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New cultural approaches to the study of poverty treat "culture" as providing the means for action and neglect the classical concern with motives for action. The author argues that though this paradigm shift has led to many important and interesting discoveries, it has also created blind spots that prevent a more complete understanding of how culture shapes action. After arguing that values, attitudes, and other motive concepts have been unfairly excluded from the new cultural pantheon, the author uses the empirical example of educational continuation to show that poor and nonpoor youth differ in their educational aspirations and that these differences can predict school continuation six years later. The findings are interpreted with an eye toward synthesizing "old" and "new" approaches to the study of culture and socioeconomic disadvantage.

New cultural approaches to the study of poverty treat "culture" as providing the means for action and neglect the classical concern with motives for action. The author argues that though this paradigm shift has led to many important and interesting discoveries, it has also created blind spots that prevent a more complete understanding of how culture shapes action. After arguing that values, attitudes, and other motive concepts have been unfairly excluded from the new cultural pantheon, the author uses the empirical example of educational continuation to show that poor and nonpoor youth differ in their educational aspirations and that these differences can predict school continuation six years later. The findings are interpreted with an eye toward synthesizing "old" and "new" approaches to the study of culture and socioeconomic disadvantage. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

In recent decades, sociologists have generally avoided explicitly discussing the role of culture in processes of social inequality. We argue that the prevailing disciplinary theory of inequality, the framework laid out in Charles Tilly's Durable Inequality, necessarily relies on cognitive processes and cultural concepts. The four primary mechanisms driving inequality—exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation—involve justification, categorization, coordination, and (e)valuation. We survey research on social inequality that illustrates each of these four processes. Our review reveals important empirical patterns about how disparities between groups emerge and endure. We observe that while sociologists often conduct work that implicitly relies on cultural concepts, other social science disciplines are also doing vital work in this area because they engage directly with cultural concepts. We identify key areas where sociologists are well positioned to use cultural concepts to uncover important findings regarding inequality, as well as to propose interventions for mitigating or preventing inequality.

Sociology was once integral to the scientific study of morality, but its explicit focus has waned over the past half-century. This article calls for greater sociological engagement in order to speak to the resurgence of the study of morality in cognate fields. We identify important treatments of morality, some of which are not explicitly so, and identify those treatments that build a distinctly sociological focus on morality: room for culturally divergent understandings of its content, a focus on antecedent social factors that shape it, and a concern with ecologically valid explorations of its social importance.

Cohort replacement – the replacement in a population of older cohorts by their successors who developed under different conditions – is an important process behind cultural change. Research on public opinion indicates that a large proportion of aggregate change is the result of cohort replacement rather than of individuals changing their minds. However, some publicly salient issues, like gay rights, appear to be exceptions. Why different issues show different patterns of change is not well understood. In this paper, we investigate whether opinions on sensitive – that is, hard to discuss – issues might change differently than opinions on less sensitive issues. We use data from the 1981–2020 World Values Surveys and newly collected data on the sensitivity of survey items to compare aggregate changes in public opinion on 56 survey items in eight countries. Our key finding is that survey items on more sensitive issues seem to change more through cohort replacement.