Levels of Culture in Everyday Interaction

• In Event: 365 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. Levels of Culture in Everyday Interaction

Abstract

Studies of everyday interaction show culture working at multiple levels: explicit or implicit, ritualized or ad-hoc, emergent or institutionalized. We encounter stable or fluid meanings and practices, and also malleable cultural patterns that combine improvisation and structure-like regularity and have some causal force. Our roundtable invites focused discussion on how we specify and interrelate these different cultural levels in the same study, for a more precisely “cultural” sociology.

We offer these open questions: How do we choose, and combine, distinct culture concepts? What do we learn about how culture contributes to institutionalization? What differences are there between cultural forms with structure-like qualities and those that emerge and change quickly? To start conversation, we apply these questions to several studies. Kushan Dasgupta’s study shows how actors in a non-profit, community-based labor organization use the word “community” in setting-specific and sometimes ambiguous ways. Their everyday interaction also reveals a more implicit, shared map that coordinates nuanced relations to specific parts of their “community.” Community talk, in turn, structures how the organization makes disparate, ethnic- and labor-centered goals seem commensurable. Edson Rodriguez’s research shows how widespread, moral understandings of “proper time-use” are both hindered and facilitated by scheduling styles through which family members coordinate daily schedules. Focusing on a family’s everyday tasks of organizing their day illuminates distinct levels of culture at the same time. We will invite participants to circulate 1-page abstracts describing their own studies’ relation to our shared theme before the session, so that their research can inform the discussion.

Authors

• Kushan Dasgupta, University of Southern California

• Edson Cruz Rodriguez, University of Southern California