The Specter of Schemas: Uncovering the Meanings and Uses of "Schemas" in Sociology

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 1. Advances in Cultural Analysis

Abstract

Sociology has made significant progress in the specification of what culture is and how it impacts individual thought and action. On the wave of the growing interest in the cognitive underpinnings of cultural processes, sociologists have increasingly used the concept of schema as a mechanism for explaining how culture shapes individual thought and action by endowing individuals with mental representations. However, the conceptual vagaries that have led scholars to critique the notion of culture have now befallen that of schemas. There is little to no agreement about what schemas are, or clarity about how they operate. We review the ways in which schemas have been used in five top sociology journals between 1990 and 2016, and find that schemas are used to represent two distinct phenomena -- structures of substantive content and/or mental processes -- which are often conflated and confused. The use of schemas in the literature is also shaped by assumptions about their ontological nature and qualities, which depart from established knowledge about schemas. The current understanding and use of schemas is problematic not simply due to a lack of precision, but rather because cognitive processes become a black box at best, or they are confused with social processes at worst. This is an analytic problem with significant implications for sociology more generally.

Author

• Vanina Leschziner, University of Toronto