Key Insight
what do you mean by cultural styles? As a qualitative researcher, that caught my eye! Thanks. A commenter recently posed this question in connection with a post from a while back. I thought the question was interesting enough, and the likelihood that others would see it or my response sufficiently remote, that I should give my answer in a new post, ... Read more
what do you mean by cultural styles? As a qualitative researcher, that caught my eye! Thanks.
what do you mean by cultural styles? As a qualitative researcher, that caught my eye! Thanks.
A commenter recently posed this question in connection with a post from a while back. I thought the question was interesting enough, and the likelihood that others would see it or my response sufficiently remote, that I should give my answer in a new post, which I hope might prompt reflection from others.
It goes to what it is that I think is being measured by scales like ours. I’ve addressed this to some extent before– e.g., here & here & here & …
But basically, we can see that on disputed risk issues, positions are not distributed randomly but instead correlated with reocognizable but not directly observable (“latent”) group affinities that are themselves associated loosely with a package of individual characteristics and attitudes.
People who share particular group affiniteis, moreover, form clusters of positions across these issues (“earth not heating up” & “concealed carry laws reduce crime”; “the death penalty doesn’t deter murder” & “nuclear wastes can’t be stored safety in deep geologic isolation”) that can’t possibly reflect links in the causal mechanisms involved and instead seem to reflect the identity-expressing equivalence of them.
The point of coming up w/ scales is to sharpen our perception of what these group affinities are & why those who share them see things the way they do — to explain what’s going on, in other words — & also to enhance our power to predict and form prescriptions.
The term “cultural style” is, for me, a way to describe these affinities. I have adapted it from Gusfield. I & collaborators use the concept and say more about it and how it relates to Gusfield in various places.
“Unlike groups such as religious and ethnic communities[,] they have no church, no political unit, and no associational units which explicitly defend their interests,” but are nevertheless affiliated, in their own self-understandings and in the views of others, by largely convergent worldviews and by common commitments to salient political agendas.
“Unlike groups such as religious and ethnic communities[,] they have no church, no political unit, and no associational units which explicitly defend their interests,” but are nevertheless affiliated, in their own self-understandings and in the views of others, by largely convergent worldviews and by common commitments to salient political agendas.
Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman & Donald Braman, Whose Eyes Are You Going to Believe? Scott V. Harris and the Perils of Cognitive Illiberalism , 122 Harv. L. Rev. 837, 862 (2009) (quoting Gusfield).
” ‘They “posssess subcultures’ ” (id.) that
furnish coherent norms for granting and withholding esteem. “Examples of these are cultural generations, such as the traditional and the modern; characterological types, such as ‘inner-directed and other-directed’; and reference orientations, such as ‘cosmopolitans and locals.'” Many of the most charged social and political issues of the past century can be understood as conflicts between individuals who identify with competing cultural styles and who see their status as bound up with the currency of those styles in society at large.
Dan M. Kahan, The Secret Ambition of Deterrence , 113 Harv. L. Rev. 413, 442 (1999) (quoting Gusfield, who is himself quoting David Reisman, Karl Mannheim & C. Wright Mills– yow! right after the quoted section, Gusfield discusses as an example Hofstadter’s famous “Mugwump style”).
BTW, I regard Gusfield as one of the most brilliant social theorists of our time. It is sad that he is not even more famous. But I suppose lucky, too, for me b/c it means I am able to play a more meaningful role in scholarly discussions by virtue of others not having the advantage of the perspective & insight that comes from reading Gusfield!
I like “cultural style” b/c it helps to reinforce that the orientation in question is relatively loose– we are talking about a style here; not the sort of fine grained, highly particular set of practices & norms that, say, an anthropologist or sociologist might have in mind as “culture” — and also general — a “style” doesn’t reduce in some analytic sense to a set of necessary & sufficient conditions; it is a prototype.
You say you are a qualitative researcher. I take it then that you regard me as a “quantitative” one. Fair enough.
But in fact, I see myself as just a researcher– or simply a scholar . I want to understand things, and also to add to scholarly conversation by others who are interested in the same things as a way to reciprocate what I have learned from them.
To do that — to learn; to add — I figure out the method most suited to investigating questions of interest to me and invest the effort necessary to be able to use that method properly. Then I just get to it.
Any scholar who thinks that the methods he or she has learned should forever determine the questions he or she should answer rather than vice versa will, at best, soon become boring and, at worst, ultimately become absurd.