Abstract
In this chapter, ‘culture’ is defined, its place in the social division of labor specified, and also distinguished from the pursuit of power and the instrumental use of value-statements. Based upon the principles and the problematique of Shmuel Eisenstadt’s theory of multiple modernities, and using Charles Taylor’s ‘constitutive goods’, Max Weber’s ‘substantive rationality’, Emile Durkheim’s ‘collective effervescence’, and Jeffrey Alexander’s and Phillip Smith’s ‘cultural pragmatics’ to specify particular aspects of the theory, an Analytic Model for cultural research is constructed and explicated. The heart of the model is ‘cultural pragmatics’, that is the performance of symbolic codes in public dramas, which are incorporated in the self as ‘internalized code orientations’ and permeates the social networks of social power as ‘institutional ground rules’ and ‘ethical orders’. The whole study explicates this mechanism.
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Notes
- 1.
I base this definition of Windelband’s analysis of the Holy and its antinomian nature vis-à-vis pragmatic necessity (Windelband 2018, 305).
- 2.
‘An ‘ethical’ standard is one to which men attribute a certain type of value and which, by virtue of this belief, they treat as a valid norm governing their action’ (Weber 1978, 36).
- 3.
For a striking example of two complementary cases of theoretical and substantive rationality (and their patterned combination) see Part II, Sect. 10.3.2.
- 4.
Weber states this rather clearly when he argues ‘Thus, religious or magical behavior or thinking must not be set apart from the range of everyday purposive conduct, particularly since even the ends of the religious and magical actions are predominantly economic’ (Weber 1978, 400).
- 5.
World III refers to objective and tangible knowledge (scientific theories, technologies, tools, social institutions, etc.) created by humans, and which, contra World II, is (partially) autonomous from human interpretation (Popper 1978).
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Marangudakis, M. (2019). An Analytic Model of Culture and Power. In: The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_1
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