Structure of Culture

• In Event: 3184 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 08. Mental Processes

Abstract

The sociology of culture has long remained disconnected from related disciplines (DiMaggio and Markus 2010; Petterson 2014), that might inform the field. Scholars in subfields that might plausibly use cultural materials, like social psychology or cross-cultural psychology, focus on beliefs and societal outlooks that should inform a sociology of culture (Vaisey 2010). Such scholars tend to miss the mark for a proper, multifaceted understanding of the relationship between macro-level patterns and individual orientations by focusing on one set of individualistic vs. collectivist beliefs (psychology) or overly universal patterns of social psychological functioning minimizing within-culture heterogeneity. When assigning cultural beliefs to various groups, scholars largely generalize values or attitudes to groups based on a priori group identification (gender, race, or class) within some stratification system. Building on theoretical discussions of relational approaches (e.g., Emirbayer 1997; Lynn and Ellerbach 2016) and new statistical methods (Correlation Class Analysis, Boutyline 2017), this study classifies cultural groups that are identifiable based on ‘cognitive structure’ of life goals apart from a priori linking them with existing categories or societies (or ‘shared cultural schemas’, Boutyline 2017). Analyzing the samples of secondary school students from Education Longitudinal Study of the U.S. and Korea, our findings show significant differences in the structure of culture and its relation to stratification between the two countries, while demonstrating some similarities, and supports both stratification and cross-cultural hypotheses about the structure of individual cultural beliefs (e.g., Markus and Kitayama 1991; Haidt et al. 2009; Gelfand et al. 2011).

Author

• Ji Hye Kim