Download Analyzing the Culture of Markets

Analyzing the Culture of Markets
Frederick F. Wherry
Yale University
Abstract. The rise of culture in economic studies has resulted in systematic investigations
of the shared meanings that shape markets, economic decisions, and outcomes. A number
of social scientists have a) privileged the heterogeneity of meanings within organizations
and groups over monolithic accounts, b) used thick description and single or comparative
case studies to investigate the incessant contestations over meanings and the
corresponding actions facilitated, and c) have developed empirically testable propositions
without insisting on the reduction of meanings to simple principles embedded in
structures. This line of work does not deny that relatively stable cultural meanings exist
or that parsimony is possible. Instead, it offers a parallel track privileging three modes of
analysis: 1) the identification of discursive inflection points as leading indicators of
market takeoffs, privileging thick minimalism over parsimony; 2) breeched sequence
analyses of transactions, highlighting experimental methods; and 3) relational analyses of
networks and contested circuits, tying situated negotiations to overarching cultural
structures. The paper concludes with a plea to keep cultural analyses interpretive,
historically grounded, and intuitively attuned to the meanings of social life.
Keywords: breeching experiments, culture, economic sociology, measurement,
relational analysis, sequence analysis, thick minimalism
Introduction
For too long culture seemed foreign to the modern economy. Although Max Weber’s
(Weber, 2009 [1905]) thesis on the Protestant ethic gave a nod to the religious
motivations for capital accumulation at a specific historical moment under specific
institutional conditions, Weber (Weber, 1978 [1922]) himself argued that religion and
charisma precluded modern, rational markets. In Stephen Kalberg’s assessment of
Weber’s approach to religion and ritual, he argued that for economic rationality to take
hold, magic and ritual had to decline in importance. In the Western rationalism eminent
in Christianity, “insider-outsider dualisms, so common and unbending among clans,
tribes, and ethnic groups and regularly ‘stereotyped’ by magic and ritual, could now be
directly contested and, in some cases, abolished” (Kalberg, 2009, p. 323).
Magic, symbols, and rituals gave way to advertisements, logos, and
institutionalized operating procedures. The non-modern seemed to have been tamed and,
in some cases, wiped clean of their meaningful contents by the scientific production of
market enchantments (Ritzer, 1999), but empirical investigations of these phenomena did
not allow these proclamations to stand uncontested. Not only did people’s relationships
matter (and hence a rise in network analyses of firms and market processes) but also
groups of actors behaved as if some market objects were inviolable, sacred, singular but
others profane. Market symbols took on lives of their own, and human capital was priced
not only by what a person knew (and what the person could do) but also by the collective
stories available about kinds types of people being naturally (culturally) suited to specific
kinds of things. Cultural analysis returned, enabling sociologists to analyze existing
(substantive) market processes and outcomes.
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The intertwining of markets and social life result in fundamentally transformed
contractual exchanges. It is not only that markets transform norms but also that norms
and narrative tropes transform transactions. Kieran Healy and Kimberly D. Krawiec
(2012) illustrate these multi-directional transformations in their study of a new form of
organ exchange (the nonsimultaneous, extended, altruistic donor [NEAD] chain). Rather
than examine a case where organ transactions seems to be a pure form of gift exchange
(altruistic donors) or a pure form of market exchange (contractual exchanges among
strangers), Healy and Krawiec examine how the practical logistics of kidney exchange
are hindered or facilitated by the donor’s perception of the transplant as an altruistic gift
versus a market exchange with enforceable contractual obligations. The chain links up
something like this.
Consider two patients in need of kidney transplants, each of whom has found a
living donor (a spouse, perhaps, or another relative, or a friend). Within each
patient-donor dyad, the donor’s kidney is incompatible with the patient’s immune
system—yet it is suitable for the patient in the other pair. There are thus two
donor-patient pairs, each incompatible internally but compatible with their
counterparts. The obvious solution is a straightforward, simultaneous swap of
kidneys between the two dyads…. A NEAD chain converts the simultaneous,
cyclical exchange of kidneys amongst two or more donor pairs into a chain of
donations and transplants. (Healy & Krawiec, 2012, pp. 107-108)
In the NEAD-chain exchange, both logics operate at different moments in the chain and
without discrete endings, facilitating moral commitments and motivating compliance..
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The mixing of the altruistic with the contractual is deliberate, and it is the symbolic work
of the mixing that enables the exchange to proceed. Indeed, contracts themselves may
enable NEAD chains to expand the number of participants, but these contracts work not
because they are legally enforceable (they are not, really), but rather because they serve
as a symbol of credible commitment. Commitments are performed for relevant audience
through the cultural work of taking contracts and market processes as part of a “life
giving” ritual.
Giving life becomes more complicated in the case of conception. Rene Almeling
(2011) finds that women who donate their eggs to fertility clinics for payment rely on a
similar narrative of gifting life. The exchange of 1) contractually specified monies, 2)
non-contractually required gifts, and 3) the designation by the egg donors of how their
“earnings” will be appropriately spent to honor the life they have given, all embed,
motivate, and buoy the exchange.
Similarly, Michel Anteby (2010) finds that collective concerns for “lives past”
impinge on how actors constitute the market for cadavers. The price and procedures for
acquiring cadavers varies according to its intended use (for profit versus academic
medical research). The extra work researchers put into humanizing the cadavers donated
for medical research and the restrictions on how the cadavers are priced and what kinds
of pricing negotiations are deemed as non-starters reflect the consequential work that
meanings do. These studies show just how intertwined our social and cultural lives are
with our economic activities. We will see that these approaches apply to standard as well
as status markets, an unfortunate distinction (Aspers, 2010) that unduly relegates the
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culture of markets to the pre-modern, the less-competitive, or the not-yet modernized
market sphere.
How can we analyze the myths, symbols, and beliefs shaping markets and
influencing action? What are the core assumptions that cultural analysts should use when
examining markets and economic activities? What are the limitations to operationalizing
cultural concepts in empirical research, and at what point do attempts to measure the
culture of markets result in evacuating markets of their consequential, meaningful
content? Let us first turn to the core assumptions cultural analysts of markets should
make before honing in on three modes of analysis that privilege maximal theoretical
interpretation in the deep play of meaning. These modes of analysis make manifest the
pitfalls of cultural analysis encountered in the pursuit of measurement precision.
Core Assumptions
A cultural sociology of markets differs from standard economic perspectives on how an
economic actor is characterized, what the goals of economic action are, what strategies
flow from those goals, and what are the nature of the markets in which these actions take
place (Spillman, 2011, 2012). Standard economic approaches focus on rational actors
(model of economic actor) who derive utility from acquiring specific goods and services.
This actor attempts to increase the combinations of goods and services that bring her the
most satisfaction (primary goal), given her budget constraint, and she includes her sense
of self and her norms as elements of her overall utility that should be optimized (Akerlof
& Kranton, 2010). Economists, however, do not attend to the source of norms or to the
collective representations shaping the sense of self, included in these utility functions.
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By contrast, cultural analysts examine the collective representations that cajole,
tempt, guilt, and scare groups of people to 1) respond to how resources are allocated in
market transactions, 2) to define some resources as scarce, and 3) to imagine some
scarcities as commodifiable. For example, Polanyi (2001) argues that the fictitious
commodities of air, water, and land were not produced for the purpose of sale, but
societies become committed to the illusio of the game and through their commitment
have conjured it (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 86). Even the maco-economy relies on collective
fictions (Beckert, 2013) to regulate them along with notions of the inviolable sacred
(Tognato, 2012) to build trust and stability in monetary systems prone to volatility.
For the cultural analyst, the actor engaged in economic activities is a pragmatic,
emotionally responsive, and sentient being. She follows her own ingrained habits, while
deeply feeling the allure to societal, religious, community, and family rituals. Her
communities include civic, professional occupational, and workplace groups. By virtue of
meaningful community membership, the culturally intentioned actor defines some goals
as out of the question, others as common sense. She does not always realize that she is
trying to achieve a multitude of goals, and sometimes she disavows economic profits as
her goal, although her economic goals may become more likely to be achieved as a result
of her sincere disavowal. Her attempt to occupy a separate sphere of non-economic
activities belies how intertwined her economic activities are with her culturally
intentioned life.
The strategies that she employs to meet her goals have meanings for her. They are
not simply a way to change her state from A to B, a transition that may be accomplished
a variety of ways (technical feasibility) but that should be accomplished in a way that
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makes sense to her (cultural fit). Often the temporal ordering of action is also meaningful,
with each step signifying something that makes the next step sensible and possible. The
market she participates in (and creates in the act of participation) is sometimes a
dramaturgical stage where she is taking on a role, offering a performance, interacting
with an audience. At other times, it is a field with economic capital, cultural capital, and
social capital arrayed as the poles of a force field, magnetically pulling her to appreciate
some things but not others (tastes/preferences/ demand) or to associate with people who
have similar accumulations of economic, cultural, and social capital. Even these fields
remain subject to the meaningful stories and myths about the games being played and the
shared stories that have their own autonomous dynamics beyond the reach of the material
goals of the actors involved and in dynamic dialogue with the cultural intentions of the
societies the actors inhabit. (See Table 1)
—Insert Table 1 About Here—
Analysis
To engage in the cultural analysis of markets is to privilege meanings and their public
enactments. 1) The identification of discursive inflection points will prove for capturing
whether the shared stories about a phenomenon changed before or after a sharp change in
the demand for a good or service. Within firms, 2) the deliberate analysis of
performances (e.g., sequence analyses with experimental breaches) can help us
understand why roughly the same idea (innovation) fails to resonate as salient by virtue
of when an action takes place in a chain of ceremony and by whom. Finally, 3) relational
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analysis allows us to bring in the cultural intentions of exchange as creatively constructed
from overarching discursive resources. To these analytic strategies we now turn.
Discursive Inflection Points
Discursive inflection points enable analysts to pinpoint how change in culture happen
before, during, or after a change in the demand for a good/service or during the course of
an industry’s emergence. Discursive inflection points refer to the moments when the
meaningful direction of “metaphors, catchphrases, visual images, moral appeals, and
other symbolic devices” (Gamson & Modigliani, 1989, p. 2) changes in content and
character. During industry emergence, these inflection points often precede the assembly
of technologies, labor, and capital while shaping the style of the industry’s performers;
where the set of metaphors differs, so too the strategies for assembling technologies and
defining core problems in the industry. When these metaphors change, they forecast the
increasing likelihood that industry ensembles will be altered. Metaphors, moral appeals,
myths, and symbols are often in flux, yet the peak or the nadir of these meaning sets often
foreshadow a material take-off, a precipitous decline, or some other significant change in
course, where the slope of change may have been gradual just before or just after the
inflection, or it may have been sharply moving one way before dramatically careening
towards the opposite direction.
The emphasis on the change in direction treats culture as motivating and dynamic
(though relatively stable), while relying on empirical indications of culture that manifest
themselves prior to the outcome under study. In other words, culture leads material
structure (most of the time), so long as we are not trying to explain social genesis, and the
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meanings of social life get translated into the configurations of industries and the
marketed messages for consumers. Two challenges to this strong depiction of culture lie
in attenuating endogeneity and keeping meaningful the cultural codes that seem to be
stripped of their thick, interpretive heft when subjected to thin theoretical coding
schemes.
Some cultural frames, for example, may make it easier for a company to deal with
exogenous shocks, to increase greatly the rate at which their products/services are
preferred over their competitors’, or to gain consensus for new financial instruments or
for modifying old ones. If we take culture seriously, however, we have to express some
skepticism. Perhaps it was not the change in culture but rather the change in material
conditions that brought about both culture change and market transformation. Maybe
there is not enough evidence to say whether culture or material conditions led as the
causal predictor. A strong view of culture holds steady under skepticism by identifying
existing conceptions of control, belief systems, and public cultures that made decision
makers more likely to rule out viable (sometimes more cost effective) alternatives. This
view also allows researchers to show the process of trial-and-error where a culture frame
gains ascendance, not because it was inevitable but rather because the frame was being
worked on, performed, re-enacted, and adjusted; all the while, those working on the
frame found themselves bumping up against and re-combining shared stories about who
they were in moral terms and what people like themselves ought to do, given the
meanings of the situations they found themselves in.
Neil Fligstein (2002) asked how firms select their strategies for dealing with
exogenous shocks. Because Fligstein documents the variety in the conceptions of control
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available within a firm at any one-time period. These conceptions of control operate as
identity stories influencing the types of control that the actors feel they can legitimately
take (White, 1992, 2002). If the engineering team reigns supreme, they will find
themselves competitively challenged in moments when there is a large exogenous shock
to the industry. Perhaps the finance unit will have a chance to prove the efficacy of their
ways. Like the prophet, the leader of each team comes before the corporate assembly to
vanquish the collective threat. The winner then establishes a way of working that may not
be effective all of the time, but her legitimacy will still hold until the next shock
generates opportunities for realignment.
Popular writing about the car industry, such as Bob Lutz’s (2011) distinction
between the “car guys” and the bean counters, offer a useful example about how cultural
conceptions of control work. Lutz sees these two conceptions of control as critical at
General Motors: the first, for blinding the accountants to the importance of engineering
and design; the second, for pointing to new, lucrative opportunities. The bean counters
rejected the soulful yearnings of the true car people, and they failed to see that the history
and traditions of American car manufacturing drove consumer loyalty and new demand.
When GM declared bankruptcy, it had this conception of control to blame. The car guys
now had an opportunity to act with charisma, to bring salvation. The discursive inflection
point enables a change in the company’s internal operations, and this change in
operations leads to an outcome in sales that defies the predicted value (calculated as sales
approached their nadir).
Let’s consider the establishment of discursive inflection points in Zelizer’s well
known study of life insurance. The insurance trade publications such as The United States
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Insurance Gazette, Insurance Journal, and Life Insurance (controlled by the Manhattan
Life Insurance Company) had tried to dis-embedded life insurance from magic,
superstition, and symbols, only to see demand for life insurance remain flat in the 1840s.
By the 1870s, the discourse of life insurance recognized transcendental concerns with the
after life along with superstitions and beliefs about putting a monetary price on life. The
life insurance industry had to launder “dirty money” and had to make sacred what would
have otherwise been “profane money” for the industry to thrive (Viviana A. Zelizer,
1979).
These cultural histories of markets cannot overcome endogeneity: the past
decisions and sets of institutions weigh heavily on the structure of new ones. This
criticism does not undermine the meaningful analysis of how different people experience
these turning points or how the collective representations of these experiences assesses
how social beings have thought about life, death, the supernatural as they approach
economic activities. The care to the details of meaning and the misunderstandings along
with the bad ideas that did not work well in the industry bring enough variation into the
analysis for interpretations that resonate with other cases. In other words, in other
societies with different understandings of “the good life” and of honorable deaths, would
we expect to see a different marketing of death (Chan, 2012)? Would we hypothesize that
the marketing of life insurance using an inappropriate cultural frame will cause the
industry to stagnate until (turning point) they get the narrative right, ceteris paribus?
For large social-historical studies, the attenuation of endogeneity comes from the
study’s usefulness in detailed historical work undertaken in other cultural sites (holding
the industry constant). In other words, one has to consider two to three books at the same
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time rather than in isolation; and one cannot expect scholars to reduce what was meant to
be a cultural history of one country site into a comparative study of several countries. In
an earlier assessment of cultural histories of markets, I write:
The effectiveness of cultural history does not depend on whether a data source is
complete (e.g., does not have years in which a periodical or memorandum is
missing) or representative (e.g., whether a majority of the public or a majority of
the politicians or business owners concerned with a particular problem would
agree that the materials analyzed are the most frequently read by policy makers,
voters, or by a large segment of relevant consumers). It is not the frequency with
which an object or word is used but its meaningful significance that the analyst
must interpret. In this way, cultural history, like psychiatry, is a tinkering trade,
even when done with a comparative view. (Wherry, 2012, pp. 108-109)
It would be a mistake to conclude from my analysis that parsimony is not desired or
achievable for cultural analysts. An interpretive sociology, however, cannot rely on
pedestrian counts alone as signs of validity or rigor. Sometimes these counts mask the
weak theoretical basis for an analysis because the author does not know why an empirical
puzzle is important, how it speaks to a body of theory or theories, and under what
conditions empirical findings can be re-signified as a theoretical advance (Reed, 2011).
Sometimes parsimony and careful, cultural interpretation coincide. In Frank
Dobbin’s analysis of the railroad industry in the United States, Britain, and France, one
sees less of the tinkering and more of the systematic tags. He examines three country
contexts that differ in their public (economic) culture but that face similar technological,
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financial capability, and information constraints. This enables him to make some
powerful predictions that seem self-evident only after their discovery: “Why does the
United States always use antitrust law to govern industries, whereas France always uses
proactive state coordination? […] What are the chances that the United States will, as
Frances sometimes does, designate the industry as a ‘national champion’ and use public
monies to turn it into a monopoly? Take any odds against it” (Dobbin, 1994, p. 11). As
parsimonious as his analysis is, Dobbin still offers a thick historical account, bringing
cultural debates in the public sphere to life as he demonstrates that understandings of
laissez-faire took a rather different form in the United States versus Britain, while France
remained insistent on core cultural coherence and centralized economic planning. Dobbin
felt his way through meanings in public discourse, identified moments when established
meanings were challenged, and explained the conditions that allowed different groups to
modify the meaning of laissez-faire for the railroad industry.
Whereas cultural histories offer detailed descriptions of changes in public
sentiments and symbols, textual and interview-based analyses lean towards parsimony,
often without the same concerns with the long history of core cultural tropes. The
analysts often identify textual codes, defined as concepts (in vivo, intuitive, or notions
tied directly to the research literature) that the researcher marks as manifested in a
segment of text, a set of behaviors, or images/ voice patterns. Isaac Reed (2011) calls
these parsimonious codes “minimal matches” because they strip away the thickness of
description to arrive at the essence of a concept. Can researchers thicken these thin
descriptions while still achieving parsimony?
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Lauren Rivera provides a partial solution. In her analysis of cultural tourism in
Croatia (Rivera, 2008), she identifies how the marketers of national identity deliberate
change (inflect) the messages in the pamphlets detailing the country’s character and
profiling its cultural wealth (Centeno, Bandelj, & Wherry, 2011). She shows how the
national tourism agency responds to an unforeseen imposition of stigma (their civil war),
and uses the timing of the civil war as the discursive inflection point. She offers a set of
parsimonious codes so that her analysis focuses tightly on otherwise missed components
of the representational change. Examples of her codes include:
Culture: European…. EXAMPLE: ‘Croatian culture forms and integral part of
West European culture.’
Culture: Local…. EXAMPLE: ‘Istria is noted for its own unique culture, music
and quite specific cuisine, all of which made it widely known for being a
wondrous and magical land.’
Culture: Turkish/Ottoman…. EXAMPLE: ‘Oriental influenced exoticism of
cultural life.’
Culture: Mixed…. EXAMPLE: ‘Croatia has stood for centuries on the very
border of Western and Eastern cultural influences.’ (Rivera, 2008, p. A6)
Her methodological appendix thickens these codes by including a discussion of the civil
war’s history and what it means for Croatia to be situated in the Balkans versus the
Mediterranean (versus Western Europe). Had her inclusion of the historical background
been systematized to correspond to the binary oppositions in her parsimonious coding
strategy, she would have embarked more fully on a neo-Durkheimian analysis of the
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national tourism agency. What does the East/West divide in Europe signify? These
significations could have also informed her participant observation of tours and her
interviews with hotel managers and tour operators. Tying the minimally matched codes
with the deeper meanings they signify, as reflected in history and in the position taking of
the researcher in the fieldsite (Aronczyk, 2013), the researcher can achieve what I call
“thick minimalism” (Wherry, forthcoming). This was not the aim or end of Rivera’s
analysis, but the care she takes in explaining her methods facilitates the thicker cultural
analyses of future studies in the tourism industry for (newly) stigmatized places or for
places managing a macro-level shock to their reputations.
Breached Sequence Analysis
Cultural analysts have walked a fine line between sequence analyses that lack cultural
intention and those whose cultural intentions feel so overwhelming that the actors caught
up in their rhythms cannot muster agenticity. The former I call the under-culturalized
view of behavior; the latter, over-culturalized. These two approaches share a lack of
attention to social performances as phenomena that depend on an autonomous structure
of stories (cultural structure) and a set of fallible actors re-combining story elements into
scripts but enacting those scripts only sometimes with aplomb (Alexander, 2004).
The under-culturalized view of ritual sequence depends less on interpretation than
on observed behavior. Sociologists use sequence analysis to specify the temporal patterns
of transactions in a wide array of social domains. Recent uses of sequence analysis
outside market contexts include David Harding’s (2007) study of courting repertoires and
the correspondence of different strategies of action for different outcomes (teenage
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pregnancy). The pattern of behaviors varies because people select from a set of several
action strategies that are immediately available for cognitive recall. There is variation in
which strategies individuals select to deal with the same problem, and sometimes they
may deploy an anomalous strategy. This approach builds on Ann Swidler’s (Swidler,
1986) as well as Iddo Tavory and Swidler’s (2009) work with repertoires. These
approaches emphasize the heterogeneous nature of culture so that cultural analyses do not
get stuck with antiquated notions of coherent, monolithic meaning structures
manipulating individual action. And this strategy could be enhanced to include
assessments of action strategies (sequence types) and their consequences, especially in
experimental situations where cultural expectations (about symbols, justifications, and
temporal order) are violated.
Randall Collins’ (2004) Interaction Ritual Theory highlights the temporal order of
transactions, whether those transactions are in leisure activities, dating and mating
processes, or material markets. Emirbayer (1996) and Alexander (2004) have critiqued
Collins’ interaction ritual chains concept as a re-inscription of utility theory (with
emotional energy substituting for utiles) and as lacking a theory of culture. ERCs extend
these critiques by relaxing the assumption that ritual-like processes necessarily function
for the generation of emotional energy rather than for the management of relationships
(even when those relationships cause pain) and that people engage in rituals out of
deference to the sacred. For Collins, the interactions happen because they give us bigger
and bigger hits of EE (emotional energy). Getting more Emotional Energy (EE) is the
goal of the transaction, and materially more is always better, even if not meaningfully so.
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Other under-culturalized approaches to sequence analysis include David Heise’s
(Heise, 1988, 1989) development of Event Structure Analysis (ESA). It usually deals
with the unfolding of political events, such as Cliff Brown’s (2000) analysis of racial
conflict and union organizing in the steel and meatpacking industries between 1917 and
1919. These structure-only scholars argued that meaningful content slows down
structural analyses and gets in the way of parsimony, but those of us committed to an
interpretive sociology need not throw out the baby with the bath water. One could image
an extension of ESA to study Interaction Ritual Chains, for example. Ritual Structure
Analysis (RSA) could attend to accumulations of emotion, emotional energy, and
symbolic resources. RSAs could combine meaningful interpretations of ethnographic data
with empirically identifiable moments in the chain of ceremony, zooming in and out of
specific links to assess the mechanisms generating ritual salience that might otherwise be
lost in structural reduction. But would we run the risk of going from too little culture to
too much?
The over-culturalized view subordinates the market and economic activities to the
system of cultural symbols. Commodification and economic competition reflect an
economic culture, and culture itself constitutes utility. The material bases of markets need
not be studied when materiality itself is a cultural camouflage. Viviana Zelizer (2010, p.
372) argues that both Marshall Sahlins (1976) and William Reddy (1987) represent this
over-culturalized view, where Reddy argues that “nineteenth century society created a
powerfully persuasive market culture that deluded people into believing that markets
existed when they did not and that defined social relationships ‘exclusively in terms of
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commodities and exchanges when they continued to involve so much more’ (Reddy 1984
quoted in Zelizer 2010, p. 372).
From the over-culturalized perspective, the economic culture sets into motion a
set of scripts. Economic culture cannot autonomously re-shape itself; it becomes a
weapon for those who understand that society is subordinate to it and who know how to
manipulate the symbolic conditions of their cultural subordination to gain symbolic and
material advantages. The under- versus over-socialized views of human behavior that
Mark Granovetter (1985, p. 486) critiques parallels the under- and culturalized views of
economic activities and markets I sketch here. In the over-culturalized view, once we
know the meaningful intentions of society and the sequence of transactions that those
meanings dictate, economic transactions become automatic reflexes because the
individuals in question are so thoroughly acculturated—societal values being introjected
through and through.
Breached ritual sequences provide a way out of the analytic quandary. This
approach requires that the analyst examine the sequence of ritual elements and the
salience of their meanings along the chain of ceremony. The re-introduction of breaching
experiments (Garfinkel, 1967) would test systematically how the ritual link (location) in
the chain of ceremony can be demonstrated to have salience for actors as inviolable. We
could define a sequence breech not only as the absence of engagement but also as the
engagement with the opposite side of a symbolic binary relevant to the ritual chain. In
other words, if there is a ritual chain with initiation and sacrifice followed by a ritual of
celebration, the transaction chain will be breached if the actor tries to skip the initiation
and sacrifice stages? It is not merely the fact that a step was skipped in the interaction but
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rather that skipping the step demonstrates disregard for order and disrespect for the
tradition of sacrifice that the ritual extols. If a breech of the transaction not informed by
the meaning of the ritual still proves consequential for the presence of the expected
outcome, the meanings of the outcome will be poorly understood, and the outcome’s
absence might not resonate as absence. Given the situation (and its failed culmination),
who would have expected the ritual outcome, anyway?
Relational Analysis
Zelizer (2012) offers analytical tools for examining how culture works in and through
transactions. The meanings of transactions and the meanings imbued in transfer media
(such as legal tender) explain the variety of ways that people deploy and enact their social
ties. This relational work contends with externally felt limits on what is appropriate or
inappropriate for differently defined transactions, and this sense of appropriateness
inheres in third-party expressions of approval and disapproval, but they also inhere in
available societal discourse (cultural structure) about the kind of relationships being tied
together through the transaction. Assembled in loosely clumped bundles or tightly wired
circuits, the relevant actors negotiate the boundaries (categorical limits) of their
obligations to one another and the way those obligations should be met. The perception
of individual interest varies by the meaningful configuration of the bundles or circuits in
which the actors affirm, contest, or transform the meanings of the situation at hand. The
emphasis is on negotiation (agency, changing likelihoods, creative re-combinations), and
dynamic negotiation situations that one can analyze systematically over time as well as in
cross-sectional comparisons of different situation types.
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Zelizer’s relational work takes what works from Parsons and remedies what does
not. Recall that Parsons (1979) argues that societal institutions shape self-interest and the
roles appropriately matched to self-interest as a primary action goal. This overculturalized approach does not assess the macro-historical processes creating a sense of
“scarcity” and “need” through the fictitious commodification of labor and land. Instead
he looks to the professions (institutions) to demonstrate how people in differently defined
situations forgo maximal economic gain for a bundle of different types of goods, be they
reputation, honors, or sense of justice. Parsons (1939, p. 463) writes: “The dominance of
a business economy as seemed to justify the view that ours was an ‘acquisitive society’ in
which everyone was an ‘economic man’ who cared little for the interests of others.” Yet
those operating in the business economy have a similar goal to those in the medical
profession who would be shamed by the idea that they are motivated by unbridled
economic acquisition rather than to the health of their patients. Both the businessperson
and the medical professional seek “objective achievement and recognition: the difference
lies in the different paths to the similar goals” (Ibid., p. 464). The categorical identity of
the businessperson or the medical professional has its own set of interests and norms of
behavior (over-culturalized). While Zelizer acknowledges the power of categorical
identifies, she empirically demonstrates the permeability of identity boundaries and the
possibilities for change. The negotiations that the individuals enacting these categorical
identities enable cultural analysts to indicate what bundles of meaning the individuals
under study are attempting to re-combine and which re-combinations violate stable (but
permeable) boundaries.
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Differentiated ties represent one of the most important features of the “division of
labor.” Parsons (1939, p. 461) envisions differentiated ties where different obligations
between interaction partners and different forms of authority operate. The basis for
claiming rights or accepting obligations varies according to the definition of the situation.
Parsons (1939, p. 464) writes:
It is seldom, even in business, that the immediate financial advantage to be
derived from a particular transaction is decisive in motivation. Orientation is
rather to a total comprehensive situation extending over a considerable period of
time. Seen in these terms the difference may lie rather in the ‘definitions of the
situation’ than in the typical motives of actors as such.
The dynamic contestation between definitions of the situation and individuals acting with
agency do not emerge fully in Parsons’ account. Money and financial calculations
become part of a symbolic ecosystem, placed in the service of affirming the meanings
(definitions) of socially regulated, ritualized situations; but this ecosystem has a variety
of species trying to live meaningfully (where living meaningfully is the functional
equivalent of survival). The collective understanding of what the meaningful life looks
like for different categorical identities becomes the starting and end-points in relational
analyses. Starting, the analyst can infer the standard versus innovated meanings of a
transfer; ending, the older configurations of the story-sets versus the dynamic attempts to
re-configure corresponding story elements during the performance of a transfer.
The practice of relational analysis involves the identification of transaction media
(different forms of money, payment, tokens of thanks or sacrifice) in dyadic exchanges as
20
being matched to a category of relationship and the identification of how transaction
media are bundled for different relationship types. The analysts then maps the matches of
transaction media and categorical identities: the direction and size of transfers, the timing
of transfers, and the nicknames attached to the transfers, the relationship histories linking
senders and receivers. Relational analysis emphasizes contestation and change as much as
it does the stability of the transaction patterns. In the place of a stable map of
corresponding transfer types and categories of relationships, relational analysts hone in
on moments when the transfers are troubled. On what basis do individuals object to a
transfer as mismatched with the categorical relation and what are the formal and informal
third-party sanctions for different violations? What kinds of claims can be made for
compensation in the courts (Viviana A. Zelizer, 2005, 2010) or in contract negotiations
based on the unspoken rules governing relational ties?
Because of its emphasis on negotiation in meaningful contexts, relational analysis
helps sociologists understand how caring labor is priced, why transfers from workers to
employers happen with such frequency, and what kinds of transfers in either direction can
derail on-going work relationships. Who gives and who receives what media? What is the
style of the transfer? What are the debates (the narratives) that praise or protest the
amount, the direction, and/or the style of the transaction? These narratives and flows
enable us to pin down the cultural meanings that guide transactions in the marketplace
and to understand the types, meanings, and functions of money.
Keeping Cultural Analyses Cultural
21
Making cultural analysis more systematic does not mean force-fitting it into qualitative
frameworks. The emphasis on rigor and systematic, interpretive analysis means that
justificatory narratives are taken as primary data, not as dependent phenomena. Take
justifications into account requires thick interpretation (against parsimony): moral
appeals have pitch, cadence, and iconic characters. These justifications are deemed to
resonate not because a random representative sample of respondents tells us so.
Authoritative texts and characters are alluded to in disparate arguments, across a variety
of societal spheres such as family, religion, politics, and markets. It is not merely that
some transactions are blocked or their transactions modified, but more significant that
actors negotiate what “makes sense,” as they piece together new transaction scripts that
borrow from justifications across a broad societal set of narratives.
In the interest of systematic analysis, cultural scholars do have to ask what their
phenomenon is a case of. This is a theoretical distinction, not a statistical one. Indeed,
there are not enough cases of industry emergence or enough sites where industries could
have emerged but failed to do so, if we want to conduct a large variable-based analysis
that would produce results that we could generalize to the entire industry population
(with high predictive power). Wherry provides a hypothetical in cultural analysis parallel
to the qualitative analyses discussed by Mario Small. Wherry writes:
Suppose we chose one firm with standard characteristics for its industry-size: a
large toy manufacturer with 43 executives and 3,000 employees (Morrill 1995).
Suppose we interviewed the head of the firm for a total of twenty hours over the
course of two years. And we interviewed the staff and observed them interact with
one another over the course of a year. No matter how copious our notes might be,
22
we could have little confidence that what we saw happening in this one firm was
being loosely replicated in any of the two hundred or two thousand firms it is said
to ‘represent’. (Wherry 2012, p. 119)
Now suppose that the conceptions of control that the work units espoused in the firm and
the overarching industry narratives structuring between-firm rationality were sketched in
a single firm for the former and using two sets of industry reports for the latter. Would
the narrative conceptions of control by unit be replicated in similar firms? Would the
individuals in these firms draw from the overarching narrative structures in their
industries and in society at large in a similar fashion? Does it matter for an interpretive
understanding of the economy?
We can think of interpretive analysis in the same way as a psychiatrist’s case
notes. Whether a firm, an industry, or a macro-economic policy agency serves as the
patient, it nonetheless provides opportunities to see the mechanisms shaping economic
arrangements with remarkable clarity. The in-depth exploration of an exemplary case
provides what Robert K. Merton (1957) called strategic research materials, because it is
the exceptional case where murkier, over-determined factors are tempered, while clarity
made manifest. Sociologist George Steinmetz makes a similar argument by recognizing
how scholars achieved significant advances in psychoanalysis and literary criticism:
In a field like psychoanalysis, for instance, the case study is just as important as
more abstract theoretical interventions in driving theoretical development
forward. Within literary criticism, the interpretation of particular texts is as central
to theoretical development as comparative studies (or abstract theoretical
23
interventions). By the same token, the case study of a specific social event,
process, or community is as important a part of the overall sociological enterprise
as comparison or sustained theoretical reflection. The plausibility of a given
theoretical argument can be assessed only by studying complex, overdetermined,
empirical objects (particular individual psychobiographies, specific practices and
so on). (emphasis added, Steinmetz, 2004, p. 383)
Steinmetz writes against parsimony, not explanation. For analysts who want the road to
discovery to have a set of mechanistic steps and parsimonious variables, ensuring
replication, Steinmetz and others remind us that those with a talent for interpretation,
wielding a practical knowledge not easily codified, should not be shunned.
Cultural analysis runs against the thin version of parsimonious explanation.
Analysts must be willing to engage in speculative inquiry, discerning second-order (meta) preferences of producers and consumers from the first-order preferences revealed in
observed action. Albert O. Hirschman (1977, p. 13) realized that “men and women have
the ability to step back from their ‘revealed’ wants, volitions, and preferences, to ask
themselves whether they really want these wants and prefer these preferences and
consequently for form meta-preferences that may differ from their preferences.” In the
act of stepping back from revealed wants, the individuals and institutions under study
complicate our coding schemes. First- and second-order preferences fall out of sync, and
the chain of meta-preferences shared in a group may constrain the arc, pace, and
character of future meta-preferences. Attending to these complications and their
embodied manifestations will keep cultural analyses cultural.
24
Conclusion
Markets work well because cultural discourse and power dynamics make them seem as if
they are naturally occurring and as if their normal participants share a similar
instrumentally rational propensity to truck, barter, and trade. Cultural discourse does not
emanate solely from the interests of capital, the manipulation of cultural dupes, or the
material necessities for survival. Cultural effects work well because they often fail to
provide obvious manifestations of themselves. Like power effects, cultural effects attend
to the negations, disavowals, and foreclosures leading economic actors to enact scripts
and to move as if by instinct—referencing core beliefs while acting upon them.
To assess cultural effects in and on markets is to deploy a wide range of
conflicting and complementary measurement approaches. The measurement of meaning
structures (Mohr, 1998) aims for parsimony and offers opportunities for complementary
methods. Likewise, the analysis of the discursive dynamics of political struggles
(Ghaziani, 2009) effects its affinities with structural analysis, yet a fully demystified
study of markets needs thickly described and psychologically speculative analyses to
identify mechanisms of operation resistant to discovery. This does not mean that
quantitative, qualitative, and heavily hermeneutical analyses cannot co-exist, but its does
mean that forced commensurability will increase the amorphous mists clouding or view
of the phenomena. Wielding skepticism and humility, we can lift the amorphous mists
(Fine, 1979, p. 733), fully cognizant of our speculations, our practical wisdom, and the
cultural and structural effects constituting and motivating market action.
25
Table 1. Economic and Cultural Depictions of Market Issues
Market Issue
Model of economic actor
Markets as Economic
Markets as Cultural
Intentions
Intentions
Rational, utility function (with
Pragmatic, emotional, habitual
possibility of modeling
(rational, utility function as
emotion and habit)
one of many cultural
orientations)
Goals of economic action
Optimization problem
Multiple goals; some goals
(allocation efficiency,
material, others symbolic;
maximize profits, minimize
disavowal of some goals so
costs)
that others realized; some
potentially profitable moves
“out of the question”;
optimization problem as a
cultural intention
Strategy of action
Means-end, purposive,
Substantive, temporally
instrumental rationality
(meaningfully) ordered,
meaningfully instrumental
View of Market
Buyers-sellers; Supply-
Fields, social performances,
demand nexus
dramaturgically managed
impressions, boundary work
Source: Adapted from Lyn Spilllman, “Culture and Economic Life” (2011).
26
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