some of Beyoncé’s fans

may be thrilled to see her transcend her role as a

celebrity by engaging in political activism. Other

fans may be more excited to see her in her role as

singer and dancer and less enthusiastic about her

activism when she speaks out against police

brutality or for transgender rights, gun control, and

female empowerment.

Inconsistency between two or more of the roles we fill is role conflict. In most instances, role conflicts

result in uncomfortable or awkward situations such as when you must decide between hanging out with your

friends and joining your family to celebrate a relative’s birthday. The role conflict you experience is the

result of the competing structural rules you feel compelled to follow: the rules of friendship versus the rules

of family.

In some situations, however, role conflicts can be more serious. One reason the individuals at the Beta

Theta Pi fraternity house failed to act in time to save Timothy Piazza’s life is that they were experiencing

Beyoncé. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BEYONCE_CONCERT_IN_CENTRAL_PARK_2011_Good_Morning_America%27s_Summer_Concert_Series_-_Central_Park,_Manhattan_NYC_-_070111_cropped

Social Structure and the Individual

11

role conflict. There was an inconsistency in how they were supposed to act based on their role as frat boys at

a party and their role as adults encountering someone in medical trouble. If they had not been in their role as

fraternity pledges and came across an unconscious student while they were walking across campus in the

middle of the day, it is likely that they would have called for help immediately. But at the fraternity house on

Pledge Night, by calling for medical assistance, the pledges would have risked being viewed as disloyal to

the frat and therefore might not have been accepted as a brother, a role they desired. By contrast, in their role

as a student outside the fraternity, they would face fewer structural rules inhibiting them from intervening as

bystanders.

Much like the statuses we hold, our roles influence and are influenced by the social structure. Each

role we fill has a certain set of rules that we may be expected to follow. These rules affect our actions, and

also often enable or constrain our behaviors. Our roles provide us with valuable resources we can use as we

take action; for example, being a fraternity member provides older members authority over pledges and the

ability to give them orders. The roles we fill may grant us some degree of power—or lack of it—that could

make it more or less likely that we will successfully take action in a crisis. The power social roles provide is

particularly apparent in hazing rituals such as those Timothy Piazza participated in.

Groups

How we act is often influenced by the values, expectations, and behavior of people around us. For

example, college fraternities try to instill a lifelong sense of solidarity among their members. They build that

allegiance partly by forcing pledges to endure intense psychological and physical challenges, such as step

dancing, binge drinking, or violent and degrading hazing. A tight bond is formed when pledges endure these

tests toget

her.

At the same time, the recruits demonstrate that they trust their older “brothers” to have their

back and that they are worthy of membership. Since refusing a challenge means giving up the chance to be a

member, pledges often push themselves beyond their limits, sometimes with devastating effects, as was the

case for Timothy Piazza.

Fraternities give us insight into how groups operate. A social group consists of two or more people

with similar values and expectations who interact with one another on a regular basis. We seek out groups to

establish friendships, accomplish goals, and fulfill social roles. Much of our social interaction takes place

within groups and is influenced by the group’s norms, or the rules and expectations by which a group guides

the behavior of its members; behavior that meets these rules and expectations is normative. Groups provide

members with valuable resources such as social support, a sense of collective identity, values, and

opportunities for positive life chances.

Fraternities and sororities give first-year students at some universities a way to establish a large set of

supportive friends as they transition to college life. After graduation, members gain access to other alumni

affiliated with their organization, who may provide professional opportunities and mentorship. Groups may

also punish people who violate social norms. In fraternities and sororities, this may include expulsion from

the group and denial of the resources it provides. Other examples of social groups include families, sports

teams, religious communities, and friendship circles.

Social Structure and the Individual
12

Networ ks

We also build connections with others outside of groups. We may develop or join a social network, a

series of social relationships that links a person directly to other individuals (such as friends) and indirectly

to even more people (for instance, friends of friends). Social networks can constrain you by limiting the

range of your interactions, but may also empower you by making vast resources available. Your friends on

Facebook, followers on Twitter and Instagram, high school or college alumni association, or a professional

organization you join form your social networks. These connections may reinforce or sway your political

viewpoints, build or undermine your self-esteem, and even help you land a job.

Social media. (Source)

According to technology sociologist Manuel Castells, digital technology has transformed social

networking.13 We no longer need to maintain regular face-to-face contact with members of our social groups

and networks. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms have made digital

social networks commonplace. The feedback we receive on social media influences our behavior. Individuals

carefully curate digital personas to amass “likes” and avoid a “swipe left” with Photoshop-enhanced selfies,

exotic vacation pics, and announcements of personal and professional accomplishments.

14

Institutions

The final element of social structure brings together statuses, roles, groups, and networks. Social

institutions are enduring practices and rules (both formal and informal) that organize a central domain of

social life. Examples of social institutions include mass media, government, the economy, the family, the

health care system, and the education system. All institutions provide individuals with important resources

while simultaneously imposing rules on how we behave. For example, in the United States the institution of

the government grants us the valuable resource of voting; however, it restricts voting to those aged eighteen

or older. More recently, the government legalized same-sex marriage. This change in the structural rules

https://pixabay.com/en/twitter-facebook-together-292994/

Social Structure and the Individual

13

gave many more individuals the financial, social, and symbolic resources that heterosexual married couples

have long benefited from. This governmental action also resulted in significant changes to the institution of

the family.

Some sociologists argue that social

institutions often maintain the status

quo—the existing set of social patterns—

including existing social inequalities.

Consider the American education system.

Most public schools in the U.S. are

financed largely through local property

taxes. Since houses are more expensive

in more affluent areas, the property taxes

in these neighborhoods allows residents

to provide their children with better-

equipped schools and better-paid

teachers than in low-income areas. As a

result, children from prosperous

communities are often better prepared

academically than children from impoverished areas. The structure of the nation’s educational system allows

such unequal treatment of school children. In response, groups such as the Campaign for Fiscal Equity,

which advocates for more equitable educational funding policies in New York State, try to address these

structural inequalities.15

Social structure is one of the most important concepts in sociology. Unfortunately, it is not always well

defined or clearly understood. This section is designed to give you a better feel for what social structure is

and why it is so important. We are not always aware of it, and we do not always see it, but all of our

individual actions and behaviors are influenced by the larger social structure. And yet it is undeniable that we

can still make choices about how we act in a given situation; our actions are not determined by social

structure. For a more complete perspective, we have to consider the individual actor.

White House illuminated in rainbow colors. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Educational Equity

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:White_House_rainbow_for_SCOTUS_ruling_on_same-sex_marriage

Social Structure and the Individual
14

Review Sheet: Social structure

Key Points

• Social structure plays a powerful role in shaping individuals’ lives as well as their access

to valuable social resources.

• Social structure provides a set of rules that people must navigate.

• Social status is correlated with positive life chances and access to social rewards.

• While it is difficult to change one’s ascribed status, the meaning of social statuses can be

transformed.

• Ascribed status can influence one’s achieved status.

• Social groups and networks influence the behavior of their members.

• Social institutions often reproduce the status quo, but they can also be avenues for social

change.

Key People

• Noliwe Rooks

• Max Weber

• Manuel Castells

• Cheryl Thompson

Key Terms

• Social structure – The set of social statuses, roles, groups, networks, and institutions that

organize and influence the way people go about their lives.

• Resources – Things which are valuable or allow us to accomplish goals.

• Social status – A person or group’s socially-determined positions within a larger group or

society.

• Ascribed status – Status assigned by society without regard for the person’s unique

talents, efforts, or characteristics.

• Achieved status – Status that results from your efforts.

• Social role – Set of expectations concerning the behavior and attitudes of people who

occupy a particular social status.

• Role conflict – Inconsistency between two or more roles.

• Life chances – Opportunities to provide yourself with material goods, positive living

conditions, and favorable life experiences.

• Social group – Two or more people with similar values and expectations who interact

with one another on a regular basis.

• Norms – Rules and expectations by which a group guides the behavior of its members.

• Social network – Series of social relationships that link a person directly to other

individuals and indirectly to even more people.

• Social institutions – Central domains of social life that guide our behaviors and meet our

basic social needs.

Social Structure and the Individual
15

THE INDIVIDUAL

 What is agency?

 How do we construct and maintain identities?

 How are we socialized to become members of society?

 How do agents of socialization shape our identities and behaviors?

Would you be willing to give up a goal you have worked diligently toward in order to help out

someone in need? What if that someone was an opposing player in a competition? Would you sacrifice your

own success to allow them to succeed?

These questions came to life for members of the women’s softball teams at Central Washington and

Western Oregon Universities. The two schools were playing a game that could have determined which team

won the conference championship and earned a spot in the NCAA tournament, something neither team had

ever accomplished. In the second inning of a scoreless tie, Sara Tucholsky came to the plate for Western

Oregon. With two runners on base, Sara hit her first home run of her college career. In her shock and

excitement, she forgot to touch first base. When she turned back to correct her error, her right knee gave out

and she crumpled to the ground, unable to walk.

According to the

umpires, if her coach replaced

her with another runner, the

home run would be nullified

and count only as a single. The

only home run she ever hit and

the possibility of making it to

the NCAA tournament were in

jeopardy. At that point,

Mallory Holtman, a senior

from the opposing team,

Central Washington, asked the

umpires if she and her

teammate, Liz Wallace, could

carry Sara and have her touch

each base with her left leg.

The umpires agreed this was allowable, and so began one of the most heartwarming displays of

sportsmanship in college sports.16

Softball players. (Source)

https://pixabay.com/en/softball-team-girls-players-1574970/

Social Structure and the Individual

16

What compelled Mallory to risk her team’s success by helping a rival? Was there anything unique

about this situation that might explain the actions of Mallory and her teammates? It’s useful to look at which

rules Mallory and Liz prioritized. They followed what they saw as the rules of sportsmanship by honoring

the home run Sara earned. As fellow competitors, they believed that Sara’s achievement should not be

cancelled out due to an injury. In short, their actions were governed by the rules of fair play rather than the

culture of competition.

Consider how the actions of the Central Washington players compare to the actions of the college

men at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house the night Timothy Piazza died. Unlike the Central Washington

softball players, the fraternity brothers at Beta Theta Pi were inhibited from suspending the rules of their

group and institution and coming to Timothy’s aid. Why did these two sets of college students act so

differently when they were similarly confronted with one of their peers in need?

These questions get at the issue of agency—our ability to act given the structural rules and resources

that impact our behaviors. When sociologists speak about agency we are generally referring to the choices

individuals make and the actions

they ultimately take. As these two

contrasting examples of college

students demonstrate, our ability to

act is always influenced by the

social structure. None of us has

total free will. Whether it’s the

rules we follow or ignore, or the

resources we possess or lack, our

agency is affected by external

structural forces.

To fully comprehend

agency and how our ability to act is

formed, we need to better

understand who we are as

individuals. Try this exercise:

Number a piece of paper 1-20 and

at the top of the page write the

question: Who Am I? Now try to

fill in an answer for each of the

twenty spaces.17

What did you come up

with? Your list might contain status or role classifications such as daughter, Latino, friend, or student. Or

perhaps social groups you belong to such as a team, club, or organization. Ideological beliefs such as

conservative, progressive, atheist, or religious may also appear on your list. A few answers may reflect your

Who am I? (Source)

https://pixabay.com/en/man-face-identity-self-me-i-am-510481/

Social Structure and the Individual

17

interests and ambitions, such as dancer, traveler, or future lawyer. It’s likely that some responses reflected

your self-evaluations, such as kind, loving, funny, or lazy.

The Twenty-Statements Test (TST) was developed over 60 years ago by Manford Kuhn and Thomas

McPartland.18 Sociologists and psychologists use it to understand how people identify themselves. It

measures our self-concept, the thoughts and feelings we have of ourselves as physical, social, and emotional

beings.

19

A great follow-up question to the TST is to ask yourself: How did I develop my self-concept? How

did I become who I am? These questions get at one of the most important sociological processes:

socialization, the experiences that give us an identity and teach us the values, morals, beliefs, and ways of

acting and thinking that are expected in our

society.

One of the earliest sociologists to study the processes of identity formation and socialization was

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931). In his classic book, Mind, Self, and Society, Mead argued that our sense

of self develops from our social experiences and interactions.20 Instead of assuming that we are born with our

personalities already determined, Mead recognized that our identities are constructed through the social

influences that we encounter in our daily lives. As we participate in social interactions we become aware of

how others see us and how they expect us to act in certain situations. For Mead, a key component of how we

develop a sense of self is being able to see ourselves through the eyes of others.

Think back to your first day of high

school and you should be able to

understand what Mead was getting at. If

you were like most teenagers, you wanted

to fit in and be accepted by your peers. As

you got dressed in the morning you

probably imagined how other students

would react to your clothes, your hairstyle,

your makeup, and your demeanor. Maybe

you even tried out some greetings or body

postures in the mirror. According to Mead,

you were using the values and norms of the

larger culture, the generalized other, as a

way to guide your actions. Your agency

was heavily influenced by the informal

dress code (or rules) of the peer group and

the resources you possessed, such as the appropriate shoes, clothing, backpack, make-up, and hair style.

As you walked nervously into school that first day and started interacting with classmates and

teachers, you were probably imagining how you appeared to others. You may have also imagined their

judgment of you: do you seem cool, nerdy, trendy, or boring? As you digested this information, you may

Preparing to face the world. (Source)

https://pixabay.com/en/girl-beauty-young-woman-mirror-2343098/

Social Structure and the Individual

18

have developed a particular feeling—pride, shame, acceptance, rejection—which, in turn, may have affected

your self-identity. This interactive process is what one of Mead’s contemporaries, Charles Horton Cooley

(1864-1929), referred to as the looking-glass self, the way our perception of how others see us affects our

sense of self.
21

Agents of s ocialization

The example of your first day of high school focuses on two influential factors that help shape your

identity: the peer group and school. We refer to these as agents of socialization because they are among the

individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions that influence your sense of self and help you learn how

to be a member of society. Besides peer groups and schools, sociologists emphasize the family and the mass

media as the two other most significant agents of socialization.

At various points in our lives, different agents of socialization are most important. Our friends might

be most important during high school, but coworkers might become more important when we enter the labor

force. Socialization is a life-long process, and our sense of self is always evolving, as is our understanding of

what it means to be a member of society. Similarly, the rules we are expected to follow and the resources we

may acquire constantly change and evolve as we enter new social environments. The socialization process

does not just happen to us as children or

young adults; it continues throughout our

lives as we learn to become different

people in different contexts, such as

teenagers, workers, parents, or coaches.

We are also socialized to know

our roles and statuses. According to

sociologist Judith Lorber, we are

socialized into our gender identities,

status, and roles from birth.22 Consider the

clothes and toys babies and young

children are given. If you encountered the

baby in the picture to the right, would you

assume that it’s a girl? Parents often use

colors to indicate their infant’s gender

based on the current normative interpretation of pink as feminine and blue as masculine. Of course, some

parents choose gender-neutral colors such as yellow or white, or challenge gender norms by dressing a boy in

pink or a girl in blue.

Toys are also used to shape children’s gender identities, status, and roles. Boys are generally offered

cars, trains, blocks, balls, action figures, and toy guns, while girls are given dolls, Barbies, dollhouses, and

toy makeup. These toys send messages about gender-appropriate rules of behavior and interest. They

encourage boys to be mechanical, handy, athletic, and aggressive, while girls learn to be nurturing

Baby in pink. (Source)

https://pixabay.com/en/baby-girl-child-small-faces-2329600/

Social Structure and the Individual
19

homemakers concerned with their physical attractiveness. Some parents challenge these gender norms by

giving Lego blocks to girls Lego blocks and stuffed animals or dolls to boys, or buying gender-neutral toys

such as board games.

As we grow older, we get cues about gender norms from our peers, school, work, and the media. For

many years, teachers, administrators, and even parents discouraged girls from exploring math and science,

instead steering them toward the social sciences, humanities, and education. The structural boundaries of

what is deemed an appropriate field of study for women and men have not only influenced the choices and

opportunities of generations of students; these structural rules of gender tracking have contributed to

women’s subordinate economic position.23

Recently, concerted institutional efforts have challenged this educational gender tracking with

computer-coding schools for girls, STEM scholarships for women, and representations of female scientists in

the media. The rules about which subject areas are acceptable for specific genders are changing; as a result,

women are increasingly acquiring the same educational resources and credentials as their male peers, though

they remain a small minority of those earning degrees in areas such as computer science.

“Science Careers in Search of Women,” Argonne National Laboratory. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The 2016 film Hidden Figures focuses on a team of female African American mathematicians who

played a pivotal role in the success of early space missions at NASA, where jobs were segregated by gender,

with women allowed to hold only select positions. When mathematician Katherine Johnson confronted one

of the chief engineers at NASA about how job segregation hindered her ability to work, these structural

barriers were removed. Other employees at NASA changed their perceptions and behaviors in response to

the shifting rules by demonstrating greater respect and inclusivity toward Mrs. Johnson and other women like

her.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Argonne_lab_education

Social Structure and the Individual

20

When social expectations shift and we encounter a new set of group rules that guide our behavior, we

often experience resocialization, the process of adopting new social norms and identities. Consider the

resocialization process that young men experience when pledging a fraternity. They are encouraged to

develop allegiance to a new “family,” which often places great value on hetero-normative masculinity, or the

dominant, widespread ideas of what it means to be a straight man. This includes displays of endurance,

toughness, strength, the ability to control emotions, and sexual success with women. How do you think this

compulsory allegiance and show of masculinity influenced the events that lead to Timothy Piazza’s hazing

death?

Sometimes we experience dramatic resocialization, greatly changing how we behave, what we think,

and how we view ourselves. This is common in what Erving Goffman called total institutions, where groups

of people are largely cut off from the wider society and their lives are largely controlled by the institution.

24

Military boot camp, prisons, mental institutions, and religious training organizations all commonly function

as total institutions. They have near-complete control over the people in them; the institution decides when

people eat or sleep, what they do all day, and when (or if) they can talk to people outside the institution.

Total institutions usually resocialize residents into values, beliefs, and behaviors that suit the needs of the

institution. For instance, religious organizations training nuns or monks may resocialize residents to reject

pleasures or preferences from their old lives and adopt new standards of behavior. Military cadets learn to

follow rigid military regulations for everything from their haircuts to how to make their beds; by doing so,

the military is also training them to follow orders without question, no matter how small or seemingly

unimportant the orders might be. Reducing signs of individuality—such as different hairstyles—also

resocializes cadets to think of themselves as just one member of a larger unit.

Most of us like to think of ourselves as independent individuals who develop our own unique

identities and sense of who we are. In truth, however, we evolve from the social worlds in which we live. We

all have a strong sense of identity and we all exert our agency in each moment of our lives. But the way we

come to see ourselves, the choices we make, and the behaviors we engage in are shaped by our place in the

larger social structure. Whether we realize or like to admit it, our actions are deeply affected by structural

rules and resources. None of us act in a vacuum devoid of societal influences.

At the same time, individuals are not robots or puppets with no control over their actions. We exert

our agency and choose the actions we take, and we have some control over the structures that influence our

lives. The central theme of this chapter, and one of the central themes of sociology, revolves around this

dynamic interplay between individuals and social structure. As we will explain in the final section,

individuals are both the products and the producers of social structure.

Social Structure and the Individual

21

Review Sheet: The individual

Key Points

• Our ability to act according to our own will is shaped by the structural rules we encounter

and resources at our disposal.

• Our sense of self may include classifications, social groups to which we belong,

ideological beliefs, interests, ambitions, and self-evaluations.

• Our identities are constructed through the social influences that we encounter in our daily

lives as well as how we see ourselves through the eyes of others.

• Our sense of self is always evolving, as is our understanding of what it means to be a

member of society. The socialization process does not just happen to us as children or

young adults; it occurs throughout our lives.

• The family, education, peer groups, and mass media are often identified as the four most

important agents of socialization.

Key People

• Thomas McPartland

• Manford Kuhn

• George Herbert Mead

• Charles Horton Cooley

• Pierre Bourdieu

• Judith Lorber

Key Terms

• Agency – Acting on your own will.

• Self-concept – Thoughts and feelings we have of ourselves as physical, social, and

emotional beings.

• Socialization – Experiences that give us an identity and that teach us how to be members

of society.

• Resocialization – Socialization process by which we adopt new norms and identities.

• Total institutions – Institutions that exert near-total control over members’ lives and

engage in resocialization.

• Generalized Other – Values and norms of the larger culture that guide your actions.

• Looking-Glass Self – The way our perception of how others see us affects our sense of

self.

• Agents of socialization – Individuals, groups, and organizations that influence your

sense of self and help you learn the ways of being a member of society.

Social Structure and the Individual

22

INDIVIDUAL AGENCY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

 What is the relationship between individual agency and social structure?

 How are individuals constrained and enabled by external forces?

 How does our behavior contribute to the construction of society?

 How are we products of the social world in which we live?

“If you’re in hijab, then someone sees you and treats you accordingly. I feel more free. Especially

men, they don’t look at your appearance—they appreciate your intellectual abilities. They respect you.” This

comment came from a 22-year-old female Muslim-American college student.25

Some of you may be surprised by this young woman’s perspective on veiling, the Muslim practice of

wearing a hijab (hair covering) or veil. Yet it reflects the attitudes of some of the well-educated, middle-

class, devout Muslim women living in Austin, TX that Jen’Nan Ghazal Read and John Bartowski

interviewed in their 2000 study.26 To uncover the diverse attitudes Muslim women have toward the practice

of veiling, they spoke with college students, professionals, and homemakers ranging in age from 21 to 55.

Some had recently arrived to the U.S., while the majority had lived in the country for at least a decade. Half

wore a hijab.

Veiled and unveiled women. (Source)

https://pixabay.com/en/boot-girl-women-muslim-hid%C5%BE%C3%A1b-1340406/

Social Structure and the Individual

23

The main questions the researchers explored were: How do Muslim communities expect women to

behave? Should they wear a hijab or veil? And if so, why? How do these Muslim women explain their

choices and decisions? In other words, the researchers were interested in learning more about the interplay

between social structure and the individual.

All the interviewees noted that veiling was based on the belief that men are prone to sexual impulses,

from which the hijab would supposedly protect women. Those who wore a veil had diverse attitudes toward

their gender roles as Muslim women. Some felt liberated from the male gaze and more comfortable being in

public among men. Some sensed that men took them more seriously as college students or professionals if

they wore a veil. And some wanted to assert their Muslim identity in a visible way to forge connections with

other Muslims in the community.

By contrast, many of the unveiled interviewees saw the hijab as a means for men to dominate women,

assert gender differences, and reinforce patriarchy. As one unveiled woman bluntly stated, “The veil is used

to control women.”27 They also felt that the hijab was not necessary to prove their religious piety, since they

viewed veiling not as a divine commandment but as a political and cultural practice designed to differentiate

Muslim women from Westerners and help men manage women’s sexuality.

These women used their agency in deciding whether or not to veil, but their choices must be

understood in the context of social structure, particularly the rules and resources provided by cultural

expectations, religious traditions, and the political climate. Each of these women interpreted the rules of their

faith individually, sorting out how to follow the rules of their religion and use these regulations as a resource

to navigate the social world. For some women, that meant wearing the hijab to gain respect in a male-

dominated society. For others, veiling was a way to express their religious identity. For a third group of

women, not wearing the veil symbolized their challenge to male domination.

Aware of prevailing attitudes in the Muslim community and broader American society, these women

faced the choice of whether to be visibly identifiable as Muslim. They had to weigh the benefits of building

ties in the Muslim community against the potential risk of religious and ethnic discrimination. By making

choices about veiling, they influenced social structure, including norms and attitudes concerning veiling in

communities where Muslims are a religious minority. By framing veiling as empowering and liberating,

some of the veiled women changed what it means to wear a hijab. The women who chose not to wear a veil

also challenged Muslim norms while tacitly reinforcing Western attitudes about veiling.

The key point is that our individual actions, our agency, can reinforce the social structure in some

situations and transform it in others. There is a constant interaction between agency—the ability to act on our

own will—and social structure—the resources we can tap into as well as the rules we must navigate.

When we recognize the complex interconnection between agency and social structure we are

exercising our sociological imagination.28 As C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) pointed out, all of our actions,

large and small, shape the world in which we live. At the same time, the social world shapes the actions we

take. It’s important to understand the two sides of this relationship—the extent to which we shape the social

Social Structure and the Individual
24

world and the extent to which we are shaped by it—if we hope to fully understand why people behave the

way they do and why society is organized as it is.

Sociologists often describe the relationship between individual action and the larger social structure in

terms of micro-sociological and macro-sociological aspects of society. Micro-sociology focuses on

individual identities and small-scale interactions with others. Macro-sociology takes aim at large-scale

societal structures, including groups and institutions as well as social forces such as norms. Micro and macro

theories help us understand the interplay between individuals and social structure, particularly in terms of our

choices and actions. These theories provide different ways to view this relationship.

Herbert Blumer (1900-1987), one of the most well-known micro-sociological theorists, contributed to

a theory called symbolic interaction, which studies human interaction by focusing on the words and

gestures that people use and the meanings they create about the world.29 From the perspective of symbolic

interaction, individuals act toward things based on the meanings those things have for them. The meanings

are developed through a process of socialization, and they may change over the life course. As individuals

act toward things, they inevitably perpetuate or transform the meanings of the things that were influencing

their actions in the first place.

We can illustrate the process of symbolic interaction by thinking about the women in Read and

Bartowski’s study. As young children, they learned from their parents, family members, and other adults in

their community that the veil is an important religious symbol for Muslims. As these women entered

adulthood, the veil took on a variety of additional cultural and political meanings, such as respectability,

collective identity, and oppression. The way these women act toward the veil is dependent on the meaning

the veil has for them at any given time in their lives. Sometimes, their actions can alter the meaning of

veiling, such as when they wear the veil to achieve respect in school and work or when they reject the veil to

call attention to patriarchy. Symbolic interactionists suggest that this process shows how individuals create

social change. Through small-scale actions, individuals transform social norms and the widely-held

meanings attached to people, things, and behaviors. This is how the micro influences the macro level of

society.

Macro-sociologists take a different

perspective, focusing first on societal

influences. Robert Merton (1910-2003) argued

that people make choices based on the

resources available to achieve their goals.30 The

goals people hope to achieve often reflect social

norms, such as financial security. When

someone lacks access to socially acceptable

pathways, they tend to seek other means to

achieve culturally acceptable goals. For

example, if someone does not have the financial

means to attend college, they may seek other Free Hugs. (Source)

Social Structure and the Individual

25

avenues to support themselves, such as becoming an entrepreneur, entering the military, or even resorting to

crime. In this way, the unequal distribution of resources and opportunities across society, a macro-

sociological phenomenon known as the structure of opportunity, shapes the choices individuals make.

Sociologists must consider both micro and macro perspectives when we analyze individual choices

and actions. We should also look at both sides of this relationship when we investigate how larger social

structures such as groups and institutions are established, maintained, and transformed.

Figure 2: Relationship between the Individual and Social Structure

Let’s revisit the example we started the chapter with to help us better understand these important

points. What makes Timothy Piazza’s death so tragic is that the other men attending the party did not use

their agency in a way that may have saved his life. Those young men did not immediately call for help

because they were following a specific set of structural rules pertaining to fraternity life and college partying.

The fraternity chapter officers knew that Penn State had a zero-tolerance policy for underage drinking.

Reporting the incident meant their organization could lose its charter and be banned from campus. The

pledges did not want to jeopardize their own chances of gaining a valuable structural resource, membership

in the fraternity. Their choice to delay calling for medical assistance was deeply affected by the social

structure; it also negatively affected Timothy’s chance of survival.

When the fraternity pledges and brothers weighed the consequences of helping Timothy, when the

Muslim women contemplated whether to veil, and when the softball players considered aiding the competing

team, they were all engaging in reflexivity—the process of evaluating our position in the social world, the

rules we are expected to follow, and the resources we have or can acquire. Ultimately, we make a decision to

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

rules
resources
statuses

roles
groups

networks
institutions

INDIVIDUAL

actions
identities

Social Structure and the Individual

26

act in a certain way and our decision has consequences. In some instances, we reinforce the social structure

through our individual choices and actions; in other instances, we may alter the social structure.

In either case, our actions and their corresponding effects reveal how we are both products and

producers of the social world. We make reflexive choices about how to act, and those choices are informed

by social structural rules and resources. In this sense, the social structure only exists because of the actions of

individuals, and the actions of individuals are influenced by social structure. They mutually influence each

other to create our ever-changing individual and social lives.

Review Sheet: Individual agency and social structure

Key Points

• There is a dynamic interplay between individual agency and social structure. Our actions

are constrained and enabled by social structural rules and resources. Our actions also

contribute to the construction of society.

• When deciding on a course of action, people take into consideration their social position,

risks and rewards, structural rules, and available resources.

• It is important to use both micro and macro sociological perspectives when we analyze

individual choices and social structural changes.

• Individuals make reflexive choices about how to act; those choices are influenced by

social structural rules and resources.

Key People

• Jen’Nan Ghazal Read

• John Bartowski

• C. Wright Mills

• Herbert Blumer

• Robert Merton

Key Terms

• Veiling – Muslim practice of wearing a hijab or veil.

• Sociological imagination – An understanding of the interplay between social structure

and agency.

• Micro-sociology – Analysis of individual identities and interactions.

• Macro-sociology – Analysis of large-scale social structures and forces.

• Symbolic interaction – The study of human interaction by focusing on the words and

gestures that people use and the meanings they create about the world.

• Structure of opportunity – The unequal distribution of resources and opportunities

across society.

• Reflexivity – Process of evaluating our position in the social world, the rules we are

expected to follow, and the resources we have or can acquire.

Social Structure and the Individual

27

REFERENCES
1

Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. 2017. “18 Penn State Students Charged in Fraternity Death.” New York Times, Retrieved at

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/us/penn-state-fraternity-death-timothy-piazza.html.
2 Park Miller, Stacy. 2017. “Beta Theta Pi Fraternity and 18 Brothers Charged in Death of Timothy Piazza; 8 Facing

Manslaughter Charges,” Court Filing, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Office of the District Attorney, May 5. Retrieved at

https://www.scribd.com/document/347444538/Notice-11-FINAL-Charges-and-Presentment.
3 Sewell, Jr., William H. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of

Sociology 98(1): 1-29. Sewell builds on Giddens’ structuration theory. See also Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of

Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
4 http://www.dreamworks.com/kungfupanda/movies/kung-fu-panda
5 Thompson, Cheryl. 2008-2009. “Black Women and Identity: What’s Hair Got to Do With It?” Michigan Feminist Studies

22(1): http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.ark5583.0022.105
6 Thompson, 2008-2009.
7 Rooks, Noliwe. 1996. Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press, pp.5-6
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271-77. Originally published in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen, 1922: 631-40).
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Postsecondary Enrollment Among Recent High School Completers,” 2016,

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_tpa.asp gives data that says college enrollment differs by SES in 2013; and

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of High-Achieving Students from Lower-Income Families,” Jack Kent Cooke Foundation & Civic Enterprises,

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/1/7/Achievement_Trap
10 The work of Annette Lareau demonstrates how social class acts as a valuable resource that propels some students forward

and holds other students back. Lareau, Annette. 2011. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press. Lareau, Annette. 2000. Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in

Elementary Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
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Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America,

http://www.rwjf.org/content/dam/farm/reports/reports/2013/rwjf406474
12 https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812 ; https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv15
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doi:10.1177/2056305116641976.
15 Alliance for Quality Education website: Campaign for Fiscal Equity, https://www.aqeny.org/equity/.
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http://www.espn.com/college-sports/columns/story?columnist=hays_graham&id=3372631.
17 For a ready-made sheet for this exercise follow this link:

http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/savvy/introtosociology/Documents/Twenty%20Statement%20Test.htm
18 Kuhn, Manford.H. and Thomas S. McPartland. 1954. “An Empirical Investigation of Self-Attitudes.” American

Sociological Review 19(1): 68-76.
19 Gecas, Viktor. 1982. “The Self-Concept.” Annual Review of Sociology 8:1-33.
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Chicago Press.
21 Cooley, Charles Horton. 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order. NY: Scribner.
22 Lorber, Judith. 1994. Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
23 De Welde, Kris and Sandra Laursen. 2011. “The Glass Obstacle Course: Informal and Formal Barriers for Women Ph.D.

Students in STEM Fields,” International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology 3(3): 571-595.
24 Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, NY:

Anchor Books.
25 Ghazal Read, Jen’Nan and John P. Bartkowski. 2000. “To Veil or Not to Veil? A Case Study of Identity Negotiation

among Muslim Women in Austin, Texas,” Gender and Society 14(3): 405.
26 Ghazal Read and Bartkowski, 2000.

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.ark5583.0022.105

https://nces.ed.gov/

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_tpa.asp

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/1/7/Achievement_Trap

http://www.rwjf.org/content/dam/farm/reports/reports/2013/rwjf406474

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv15

https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116641976

Educational Equity

http://www.espn.com/college-sports/columns/story?columnist=hays_graham&id=3372631

http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/savvy/introtosociology/Documents/Twenty%20Statement%20Test.htm

Social Structure and the Individual

28

27 Ghazal Read and Bartkowski, 2000.
28 Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. NY: Oxford.
29 Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press.
30 Merton, Robert. 1938. “Social Structure and Anomie,” American Sociological Review 3(5):672-682.

Cover Photo Source

https://pixabay.com/en/hip-hop-dancer-silhouette-man-male-1209499/

Culture

Jonathan R. Wynn, University of Massachusetts
Amherst

Culture

Page 2

Culture

J O N A T H A N R . W Y N N , U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A S S A C H U S E T T S
A M H E R S T

WHAT IS CULTURE?

M aterial cu ltu re v s. sy m b olic cu ltu re

H igh cu ltu re v s. p op u lar cu ltu re

C u ltu re as v alu es vs. cu ltu re as a way of life

CULTURE IS A CYCLE

The rom antic im a ge of an a rtist

H ow is cu ltu re p rod u ced ?

C on su m in g c u ltu re

Su b cu ltu res

HOW CULTURE WORKS

H ow cu ltu re creates in eq u alities

H ow cu ltu re creates g rou p s an d b ou n d aries

THE CULTURE JAM

C u ltu re jam as a m ix

C u ltu re jam as a problem

C u ltu re jam as a solu tion

Culture

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INTRODUCTION

£ How does music help us understand the complexity of culture?

You close your eyes and feel the music. Your head bobs up and down. You see the color of the lights
through your eyelids.

Are you close to the stage, with bodies and sweat pressed to your shoulders, or do you hang back? Do
you feel a connection with the strangers around you? With the band? What kind of music is it? Do the lyrics
reflect your experiences or do they transport you into another perspective? Where are you? A packed
underground club? A stadium? Or a library cubicle, listening on Beats headphones?

Music is a powerful force in our lives. It is also a multibillion-dollar industry, with organizational and
technological changes that shape how music is made and experienced. Music is just one kind of culture,
shaping our views of the world, connecting people near and far.

What kind of music is this crowd listening to?

(Source)

We humans produce far more than what we need for mere survival. Our intellect allows for
expansive creativity, self-reflection, and communication. We transform our living environment. We share

Culture

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ideas and values. Culture, broadly, is everything we make and consume—including our ideas, attitudes,
traditions, and practices—beyond that bare necessity. Music may very well be one of the earliest forms of
culture humanity produced.

“Culture” is one of the most difficult words for a sociologist to use. Sociological research on culture
varies, but most work is committed to the idea that the symbolic and expressive aspects to social life—the
beliefs and values we hold, as well as the practices and activities we engage in—are worth examination.
Thinking in this way, burritos and Beyoncé, athleisure and college athletics, juggalos and graffiti all uncover
great sociological questions.

Opening this chapter with a few questions about how you experience music illustrates how we can
begin to think about culture from a sociological perspective. Émile Durkheim allows us to think about how
much of social life works via culture: he notes that symbols (material or immaterial objects that groups affix
meaning to), deployed through rituals (routinized and highly important group activities), give a community
its specific character. In my research on festivals, for example, I walked through the Country Music
Association’s CMA Fest in Nashville, cataloging common references in song lyrics (dirt roads, pickup trucks,
cigarettes, Red Solo Cups) performed on stage that resonated with audiences. The annual ritual of the
country music festival creates collective meanings for festivalgoers—crystalizing shared sentiments about
America (small towns, simple living, reckless but “honest” fun)—through this common set of symbols.

This chapter explores how to understand culture sociologically. The first section provides a set of key
tensions for making sense out of the complexity of what we mean when we use the term “culture.” Then I
discuss how sociologists analyze culture as an object: how culture is made and produced. A third section
explains how culture shapes social life. The final section discusses some wider issues raised in studies of
culture, from globalization to cultural appropriation.

WHAT IS CULTURE?

£ What is the difference between high culture and popular culture?

£ How has the idea of culture changed over time, and what are the tradeoffs?

£ Is culture a set of beliefs, and how are those beliefs put into practice?

£ What does it mean to say that culture is a way of life?

We start by differentiating between high and popular culture, material and symbolic culture, and
‘culture as values’ vs. ‘culture as activity.’ Later sections discuss how culture is produced and consumed and
how tastes shape groups and boundaries.

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M aterial cu ltu re v s. sy m b olic cu ltu re
Think about clothing and fashion, college fashion in particular. Humans produce clothing to stay

cool in the summer and warm in the winter. But if that were its only purpose, everyone would wear the same
kind of clothes—perhaps a brown tunic or blue denim overalls. People don’t just use clothing for warmth.
We communicate a lot through our fashion. There is a material component to what we wear (fabric, dye, the
production of clothing) and a symbolic component (words, images, style). Sociologically, this is material
culture—physical goods, often placed in an economic system—and symbolic culture—beliefs, values,
language.

Published in 1912, Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life explains how symbolic
culture shapes social life. He described how a set of images and words—a bundle he called collective
representations—can represent a particular culture; the purpose, or function, is to create social order and
cohesion. For Durkheim, religion separates symbols into categories of sacred and profane, constructing social
boundaries between people who recognize a set of collective representations as worthy of reverence and those
who do not. Although he makes the argument primarily through religion, his work points to the importance
of culture in shaping social life.

We can certainly see how collective representations work in the U.S. American collective
representations might be baseball, the “Stars and Stripes,” apple pie, and the like. Similarly, college fashion
might be part of the collective representations for your college or university, which could also include a
mascot or a motto, colors (e.g., “Spartan Green”), an iconic campus building, or statue, all of which were
created, debated, and then shape the character of your college community.

No matter the school, students tend to wear college gear a lot. I have, however, noticed new fashion
trends. On my campus, I used to see a lot of jeans, mixed with an assortment of sweatpants and sweatshirts,
usually with our campus logo in maroon. Increasingly, I see skin-tight leggings. The material is light,
stretchable, odor-resistant, and sweat-wicking. It’s useful for yoga and stretching at the gym and now,
apparently, sitting in class. Athleisure, as it’s called, is a growing market trend; it combines the causal style of
sweatpants with a more fitted look. My campus, apparently, is becoming a large (and rather expensive) yoga
studio.

Trends in the relationship between symbolic and material culture can be quite telling. Symbolically,
athleisure is part of a growing tendency toward the “casualization” of fashion, intersecting with health and
fitness trends in a way that makes everyday clothes less formal. And then there is the material aspect: USA
Today notes that yoga pants (like corduroy pants and khakis before them) are cutting into the jeans market.1
And what does it say about masculinity that men are unlikely to wear leggings, and companies sell them
“luxury sweatpants” instead? For centuries, it was quite common for men to wear leggings—exemplified by
the painting of Henry VIII, below—but today it’s unlikely one of your professors would wear yoga pants to
class, regardless of their gender. Sometimes controversies highlight cultural change: what do you think of
three women being kicked off a United Airlines flight in 2017 because an attendant deemed their leggings
“improper dress”?

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Yoga pants with punk studs (Source); Portrait of Henry VIII by the workshop of Hans Holbein the Younger (Source).

Fashion can be profoundly meaningful, and unpacking the relationship between its symbolic and
material elements produces insights into cultural change and even how groups cohere. More on this later.

Material culture vs. symbolic culture is only one of the tensions we can discuss, however.

H igh cu ltu re vs. p op u lar cu ltu re

Most classical art was designed for the enjoyment of a few. When people used the term culture, the

term once denoted only high culture: cultural goods made for and enjoyed by elite groups. This included
oil paintings, ballet, the opera, fancy cuisine, and the like. High culture was “fine art,” often hidden away
from the masses.

The Industrial Revolution allowed for the mechanical reproduction of cultural goods for broader
society. In contrast with high culture, industry manufactures popular culture: heavily produced and
commercialized goods made for and consumed by a large audience. This could also be called mass culture or
low culture. While high culture is attuned to elite and upper-middle class tastes, and has an aura that denotes
its exceptional quality, popular culture is commonly associated with pleasure, the mundane, and the masses.
Although you might hear of elites, well, being elitist about popular culture (e.g., dismissing superhero movies
as frivolous and trivial) or working-class folks rejecting high culture (say, avoiding art museums), most
sociological studies of culture start from the assumption that all culture has value, whether it’s Spiderman or
the Mona Lisa.

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Figure 1: Family Income and Attendance at Select High Culture Events

Source: Data from “A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002-2015,” p. 4

Making clear distinctions between high and popular culture makes it easy to demonstrate how the
lines can become quite blurred. For example: if you text “send me” and a keyword to 572-51, the San
Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA) will text an image of a piece of “high art” back to you via the more
“popular culture” of our cellphones. This probably started partly as self-promotion by the museum, but
SFMOMA is also only able to exhibit a fraction of its collection and wanted to make its artworks more
accessible. I texted “send me culture” and received a 1976 Andy Warhol portrait of crooner Paul Anka. I
texted “send me high culture” and received a 1936 photograph of a circus high-wire act. Try it and see what
you get!

Is tearing down the walls between high and popular culture a positive development? Culture theorist
Walter Benjamin noted with some melancholy that, while allowing for greater accessibility, the mass
reproduction of art destroys the
aura—a glow of authentic and
unique creative labor—of high
culture.2 Benjamin would likely
not have approved of a
museum texting art. And yet,
transformations in high and
popular culture are complex
tradeoffs. SFMOMA was
designed by award-winning
architect Mario Botta to
showcase its works of art. The
spaces and architecture—a
combination of high material

A production of the opera Don Quixote. (Source)

Culture

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and symbolic culture—aim to produce an emotional experience. But only a fraction of the country’s
population is able to travel to San Francisco and pay the $25 admission fee. Now, you can get the museum’s
art delivered right to your phone while you’re sitting on the toilet!

Figure 2: Decline in Attendance at Select High Culture Events

Source: Data from “A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002-2015,” p. 5

What examples successfully bridge high and low? Here’s one: In 2016, Beyoncé released Lemonade, a
chart-topping and award-winning visual art album with songs packaged along with a feature-length gritty,
breathtaking, Instagram-filter-hued film. Lemonade is a concept album: a set of songs centered on a set of
themes (infidelity, revenge, and the historical impact of race relations on intimate and community
relationships in the African American community) that tell a story; the video is divided into chapters based on
themes, from intuition and denial all the way to redemption. While Lemonade was a chart-topping and
infectiously catchy example of pop culture, the idea of the concept album originated with classical German
musical compositions by Beethoven and Brahms. (Pink Floyd’s The Wall is a famous example of a pop
concept album.) Lemonade is high culture enough to be artistic, popular culture enough to bring down the
house at the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show.

Such changes in high and popular culture spark much debate: Is high culture really high culture
when it’s accessible to everyone? What is gained and lost? Does it matter and, if not, why not?

30%

33%

32%

34%

38%

3

7%

26%

33%

36%

37%
36%
37%
33%

21%

36%

40%

42%

46%

41%

35%

23%

18-24

25-34

35-44

45-54

55-64

65-74

75+

Overall decline in Attending Ballet, Classical or Jazz
Music, an Arts Museum, Opera, Musical or Play

2002 2008 2012

Culture

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C u ltu re as v alu es vs. cu ltu re as a w ay of life
From Max Weber to 1950s American sociologist Talcott Parsons, social scientists learned to

approach culture as a unified system of values (moral beliefs) and norms (rules and expectations by which a
group guides the behavior of its members).3 Culture, in this way, bends our beliefs into actions.

A well-known example is the conversation around the “culture of poverty.” In the 1960s, Oscar
Lewis studied Mexico and Puerto Rico, finding that the conditions of poverty there created a set of
widespread values and norms.4 In a report, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan claimed that a “tangle of
pathologies” resulted from the combined effects of slavery, economic marginalization, and racism.5 Although
these studies argued that this culture is a result of poverty and inequality—that is, that individuals who are
poor create pathological cultural values and norms—Lewis and Moynihan’s work was incorrectly interpreted
as blaming the poor for their own marginalization. The debate transformed into the perception that poor
folks are poor due to their own habits and preferences, their own culture.

Research has since shown that poor Americans hold values that are similar to the wider American
population, even among the homeless.6 William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged sought to understand
how culture helps those trapped in poverty to cope with and come to understand their circumstances.7 He
found high social isolation among urban African Americans living in areas of extreme poverty; changes in
urban economies had led to declining employment rates for Black men and rising female-headed households.
But Wilson found the same values among this population as among wider American society, including a
strong belief in marriage and a work ethic.

Studies of organizations illustrate how values and beliefs are rather stubborn. In the middle of the last
century—with the rise of an affluent middle class after World War II—sociologists turned toward
understanding how organizations create their own culture, nurturing the institution’s goals and developing a
world of meaning that shapes how its members think and act.8 In order to explain the 1986 Challenger
disaster—when the NASA space shuttle exploded due to a structural failure in one of its booster rockets—
Diane Vaughan studied how NASA’s organizational culture shaped problem-solving among engineers and
scientists in a way that allowed such an event to occur. She found widespread awareness that booster rockets
were faulty before 1986, and yet, even in the face of a potential catastrophe, NASA’s practices were difficult
to change because the organization’s culture made such risks a normal part of their calculations.9

It might appear that culture is external to us, that we are fully socialized into a culture’s ideas,
language, and patterns of interaction. And yet, people also adopt and adapt culture from moment to
moment. Our collective norms, values, and ideas are not as stable as they appear. Contrary to the “culture as
values” approach, don’t we also think of culture as a set of practices, a way of life?

Take ethnographer Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street, a detailed account of a primarily African
American neighborhood in Philadelphia. He shows how kids were separated into groups based on cultural
cues (how they dressed, the language they used, their mannerisms and gestures) that put them into two
groups: “street” and “decent.” Some were successful in the contrasting spheres of the street and school

Culture

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because they were able to switch between those different norms, each suited to particular situations.
Anderson called this skill code switching: adopting a set of informal rules and manners that are
appropriate in a specific setting.10 For example, some kids would embrace the slang, manner, and clothing of
the street to avoid ridicule on their blocks, and then adopt the norms of middle-class culture at school in
order to succeed in the eyes of their teachers.

While responding to the “culture as values” perspective, Ann Swidler offered an alternative
understanding of how we practice culture in real life. Swidler describes culture as a cultural toolkit: sets of
beliefs, values, and attitudes that we learn to use in different situations.11 We use the cultural tools that solve
particular problems or help us in the specific situation we’re facing. Culture isn’t a single system of beliefs and
practices that we have all learned and accepted. It’s a strategic activity: people making decisions about what
might work best in a given situation.

Culture is continually practiced and repurposed in every interaction. Those in Anderson’s study, for
example, used culture strategically. Think about it: if culture wasn’t remade and repurposed, everyone would
still be wearing corduroy pants from the 1970s! (Or is that back in fashion?) Furthermore, those with a wider
cultural repertoire are equipped to handle a greater variety of conditions and those who hold a “cultural
tool” well matched for a particular situation are more successful.12

In thinking about culture as both a set of values and a set of practices, it becomes a kind of paradox:
Culture exists outside of us as individuals, shaping our understandings of the world, yet it is also constantly
remade and repurposed through everyday interactions.13

Review Sheet: What is culture?

Key Points
• Culture can be understood in a variety of ways, from a division between high and popular

culture to analyzing the material and symbolic components of a cultural good.
• Culture can be seen as a system of values and norms, whether at the macro-level of a

society or at the more middle (or ‘meso’) level of an organization.
• Culture can also be seen as a set of practices people use strategically that can change over

time.

Key People
• Elijah Anderson
• Émile Durkheim
• Ann Swidler
• Diane Vaughan

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Key Terms
• Code switching – Adopting a set of informal rules and manners attuned to a particular

setting.
• Collective representations – A set of images and words that represent a particular

culture
• Cultural toolkit – Using a stash of beliefs, values, and attitudes that we learn how to

deploy based upon the situation at hand.
• High culture – Cultural goods made for and enjoyed by elite groups.
• Material culture – Physical goods, not necessarily essentials, often placed within an

economic system.
• Norms – Rules for group behaviors, informed by values, specifying appropriate and

inappropriate activities.
• Popular culture – Heavily produced and commercialized goods made for and

consumed by a large audience.
• Rituals – Routinized and highly important group activities.
• Symbolic culture – Aspect of culture that includes beliefs, values, norms, and language.
• Symbols – Material or immaterial objects that groups affix meaning to.
• Values –Moral beliefs.

CULTURE IS A CYCLE

£ How do sociologists study the way cultural and artistic goods are made?

£ What are the culture industries and how have they changed?

£ Is consuming culture an active or passive activity?

£ How do subcultures and fan cultures help us think about culture as a process?

The rom antic im a ge of an a rtist
Author James Baldwin once wrote that “perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must

actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.”14

The image of a solitary creative artist, deep in thought, certainly sounds right. When you think of a
cultural good—a song, say, or a novel—being made, do you imagine a musician and his favorite acoustic
guitar, trying a new chord progression? A fiction writer in a cabin, slouched over her laptop tapping out her
next novel?

Culture

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Baldwin’s image is quite romantic, and yet, even in their most isolated forms, artists are always part of
a vast network of groups and institutions that shape every cultural object. Those guitars and laptops were all
produced in places far away from where they were used, and yet the conditions of production are quite
important to the overall artistic endeavor.15 The structures of chord progressions and fiction writing were
established well before he strummed G, C, and D chords and before she made the decision to describe a
murder scene for the opening chapter of her mystery novel. An author like Baldwin might write alone, but he
was certainly influenced by the writers he socialized with in artistic neighborhoods like New York City’s
Greenwich Village and Paris’s Left Bank. And what of all the audiences who listen and read those finished
products?

The artist is one part of a cultural cycle. In this section, we look at that larger circuit, which includes
production, consumption, and remaking of culture.

H ow is cu ltu re p rod u ced ?
Where do cultural goods come from, and under what conditions have they been made?

If we maintained Baldwin’s romantic notion of the artist, we might believe that Elvis invented rock-
and-roll. From a more sociological perspective, the rise of rock-and-roll music in the 1950s wasn’t due to his
individual genius, or even to a White man copying the style of Black singers, but resulted from technological
advances (the electric guitar, amplification), new market demands (young and Black radio audiences with
money to spend), and music label business decisions.16 Music genres are made in the studio and through a
wide social system, not by a single artist.

The mass production of cultural goods requires a vast system of people and organizations called the
culture industries. In his study of country music from its early commercialization through radio and
recorded music production, Richard Peterson outlined different systems through which music was created,
distributed, evaluated, and preserved. This is called the “production of culture” perspective. Using country
music as a case, Peterson showed how macro-level arrangements in the culture industries (e.g., laws,
technology) shape innovations and standardize cultural production; over time, changes in these macro-level
forces are critical factors in making the culture that we see and hear.17 Peterson describes country music as
being “fabricated” to underscore how cultural goods are subjected to this industrial process. He noted, for
example, that there was a great deal of diversity and innovation in country music when many record labels
competed against each other for consumers, but that the genre became increasingly homogeneous as larger
labels bought smaller ones, monopolizing the production of the majority of country music.

In the last few decades, a handful of companies have controlled an increasing share of the cultural
industries. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 lifted limits on how many U.S. media outlets can be owned
by the same group or company. The resulting corporate consolidation—the acquisition of smaller
corporations by larger ones—has created a more homogenous symbolic and material cultural landscape. In
the 1980s, 50 corporations owned 90% of the media; now just six companies own over 90% of the U.S.
media market: 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Disney, Universal, WB, and Sony.18 The music industry

Culture

Page 13

consolidated in the 1960s and again in the 1990s and 2000s as larger record labels purchased smaller ones.
Even large live music events are in the hands of two companies: Live Nation and AEG own major music
festivals like Bonnaroo and Coachella.19

Figure 3: Academy Award Nominations by Race, 2000-2015

Source: 2010 U.S. Census and Academy Awards Database

Who produces these cultural goods? Non-White and non-Hispanic individuals make up only 13% of
writers and artists, 20% of designers, and 17% of fine artists.20 Women are just 2% of music producers,
12.3% of songwriters, and 22.4% of professional musicians.21 In 2015 and 2016 there was a major critique of
the Oscars (the most prestigious U.S. film awards ceremony) for the lack of diversity among those nominated
for awards, despite the release of well-received films like Creed, Selma, and Beasts of No Nation, which featured
diverse casts and creators. The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag trended when no person of color was nominated for
an acting award; in addition, no women were nominated for Best Director or Best Cinematographer in 2016.
While much of this activism has focused on nominations of Black actors and film creators (such as directors),
since 2000, the proportion of acting nominations received by African Americans has nearly matched their
percentage of the overall U.S. population. Less attention has been paid to Latinos and Asian Americans in
Hollywood, who remain underrepresented among Oscar nominees. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts &
Sciences, which awards the Oscars, has recognized that more work is needed, including diversifying its
membership: 94% of the Academy Awards voting members are White (and most are men), which may affect
the types of films that are likely to win awards.

Just as technology changed access to SFMOMA’s art collection, technology can open greater access
to cultural production. In 2015, Tangerine, a Do It Yourself (DIY) film about transgender sex workers in Los
Angeles, made waves for being shot entirely on an iPhone 5s, edited with an $8 app, and accompanied by
music found via a free streaming service called Soundcloud. It was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival.

Culture

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As an outgrowth of the production of culture approach, scholars have examined changes in work and
occupations in the cultural realm.
Sociologist Alexandre Frenette, for
example, looks at the pivotal role
of interns: the army of free and
temporary labor that is essential to
many cultural industries. He finds
a very complex relationship
between the cultural industries and
higher education, demonstrating
how internships limit employment
opportunities in the culture
industries and reproduce
inequalities (for instance, only
those who can afford to live in an
expensive place like New York
City and work for free can be
music interns).22 New jobs emerge
across the culture industries, too.

The rise of fast food created new youth labor markets,23 as fast food restaurants provided part-time work for
teenagers. More recently, as markets for artisanal, organic, and hand-crafted foods have grown, individuals in
the middle class have regained an interest in older types of food work like cocktail bartending, butchering
meat, and distilling whiskey. All of these changes provide sociologists with opportunities to study how culture
shapes labor markets.24

The production of cultural goods serves as one part of the cultural cycle. What about the people who
listen to the music, read the books, and drink the cocktails?

C on su m in g c u ltu re
With the publication of his book, A Theory of the Leisure Class, in 1899, Thorstein Veblen (pronounced

VEH-blen) became one of the first theorists of cultural consumption.25 He noted a major shift in the late
1800s. In colonial America (until the late 1700s), open displays of wealth were usually met with scorn, as they
were considered vulgar. People profited economically, of course, but most people shunned the open
appreciation of material possessions or leisure time. Instead, they valued the ability to delay gratification,
putting off pleasure. But over time, excess wealth became something to display. Veblen called it
conspicuous consumption: gaining prestige by exhibiting valuable cultural goods, which implies to others
that you are wealthy. Sure, a $17,000 Hyundai Elantra can get you to the grocery store, but to display

Fancy cocktail bar, crafted to look authentic. (Source)

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wealth, a bright yellow $100,000 Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet would do the trick. Why wear $20 college
sweatpants to class when you can wear $200 Kanye West-designed Calabasas trackpants?

Figure 4: Global Spending on Luxury Goods, 2016

Source: Bain & Company Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study, 2016

Sociologists have broadened our understanding of how people consume culture, including the effects
of fast food on children26 and how different consumption habits, from social media use to buying the newest
fad in clothing, can create tensions within a family.27 Sharon Zukin examined how the spaces of consumption
have changed over time, from small mom-and-pop businesses to megamalls and international corporations.28
And Elizabeth Currid-Halkett explains how elites today are more likely to conspicuously participate in
services and activities (e.g., yoga, silent meditation retreats, listening to NPR, drinking almond milk) rather
than displaying luxury goods.29 The way we consume music is rapidly changing, too.

But is cultural consumption simply a passive activity? You might believe that the women who join
romance novel book clubs internalize what many see as their oppressive messages about women, sex, and
relationships. Janice Radway, however, found that reading groups are a great example of how cultural
consumption can be quite complex. When reading romance novels, some women in her study inverted even
the most old fashioned stories—mysterious men and damsels in distress—into narratives of adventure, female
empowerment, and freedom.30 By rejecting the regressive gender norms in the books they read, another
scholar concluded that female readers “press books into service for the meanings that they transmit and the
conversations they generate.”31

Are we mindless consumers, or do we bend the meanings and uses of the cultural goods to our own
purposes? Sociology shows how audiences play a role in culture as much as producers do. As Radway’s
research illustrates, the meaning of a cultural good is open to multiple interpretations by its varied users.
Studying how people consume cultural goods illuminates another part of the cycle.

474

269
198

71 49 42 35 19 7 2

Luxury Cars Personal
Luxury
Goods

Luxury
Hospitality

Fine Wines
& Spirits

Fine Food Fine Art Designer
Furniture

Private Jets Yachts Luxury
Cruises

2016 Worldwide Luxury Goods Expenditures, in billions
(Total: over $1.1 trillion)

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Figure 5: Music Sales by Format, 2015-2016

Source: Data from Nielsen Mid-Year Music Report 2016

Su b cu ltu res
What can goth culture teach us about the cycle of culture? While the production of culture allows us

to understand that culture is fabricated just like any other product, and consumption studies teach us how
audiences are active and strategic interpreters of the culture they see and hear, subcultures like goths give us a
sense for how culture is repurposed and remade.

A subculture is, generally, a group that holds values and engages in activities that separate
members from the wider society. Based on his examination of British working class youth, professor of art
and media studies Dick Hebdige differentiated subcultures based on their expressions of style: their particular
forms of slang, dress, and music. Goths have their own jargon (‘babybat’ means a new or young goth), dress
(dark clothes, boots, pale makeup), and music (Bauhaus, The Cure). Subcultures take and adapt existing
cultural items and behaviors and reuse them. Goths, for example, repurpose British Victorian-era styles from
the 1800s, blended with a more contemporary punk DIY sensibility.

From goths to skate punks to juggalos, it’s nearly impossible to think of a subculture without its
characteristic style. Subcultures are not just about the symbolic content of style, however. Subcultures offer
characteristic “ways of life” as well. In Amy Wilkins’s study of teen subcultures, Wannabes, Goths, and Christians,
she points to how subcultural groups offer freedom of behavior. The groups she studied allow young girls to
select various sexual strategies and break taboos in ways that the more dominant culture does not.32

7%

52%

41%

2016 U.S. Album
Sales, by format

LP/Vinyl CD Digital

97.40%

28.60%

11.50%

-11.60%
-18.40%

-23.90%

Audio
Streams

Video
Streams

Vinyl
Album
Sales

CD Album
Sales

Digital
Album
Sales

Digital
Track Sales

Percent Change in Music Consumption from
2015 to 2016

Culture

Page 17

Punk or Goth? (Source)

There are also subcultural groups based upon reusing and sharing fictional and pop cultural worlds.
More than merely interpreting cultural products, these fan cultures actively change and use fictional
characters and settings to write their own stories. You might think that J.K. Rowling would be upset that tens
of thousands of stories have been written and published online (at www.harrypotterfanfiction.com) using
characters from her Harry Potter books. Rowling, however, sees these writers as fans of her books and a
community that keeps her characters alive. Indeed, thousands of people have written, read, and reviewed
each other’s work—over two million times.

Subcultures allow us to see how culture is remade, but there’s more to it. Subcultural activities may
also be co-opted by popular culture. For example, goth was an explicit rejection of commercialization and
popular culture, yet it was eventually repackaged into consumerist culture in the form of a popular mall
chain, Hot Topic, and serves as a character style on primetime TV shows like 24: Live Another Day and NCIS.
(Women in tech, apparently, have to be goth.) The ultra-popular Fifty Shades of Grey series began as Twilight
fan fiction that was repackaged into a modern-day romance novel and a major movie series. Subcultures
show us how systems of production and consumption are not discrete spheres but parts of a broader, more
intertwined cultural circuit, as individuals consuming culture may then use it as the jumping-off point to
produce something new.

Review Sheet: Culture is a cycle

Key Points
• Depending on whether you examine culture from the point of production or

consumption, different issues emerge. Each perspective answers significant questions.

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• The production of culture perspective shows how culture is made and distributed by a
wide array of groups and organizations, not just individuals.

• Consuming culture is not necessarily a passive activity, but rather a thoughtful practice.
• Subcultures and fan cultures engage in cultural refashioning, cobbling together symbolic

and material culture and assigning them new meanings.
• Subcultures can be coopted by popular culture, refreshing the wider cultural landscape.

Key People
• Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
• Alexandre Frenette
• Dick Hebdige
• Richard Peterson
• Janice Radway
• Thorstein Veblen
• Sharon Zukin

Key Terms
• Conspicuous consumption – Gaining prestige by exhibiting valuable cultural goods.
• Corporate consolidation – The acquisition of smaller corporations by larger ones.
• Culture industries – A system of organizations that produce and distribute cultural

goods (e.g., music, food, art).
• Subculture – A group that uses alternative symbolic and material cultural goods to

distinguish themselves from the wider society.

HOW CULTURE WORKS

£ How does culture shape our lived social worlds?

£ Why are cultural practices sometimes effective in one social sphere but not in another?

£ What are the purposes of “us vs. them” feelings? How is such boundary-making nurtured and reinforced?

£ What can “taste” tell us about how culture is used to distinguish different types of people, and how has
this changed over time?

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H ow cu ltu re creates i n eq u alities
Elijah Anderson’s account of code switching provides a story of culture as it is practiced. It also shows

how some beliefs and practices are useful in some contexts, but less helpful in others. Sociologists argue that
no set of beliefs and practices is inherently better or more valuable than another. Rather, different kinds of
culture lead to different outcomes depending upon the situation in which they are used. In Anderson’s study,
there were two worlds—the school and the street—where two different kinds of culture exist and are
considered appropriate. Digging deeper, sociologists have found that such cultural differences can create
inequality and affect social mobility.

How? French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu proposed three interlinked concepts for understanding how
culture makes differences seem fair or natural and reproduces social hierarchies.

Particular cultural goods—material and symbolic—are acquired and traded. Bourdieu called this
cultural capital: non-economic resources (knowledge, skills, behaviors) that are useful in a particular
sphere of social life.33 These can be institutional cultural capital (such as a degree from a particular
university), embodied cultural capital (your manner, style, ways of acting), or objectified cultural capital (your
clothes, material objects). For example, high school students participating in certain types of extracurricular
activities (student government, chess club) have greater success getting into elite colleges, where admissions
officers are likely to value that kind of cultural capital.34 However, not everyone has access to those resources.
Not every school has the funding to support a Model United Nations club, and if a student has to work a job
after school to help support their family, there’s no time to join the chess club. Similarly, not everyone has the
same kinds of knowledge. Upper-class students are far more likely to have visited a museum like SFMOMA,
listened to classical composers such as Brahms, or read Moby Dick. That kind of cultural knowledge can be
used to improve their standing in school. Gathering cultural capital can bring tangible rewards, if it is
deployed under the correct circumstances.

What does it mean to say “…if it is deployed under the correct circumstances?” Well, cultural goods
aren’t necessarily valuable everywhere, or in the same way. Think of cultural capital like money. (That’s why
Bourdieu called it ‘capital’!) If you go to Istanbul, it would be difficult to purchase something with five U.S.
dollars; you need the local currency—Turkish Lira. Cultural capital works the same way. Cultural capital
might function in one social sphere and not in another, just as a country’s money works perfectly well in that
country but isn’t necessarily useful outside of it. Bourdieu called these social spheres fields: contexts where a
particular kind of cultural capital is exchanged, like a profession, a community, or a class of people. People
vary in how much control they have over who belongs and what kinds of culture are valued within the field.
Bourdieu compared it to a field in a sport. Each sport has its own “rules of the game” through which players
compete. The better a player learns the specific rules of the game, and how they work in the field, the better
their chances for success.

Our ability to know how capital works is crucial. Using the right kind of knowledge in the right way
leads to rewards. This introduces Bourdieu’s third major concept, habitus (pronounced HA-bi-tuss). Our
habitus is our learned dispositions, a set of tendencies organizing how we see the world and act within it. For

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example, we don’t consciously think about how to cross the street. Without much thought we wait for traffic
to stop, look both ways, and cross. It’s a kind of second nature that is really only apparent when something
goes wrong (a distracted driver) or we travel to another country with different norms (traffic comes from the
right at a crosswalk, not the left as in the U.S.). Applying the concept of the habitus to issues like education,
class, and race allows us to explain how we learn, somewhat unconsciously, to think and carry ourselves in
the social world—from crossing the street to how we eat a meal to what kinds of culture we appreciate.

With these three concepts—cultural capital, fields, and habitus—in mind, let’s look at schooling to
understand how culture creates inequalities. Education is the field, with its particular rules of the game, from
raising your hand in class to instilling a belief in meritocracy. And the education system teaches and rewards
a particular kind of cultural capital: that of the dominant, White, and middle- to upper-class culture. Poorer
and non-White students are disadvantaged in their attempts to gain educational credentials, such as good
grades and degrees, that are forms of institutional cultural capital. Middle- and upper-class students have a
habitus, or disposition, that corresponds to their social class, resonating with the teachers and education they
receive. Success in education offers greater employment opportunities and better economic outcomes. By
valuing and rewarding the culture of the dominant group, the educational system reproduces the existing
class structure, allowing those with more economic and cultural resources to succeed more easily than their
peers with fewer resources.

Code switching illustrates Bourdieu’s concepts nicely. The young African Americans in Anderson’s
study were not being fake when they acted one way at school and another way in the street. They were being
savvy cultural actors whose habitus allowed them to use the kinds of cultural capital that were valuable in the
very different fields of school and the street. They had learned a set of behaviors and values that allowed
them to easily move between these two worlds, using the cultural capital that was most helpful in each one—
allowing them to succeed in school while fitting in, and staying safe, on the streets. This is not an inspiring
story of how disadvantaged students can succeed in school, however. Those students had to learn different
ways of acting, and mistakes could be costly. Anderson’s work proves how culture places severe obstacles in
front of poorer and non-White students, while middle-class students have an easier path toward educational
credentials and better life chances.

H ow cu ltu re m akes g rou p s an d b ou n d aries
Would you be willing to go on a blind date with a country music fan? What about a goth? Does the

music someone listens to, or maybe a bit of extra eyeliner, say a lot about them? These seemingly superficial
questions get at how culture can create groups and boundaries.

Pierre Bourdieu was influenced by classical social theorists like Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. As
mentioned earlier, Durkheim showed how religion divides the symbolic world into the sacred and the
profane, identifying the social origins of how we classify our world. One of Weber’s key contributions was to
distinguish between a class (groups who share a similar position based on income, wealth, education, and
occupation) and status (the social designation of honor).35 For Weber, there are classes and also status
groups. A status group is a collection of people who share similar characteristics that a community has

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given a certain level of prestige—a greater or lesser value when compared to other groups. In your high
school, for example, there may have been a high-status clique of popular kids who wore a certain style of
clothes and makeup, and a lower-status clique that listened to a particular type of music. Music and eyeliner,
of course, are not the only ways to determine such groups.

Contemporary sociologists like Michèle Lamont examine how we organize ourselves through culture.
Lamont differentiates between social boundaries—inequalities in access to resources (e.g., race, class,
gender)—and symbolic boundaries—the ways people separate each other into groups (through
traditions, styles, tastes, classifications).36 These boundaries generate feelings of group membership, lend an
emotion-fueled sense of belonging, and help us grasp the wild diversity of social life by placing other people
into categories. Lamont looked at men in France and the U.S., showing how men create group identities by
contrasting themselves with the poor. In France, the middle class sees the poor as temporarily out of work,
disadvantaged by the economy, but otherwise similar to other social classes; in the U.S., middle-class people
generally believe they hold different values (hard work and self-sufficiency) than the poor, explaining
economic inequality as a result of these supposedly different values.37

So, on the one hand, culture shapes and binds groups. Recalling Durkheim’s contribution—that
symbols, activated through rituals, foster shared meanings and create community—we know that culture
“bridges”: We make friendships and social ties through our taste in music or clothes, and we are able to
maintain those connections through continued cultural activities.38 If you like bands like The Cure, you
might be more willing to go on a blind date with someone who dresses like a goth. In return, our social
networks also affect our tastes, introducing us to new ideas, fashions, cultural items, and classifications, which
are passed along to us through our social interactions with others.39 Bethany Bryson, for example, explains
that people use others’ musical preferences—like goth vs. country music—as cues to help them decide
whether to include them in or exclude them from a friendship group.

And yet, culture also creates fences. While Durkheim focused on how culture generates social
cohesion, Max Weber saw that culture can also differentiate, pulling us apart.40 Sports, while generating
warm feelings, can also create strong negative feelings: wearing a Yankees cap in Boston almost always
compels someone to say, “Go Sox!” This phenomenon occurs everywhere, from American baseball to
Spanish soccer.

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Culture, seen in this way, can be a bridge or a fence.41 It allows us to establish or cross boundaries,
activate differences, and maintain social proximity or distance. Symbolic boundaries, nurturing a sense of “us
vs. them,” shape everything from employment to politics to education: we define groups when we hire
employees, when we decide who is welcome in a political movement and who isn’t, and when elite culture is
valued more in higher education than the cultures of poor or working–class students.42 Creating and
maintaining these distinctions—
from defining a friendship group to
classifying people as part of the
working class—and thereby limiting
membership and access to resources
is called boundary work.

Somewhat paradoxically,
boundary work—and even
conflict—creates groups and
solidifies group cohesion.43 Think
about how passionate sports
rivalries foster a strong sense of in-
group belonging. NCAA schools are
divided into athletic conferences that define which programs compete against each other. When Texas A&M
University left the Big 12 for a more prestigious conference, Texas Tech football was left without a strong in-
state rival; the loss of this competition that allowed Texans to divide themselves into groups of fans lowered
enthusiasm for Texas Tech football (and ticket sales). In the case of cricket in South Asia, where a match
between India and Pakistan reflects decades of political conflict, over 60 students were expelled from their
Indian university—and even threatened with criminal sedition charges—for cheering for the Pakistani
team.44 Boundary work in culture—even in sports—creates groups and hierarchies, limiting or distributing
resources and opportunities. Let’s go us! Let’s beat them!

Lastly, sociological research shows how cultural tastes have changed dramatically, not just in people’s
interests (corduroy pants vs. athleisure, disco vs. hip hop), but in how we think of taste itself. People used to
gain status in their group by displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of a particular cultural genre. Think
about a classical music aficionado or a wine connoisseur. The music snob is able to differentiate Mozart from
Chopin and the wine connoisseur, as a song from British punk-pop band Blur goes, “knows his claret from a
Beaujolais.” Both experts can use their knowledge to make claims of high status. Perhaps you know the type:
Not always the person you want to be cornered by at a party. But sociologists note that today, many people
differentiate themselves by knowing a lot about many different cultural spheres.45 These cultural
omnivores might talk about wine or classical music, but can discuss Budweiser and Beyoncé, too.
Omnivores speak of high culture and popular culture with equal ease.

Summarizing this section, you should now see how culture generates inequalities and creates
symbolic boundaries. The two processes work in concert. The rise of cultural ‘omnivorousness’ as a form of

Fans at a Texas Tech football game; when Texas A&M left its athletic conference, Texas
lost an in-state athletic rivalry. (Source)

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Page 23

cultural consumption is hardly a democratization of taste, nor an indication that symbolic boundaries have
been obliterated. Knowing Beyoncé and Mozart does not give someone equal footing in the eyes of the wider
culture. Rather, people find new ways to distinguish themselves. A familiarity with a wide range of cultural
goods is just another form of generating status.46

Review Sheet: How Culture Works

Key Points
• Cultural capital, fields, and habitus conceptualize culture as a kind of exchangeable good,

useful depending upon the context, and a kind of learned tendency towards seeing and
acting in the world.

• Culture can work as a bridge and a fence.
• Tastes help people to define groups based upon aesthetic or moral bases.
• People distinguish themselves through a deep understanding of a particular facet of

culture, but nowadays people also gain status with knowledge of a wide palate of cultural
goods.

• Culture can justify and reinforce inequalities.

Key People
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Michèle Lamont
• Max Weber

Key Terms
• Boundary work – Creating and maintaining symbolic boundaries to limit group

membership and access to resources.
• Cultural capital –Non-economic cultural resources (e.g., knowledge, skills, behaviors)

attuned to a particular sphere of social life.
• Cultural omnivores – People who differentiate themselves by knowing a lot about

many different cultural fields.
• Field – A context of social relations (e.g., a profession, a community) where a particular

kind of cultural capital is exchanged.
• Habitus – A learned disposition, based within the particular social world a person

inhabits.
• Status – The social designation of honor, either positive or negative.
• Status group – Collection of people who share similar characteristics that a community

has given a certain level of prestige.
• Symbolic boundaries – Conceptual ways people separate each other into groups (e.g.,

traditions, styles, tastes, classifications).

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THE CULTURE JAM

£ What happens when culture moves across boundaries? Who benefits, and why should it matter?

£ What are the intended and unintended consequences of an increasingly globalized culture? How does
global culture interact with local cultures?

£ Is there room for critique in popular culture?

The final section of this chapter uses the term “jam” in three different ways to discuss a few
challenging and controversial ideas. These sections look at culture as a mixture, especially in the era of
globalization; discuss debates around mixing goods from different cultures; and point to ways people use
culture for political and social commentary.

C u ltu re jam as a m ix
Culture moves, spreading beliefs and practices across groups. Anthropologists study the various ways

this diffusion occurs (often through conflict, war, migration, or trade), and as culture crosses boundaries—
whether a national border or a music genre—it changes and adapts. Culture is always a combination, where
the parts can harmonize and conflict with each other, often obscuring history in the process.47

Investigating cultural mixtures can illuminate a great deal about social life. We can look at three
curious examples. While doing research on a country music festival, I found myself in a Nashville crowd,
listening to an African American man named Cowboy Troy sing and rap a county/hip hop song called “I
Play Chicken with the Train.” When visiting Las Vegas, I ordered duck tongue tacos at a Chinese/Mexican
restaurant called China Poblano. And last year, I was excited to see a restaurant open in my town that sells
Vietnamese bánh mì sandwiches: pickled veggies and roast pork on a French baguette.

These might seem like little more than odd cultural mashups. A successful African American singing
in a predominantly White music genre? Chinese Mexican food? Vietnamese sandwiches on French bread?
But these mixtures are hardly haphazard. African American music was part of early country music. When
Beyoncé performed at the Country Music Association Awards in 2016 to promote Lemonade—an album that
includes samples from country, R&B, Led Zeppelin, indie rockers Vampire Weekend, soul legend Isaac
Hayes, and 1950s crooner Andy Williams—she was honoring that country tradition.48 Chinese Mexican food
and bánh mì sandwiches have their own histories. In 1882, the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which
banned Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. to work, barred those already here from becoming
citizens, and made it difficult for them to re-enter the U.S. if they returned to China to visit family. This
sparked a wave of Chinese immigration from the U.S. to northwestern Mexico (and there are still Chinese
Mexican restaurants in that region). And the bánh mì sandwich is the product of France’s occupation of
Vietnam, starting in the late 1800s; the mashup of Vietnamese and French cuisine has become one of
Vietnam’s most recognizable cultural products worldwide.

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While examples like Chinese Mexican food and bánh mì sandwiches show that cultural mashups
have happened for centuries, today’s exchange of culture across the world is at another magnitude. When
intercultural communication and the exchange of ideas and values reaches such an international scale,
integrating political and economic systems, we call it globalization.

As American culture becomes globalized, what is its relationship within other cultures? When U.S.
corporations enter new markets, they don’t impose themselves completely. They often adapt. Whether in
Tokyo, Mumbai, or Hong Kong, there will be a McDonald’s or Starbucks. However, globalizing
corporations often “localize” themselves to regional tastes. In Japan and India, McDonald’s offers squid ink
black burgers and Maharaja Macs, respectively, while the McDonald’s in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam,
serves a bánh mì. Hong Kong’s Starbucks, meanwhile, has a Red Bean Green Tea Frappuccino. The global
becomes localized.

This moves us to seeing culture jams in a second, and more challenging, way.

A Starbucks in China (Source); tortillas warming on a grill (Source).

C u ltu re jam as a problem
Certainly some people are relieved to find a McDonald’s everywhere. George Ritzer, however, called

the mass production of culture, resulting in similar cultural goods being found everywhere, McDonaldization.
Ritzer drew from Max Weber, who noted capitalism’s tendency toward rationalization: increased
calculability, efficiency, predictability, and control.49 While corporations do, undoubtedly, make some efforts
to acclimate to local cultures, McDonaldization is the broader trend toward driving out local cultures,

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replacing them with standardized products. Entire places can fall under a similar process. Tourist zones, like
New York City’s Times Square or Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, lose their distinctive qualities, making
seemingly dissimilar places more alike than different.

Multinational corporations are increasingly universal and inescapable, drowning out local ideas,
beliefs, and traditions. Cultural hybrids like Maharaja Macs should not distract us from the fact that the most
recognizable worldwide brands tend to be owned by American and Western corporations. This imposition of
a dominant group’s material and symbolic goods is called cultural imperialism. Recall the consolidation
of the music industry? We see it on the wider global culture landscape, too: the same music companies that
dominate the U.S. market—Sony BMG, EMI, Warner, and Universal Music Group—dominate the global
market. The economic power of Western culture industries overwhelms competition from local culture. (At
the same time, we are seeing a rise in the economic power of India’s “Bollywood” and China’s emerging
movie production market.)

Figure 6: Global Box Office Revenue, 2014-2016

Source: Data from Motion Picture Association of America Theatrical Market Statistics 2016, p.6

On the flip side of cultural imperialism, there’s cultural appropriation, when members of a
dominant culture adopt the cultural goods (ideas, symbols, skills, expressions, intellectual property) of other
groups for profit. This disconnects the product from the history and community from which it emerged, and
reduces the chances that those groups can benefit from the culture they produce.50

Can an ethnic group ‘own’ culture? Let’s talk about burritos. In 2017, two White chefs, operators of a
food truck called Kooks Burritos, explained to a local alternative weekly newspaper in Portland, Oregon, that
they went to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico, and asked local chefs to teach them how to make a flour tortilla for their
breakfast burritos.51 Their story was intended to illustrate their hard work and desire to create an ‘authentic’

2.1 1.7 1.6 1.4 1.6 1.7 2.1 2.6 2.8 3 3 3.4 2.8

8.5 7.2 6.8 6.5 6.8 7.2
8.5 9

10.4 11.1 12.4
14.1 14.9

10.4
9.9 9.7 8.7 9.7

9.9
10.4 10.8

10.7 10.9
10.6

9.7 9.5
10.6

10.6 9.6 9.6 9.6
10.6

10.6 10.2
10.8 10.9

10.4
11.1 11.4

2 0 0 4 2 0 0 5 2 0 0 6 2 0 0 7 2 0 0 8 2 0 0 9 2 0 1 0 2 0 1 1 2 0 1 2 2 0 1 3 2 0 1 4 2 0 1 5 2 0 1 6

GLOBAL BOX OFFICE REVENUE 2004-2016,
BY REGION (IN BILLION U.S. DOLLARS)

Latin America Asia Pacific Europe, Middle East and Africa U.S. and Canada

Culture

Page 27

tortilla. However, it pulled them into a wider debate over how White folks use other people’s cultures for
their own gain. Internet commentators called this cultural appropriation, and the two quickly closed their
business.

Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco U.S.A.: How Mexican Food Conquered America, responded to the debate
by saying that appropriation happens all the time in the food industry. He says it’s laughable” to think of
Mexican food, comida mexicana, as a sacred and untouchable tradition, or that “cultural appropriation is a one-
way street where the evil gabacho steals from the poor, pathetic Mexicans yet again.”52

Are burritos Mexican or Tex Mex? Are flour tortillas traditionally Mexican? Does it matter if, as
some argue, they come from Jewish immigrants to Mexico who began to make tortillas out of wheat—a
European grain introduced by the Spanish—instead of the corn that was native to Mexico?53 If, as Arellano
points out, Mexicans mix and borrow from other cultures, why shouldn’t Anglos borrow too? Should it
matter that these groups don’t have equal opportunities to profit from a cultural trend? If Mexican food, like
Rock and Roll, is a mixture of many cultural traditions (for instance, the method of preparing pork for tacos
al pastor originated in the Ottoman Empire, centered in modern-day Turkey), who is being appropriated?
Who has the power to control the path of a culture? Who profits?

El Luchador restaurant, South Street Seaport, NYC (Source)

The owners of Kooks Burritos are rather insignificant when compared with multinational
corporations adopting culture for profit. In 2016, Urban Outfitters and the Navajo Nation settled a lawsuit
over the corporation using the Navajo name and symbolic culture on a line of products, from alcohol flasks to
underwear. The use of Navajo imagery on a flask is culturally insensitive, even racist, when paired with the
ugly stereotype of Native American peoples being prone to alcoholism. Such corporate appropriation also

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disconnects culture from history, from tradition, and from a community. The expansive systems of goods and
ideas flowing across the world, particularly through large corporations, hides such discrimination and
inequalities.

C u ltu re jam as a solu tion
With these concerns, it is fair enough to feel frustrated. What can be done to address these issues?

People who participate in the culture industries are not completely unaware of the larger problems in
culture. Take hip hop, for example. Rappers can be particularly self-aware and willing to critique the wider
corporate and political systems they work within. Some have been doing it for a long time. Although it’s
more common in today’s hip hop for MCs to flaunt status and engage in conspicuous consumption (such as
boasting about cars and money), many rappers in the 1990s infused their lyrics with criticisms of the
corporate music production system. De la Soul rapped about the power record labels wield in their 1993
song “I Am, I Be”: “I be the new generation of slaves / Here to make papes to buy a record exec rakes / The
pile of revenue I create / But I guess I don’t get a cut cuz my rent’s a month late.” Similarly, A Tribe Called
Quest’s “Check the Rhime” (1991) includes the lyrics, “Industry rule number four-thousand-and-eighty /
Record company people are shady.” With more scope, Mos Def’s “Hip Hop,” from 1999, outlined how the
genre was part of a long tradition of exploitation to gaining some class mobility: “We went from pickin’
cotton / To chain gang line chopping / To Be-Bopping, to Hip-Hopping / Blues people got the blue-chip
stock option.” These insights serve as examples of what we call culture jamming.

In her book No Logo, Naomi Klein explains that culture jamming is the practice of raising
awareness around issues of McDonaldization, corporate consolidation, and cultural imperialism through
informal and often illegal guerilla (independent and unauthorized) marketing campaigns.54 These alternative
or subversive media activities are a form of political communication, often using existing media to subvert a
marketing strategy. Just as early hip hop illuminated the conditions under which African American culture
was made and exploited, graffiti often engages with and critiques cultural industries.

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Art by Shepard Fairey, a well-known graffiti artist who critiques pop culture while adopting its familiar imagery.

(Source)

From another cultural realm, well-known graffiti artist Shepard Fairey uses imagery similar to Soviet
and Chinese propaganda and other references (e.g., images from the 1980s anti-consumerist alien-invasion
movie They Live) to critique consumerism, promote social justice causes, and puncture commonly-held beliefs
through pop culture. At the same time, his use of imagery from African American and Latino social justice
movements has led to others claiming that he is appropriating symbolic culture.

A sociological approach to culture can illuminate power, inequality, and the cycle of culture by tying
together the ends of the production and consumption process. The international production, distribution,
and marketing system of corporations, laborers, and consumers is called the global commodity chain (or
global assembly line). This system is largely hidden: Few people have any idea where their products come
from, leaving most consumers unperturbed by the gross inequalities between them and the laborers on the
other side of the system.

To interrogate this global commodity chain, sociologist and filmmaker David Redmon made the
documentary film Mardi Gras: Made in China, focusing on Mardi Gras beads. He unpacks the symbolic and
material components of those colorful plastic beads (such as the meanings of Mardi Gras as a celebration and
an escape from everyday values and norms) as well as the rituals associated with the exchange of beads
(women showing their breasts, men throwing beads in return). Then he takes his camera far from New
Orleans to Fuzhou, China, to uncover how those beads are produced and the working conditions the (mostly
young women) workers endure at the factory. But the third component of his investigation is the

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documentary’s best: Using a handheld camera and projector, he shows Mardi Gras revelers images of the
labor conditions that create the beads they casually toss around, and shows the young Chinese factory girls
what happens to the beads after they leave the factory. Redmon manages to educate both groups,
scandalizing the laborers and sobering the partygoers.

For viewers of the documentary, connecting the global commodity system is a powerful reminder of
how cultural goods are made and consumed and what sociology brings to the study of culture.

Review Sheet: The culture jam

Key Points
• Culture is a mixture of various beliefs and practices, but a sociological perspective

requires thinking about how history and social dynamics play a powerful role.
• There are obvious and hidden consequences of a globalized culture. While Western

culture “localizes” itself (e.g., McDonald’s Maharaja Mac), such examples can obscure
deeper cultural imperialism and inequalities.

• Artists and activists can counter and critique mass culture at various stages of the cultural
cycle.

Key People
• Naomi Klein
• George Ritzer

Key Terms
• Cultural appropriation – Members of a dominant culture adopting cultural goods

(e.g., ideas, symbols, skills, cultural expressions, intellectual property) of other cultural
groups for profit.

• Cultural imperialism – Imposition of a dominant group’s material and symbolic
culture onto another group.

• Culture jamming – Efforts to raise awareness around issues of hegemony through
informal and often illegal guerilla marketing campaigns.

• Global commodity chain – International production, distribution, and marketing
system of corporations, laborers, and consumers.

• Globalization – Integration of political and economic systems; has brought about
intercultural communication and an exchange of ideas and values.

• McDonaldization – Ritzer’s term for the increased rationalization and globalization of
culture.

• Rationalization – Weber’s term for capitalism’s trend toward increased calculability,
efficiency, predictability, and control.

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