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Theor Soc (2014) 43:247274
DOI 10.1007/s11186-014-9224-5
Terence E. McDonnell
Published online: 30 May 2014# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract Theories of culture and action, especially after the cognitive turn, have developed more complex understandings of how unconscious, embodied, internalized culture motivates action. As our theories have become more sophisticated, our methods for capturing these internal processes have not kept up and we struggle to adjudicate among theories of how culture shapes action. This article discusses what I call productive methods: methods that observe people creating a cultural object. Productive methods, I argue, are well suited for drawing out moments of shared automatic cognition and resonance. To demonstrate the value of productive methods, I describe my method of asking focus group participants to devise and draw AIDS campaign posters collectively. I then 1) show how this productive method made visible distinct moments of both automatic and deliberative cognition, 2) offer an operational definition of resonance and demonstrate how the process of drawing revealed moments of resonance, and 3) suggest how this method allowed me to investigate the relationship between cognition and resonance and their effect on action. To conclude, I discuss strategies for using productive methods and advocate for their use in measuring culture.
Keywords Culture . Methods . Cognition . Resonance . Focus Groups . HIV/AIDS
Limited by existing cultural methods, scholars struggle to adjudicate among different theories of how culture shapes action (Swidler 1986; Vaisey 2009). These problems stem from the dual nature of culture: culture as both ideas embodied in external supra-individual objects and internalized intra-individual schemas that are cultural to the extent that they are shared.1 The concern is perennial, how can we know what aspects of culture people have internalized except through the process of externalization (Berger and Luckmann 1966, p. 52)? Measures in cultural sociology, and sociology
1This divide has been variously labeled: Cognitive v. material, subject v. object, internalization v. externalization (Berger and Luckmann 1966), implicit v. explicit culture (Wuthnow and Witten 1988). In addition, here I echo DiMaggios (1997) point that not all schemas are cultural to the same degree. We fundamentally care about schemas that are shared rather than individualistic.
T. E. McDonnell (*)
Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame, 810 Flanner Hall, Notre Dame,...