Dynamics of Culture

J. Zvi Namenwirth, Robert Philip Weber

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138699465
• eBook ISBN: 9781315512150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, first published in 1987, is a landmark contribution to macrosociology that extends the tradition of Sorokin, Durkheim, Marx, Weber and other founders of the discipline in new and exciting directions. Using their innovative content analysis methodology to examine American and British political documents, the authors show that the long-term dynamics of culture are subject to their own laws and are independent of the actions of 'great men' and other individual actors. This comprehensive volume brings together over two decades of the authors' research on culture indicators. Key findings include the identification of two long-term cultural cycles in the United States and Great Britain: one is related to party realignments, the other to long-term economic fluctuations. In addition, the authors demonstrate how culture provides the themes that political parties use to interpret economic conditions in their appeal for votes. Other results show that organizational cultures move in opposite directions from those in the culture of the larger society. The book also includes detailed discussions of both the methodology used to analyse text content and related metatheoretical issues in the study of cultural dynamics.

Acknowledgments

Our work has been aided by numerous individuals and institutions. They are acknowledged at the beginning of each essay. If we omitted anyone, it was only through our negligence.

Chapter 3 is a revision of Namenwirth (1973); Chapter 4 is a revision of Weber (1982). Chapter 5 incorporates material published in Weber (1981). A longer version of Chapter 6 was originally published in Spanish (Weber and Namenwirth, 1985). Chapter 8 was originally published as Weber (1983a).

Weber's work has been generously supported by ZUMA, the Center for Surveys, Methods, and Analysis, Mannheim, FRG. Special thanks to Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Peter Philip Mohler, and to the Executive Directors of ZUMA who at various times made Guest Professorships possible, including Max Kaase, Karl Ulrich Mayer, Manfred Kuechler, and most recently, Hartmut Esser.

Thanks to Philip J. Stone for graciously supplying the General Inquirer programs and to the staff of the University of Connecticut Computer Center for its assistance. Weber thanks the Harvard University Computing Center for providing computer resources.

We are also indebted to Philip J. Stone for an incisive critique of an earlier draft of the manuscript. Although we did not always agree with the anonymous reviewers, we thank them for their comments and suggestions. We also appreciate the enthusiasm and efforts of Lisa Freeman-Miller, our editor at Allen & Unwin.

Ray Blanchette did the figures. We appreciate his efforts.

Finally, we gratefully acknowledge and remember the late Harold D. Laswell for his unfailing support in the initial phases; our work is in part an extension of his pioneering ideas.

1
Culture and Culture Dynamics¹

The Study of Culture

Classical social theorists—Spencer, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Pareto, Parsons, and Sorokin, for example—asked questions concerning social and cultural change such as

• Is the form of change linear, curvilinear, or cyclical?
• Is change continuous and evolutionary, or discontinuous and perhaps revolutionary?
• Is culture merely a reflection of political economy or the major determinant of social interaction?

We are convinced that contemporary social scientists can address these questions using modern quantitative techniques. What are these methods, and what answers do they provide?

To answer the classical questions, we study the dynamics of culture by analyzing the content of a variety of texts: party platforms in American presidential campaigns 1844–1964 (Chapters 3 and 6), the speeches given at the opening of each session of the British parliament 1689–1972 (Chapters 4 and 5), and the presidential addresses of three scientific associations² in three decades of this century (Chapter 7). Our content analysis techniques (Weber, 1983a, 1984a, 1985a; Kelly and Stone, 1975; Stone et al., 1966) produce quantitative indicators of textual content that we then directly and indirectly relate to social, political, and economic indicators. In our view, content analysis is an important tool for generating reliable and valid indicators of culture content over long periods of time such as two or three centuries. In comparison, reliable quantitative economic, political, and social indicators seldom exist for similar time periods.

Our methods frequently reveal aspects of cultural change not easily detected by interpretive or qualitative techniques. As a result, and because of the long time periods spanned by our data, the theories that seem most plausible to us are often drawn from "grand" theories rather than from more narrow or "middle range" theories that currently predominate in contemporary social science. Also, sociological theories in the classical tradition were often monocausal: Of all possible causes, only one could be the true one. However, because of methodological, substantive, and theoretical innovations, most contemporary sociological theories are multicausal and often conditional. Ours are no different. In short, we find that the dynamics of culture have multiple causes and consequences, and may depend on specific historical circumstances.

What, then, are our answers to the classical questions of cultural change? We find that the long-term dynamics of cultural change are partly cyclical³ and partly discontinuous. We also find instances where culture and other realms causally interact with each other, where culture change intervenes between economic and political change, and where cultural change appears to constrain political change.

Specifically, we find in America (Chapter 3) and in Great Britain since 1795 (Chapter 4) long-term changes in concern with broad political issues that constitute 150-year sequences or cycles. We interpret these broad political themes using a variant of the Bales-Parsons functional paradigm⁴ (Parsons et al., 1953; Parsons and Bales, 1953; Parsons and Smelser, 1956; cf. Bales, 1950, 1953; Bales and Strodtbeck, 1953), which posits that societies must solve four problems: Expressive, Adaptive, Instrumental, and Integrative. These correspond to the following questions: "What does it mean to be American or British" (Expressive)? "How shall we organize the social institutions required to achieve the good society"⁵ (Adaptive)? "How shall we produce the material and social goods required for the good society" (Instrumental)? and "How shall we achieve social and economic justice" (Integrative)? Moreover, changing concern with these questions is related to party realignments in both America (Burnham, 1976) and Great Britain (Chapter 4). The driving forces behind these changes are the succession of citizen cohorts (cf. Beck, 1974) and the dynamics of culturally determined societal problem solving.

Weber (Chapter 4) also finds a discontinuity in the dynamics of thematic concerns in Great Britain. Specifically, in the period 1689–1795 (the Mercantilist period) there is a long cycle of themes whose length is half the length of the long cycle after 1795 (the Capitalist period). Also, the sequence of themes differs between these periods. This discontinuity results from changes in political economy between these epochs—in particular, the replacement of state-directed control by the marketplace in the economic factors of land, labor, and capital (Polanyi, 1957).

We also observed a second, shorter thematic cycle in America (Chapter 3) and post-1795 Britain (Chapter 5) that is related to long-term expansions and contractions of the economy noted by Wallerstein (1980), Gordon et al. (1982), and others. Weber (Chapter 5; 1983b) argues that this thematic cycle reflects a debate concerning economic performance generally, and specifically concerning the need to restructure the economy whenever long-term performance declines. It is our belief that this periodic restructuring constitutes the adaptation of the world system to changing internal and external conditions, thereby maintaining the long-term vitality and viability of capitalism.

Of course, not all culture changes occur over the long run. Chapter 6 examines the relationship between short-run changes in economic performance in America, concern by the major political parties with selected political issues, and changes in voter support for the major parties. We find that concern with selected political issues intervenes between economic performance and election outcome: Each party appeals to the electorate using issues selected to cast economic performance in terms most favorable to itself.

Culture indicators are also useful for analyzing the dynamics of smaller collectivities such as business firms, voluntary associations, and professional groups. Namenwirth (Chapter 7) a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Category Index
• Author Index
• Subject Index