Suchergebnisse

In this paper, I outline a general framework for cultural analysis consistent with an "analytic" approach to explanation in social science. The proposed approach provides coherent solutions to thorny problems in cultural theory. These include providing a coherent definition of culture (and the "cultural"), specifying the nature of cultural units (both simple and complex), and outlining the processes making possible episodes of cultural genesis, transformation, and reproduction within bounded units characterized as cultural causal systems.

Whether cultural practices change gradually—at the timescale of generations—or can be lastingly affected by short-term exogenous shocks is a question that continues to inspire much debate in the social sciences. Previous work shows that trends in cultural participation, if they exist, tend to be slow and gradual, responding to cohort changes and impervious to period-specific events. Here I use data from the two Eurobarometer surveys fielded just before (2007) and in the immediate aftermath (2013) of the Great Recession-related eurozone crisis to visualize the impact of a once-in-a-generation period-specific shock for the four national cases most deeply affected: Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece. In all cases, with the possible exception of Spain, we can observe steep increases in rates of nonparticipation, impacting particularly the less educated, except for Greece, for which we can see general negative impacts of the crisis on participation across all levels of education. Overall, the results depicted in this visualization suggest that cultural participation practices can be affected by large exogenous shocks at timescales below gradual cohort change.

Aux États-Unis, une sociologie cognitive s'est récemment développée, dans le sillage de la sociologie culturelle, et plus particulièrement du courant « Culture and Cognition ». Omar Lizardo, sociologue à l'Université de Californie à Los Angeles, revient sur ces développements scientifiques, auxquels il a directement contribué. C'est pour lui l'occasion de réfléchir aux logiques de construction d'objet en sciences sociales, aux liens entre (neuro)psychologie et sociologie, ainsi qu'aux façons de penser et de mesurer l'incorporation de dispositions cognitives.

While influential across a wide variety of subfields, cultural analysis in sociology continues to be hampered by coarse-grained conceptualizations of the different modes in which culture becomes personal, as well as the process via which persons acquire and use different forms of culture. In this article, I argue that persons acquire and use culture in two analytically and empirically distinct forms, which I label declarative and nondeclarative. The mode of cultural acquisition depends on the dynamics of exposure and encoding, and modulates the process of cultural accessibility, activation, and use. Cultural knowledge about one domain may be redundantly represented in both declarative and nondeclarative forms, each linked via analytically separable pathways to corresponding public cultural forms and ultimately to substantive outcomes. I outline how the new theoretical vocabulary, theoretical model, and analytic distinctions that I propose can be used to resolve contradictions and improve our understanding of outstanding substantive issues in empirically oriented subfields that have recently incorporated cultural processes as a core explanatory resource.

In this paper, I provide a critical examination of Warren Schmaus's recently systematized "functionalist" approach to the study of collective representations. I examine both the logical and the conceptual viability of Schmaus's brand of "functionalism" and the relation between his rational reconstruction and philosophical critique of Durkheim and the latter's original set of proposals. I conclude that, due to its reliance on certain problematic philosophical theses, Schmaus's functionalism ultimately falls short of providing a coherent alternative to the Durkhemian position or serving as a useful starting point from which to understand the origins of abstract categories in concrete experience.