CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 399Contemporary Sociological Theory and PracticeAnthropological Studies and InsightsWeber, Simmel, Sociological Theory

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 240 of the 248 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Making sense of culture.

Patterson, Orlando·2014·Annual Review of Sociology
DOI 10.1146/annurev-soc-071913-043123
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

I present a brief review of problems in the sociological study of culture, followed by an integrated, interdisciplinary view of culture that eschews extreme contextualism and other orthodoxies. Culture is defined as the conjugate product of two reciprocal, componential processes. The first is a dynamically stable process of collectively made, reproduced, and unevenly shared knowledge structures that are informational and meaningful, internally embodied, and externally represented and that provide predictability, coordination equilibria, continuity, and meaning in human actions and interactions. The second is a pragmatic component of culture that grounds the first, and it has its own rules of usage and a pragmatically derived structure of practical knowledge. I also offer an account of change and draw on knowledge activation theory in exploring the microdynamics of cultural practice and propose the concept of cultural configuration as a better way of studying cultural practice in highly heterogeneous modern societies where people shift between multiple, overlapping configurations. Power, power everywhere, And how the signs do shrink, Power, power everywhere, And nothing else to think. —Marshall Sahlins (2002) , Waiting for Foucault, Still O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim For preacher and monk the honored name! For, quarreling, each to his view they cling. Such folk see only one side of a thing. —Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant Udanam vi.4 (transl. F.L. Woodward, 1948 , p. 83)

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1146/annurev-soc-071913-043123

Cites

240 of 240 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 248 references

Research works printed but not linked: 46

  1. Acemoglu D, 2012, Why Nations Fail.
  2. Alexander J, 2012, Trauma: A Social Theory
  3. Andersen S, Moskowitz GB, Blair IV, Nosek BA. 2007. Automatic thought. See Kruglanski & Higgins 2007, pp. 138–75
  4. Axelrod R, 1984, Evolution of Cooperation
  5. Barth F. 1969. Introduction. In Ethnic Groups & Boundaries: Social Organization of Culture Differences , ed. F Barth, pp. 9–38. London: Allen & Unwin
  6. Bateson G, 1972, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, 454
  7. Binder A, 2008, Ann. Am. Acad. Polit. Soc. Sci. (Spec. Issue), 619
  8. Bourdieu P, 1979, Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World, the Sense of Honour, the Kabyle House or the World Reversed
  9. Brewer WF, 1987, Modelling Cognition, 187
  10. Brewer WF, 1984, Handbook of Social Cognition, Volume 1, Basic Processes, 119
  11. Cerulo KA, 2010, Poetics (Spec. Issue), 38
  12. Chen X, 2004, Science, Cognitive, and Consciousness, 96
  13. Chriss J, 2000, Soc. Thought Res., 23, 199
  14. Eagly A, Chaiken S. 1998. Attitude structure and function. See Gilbert et al. 1998, Vol. I, pp. 269–322
  15. Ensminger J, 2014, Experimenting With Norms, 19
  16. 10.1037//0022-3514.68.6.1135 · DOI
  17. Förster J, Liberman N. 2007. Knowledge activation. See Kruglanski & Higgins 2007, pp. 201–31
  18. Freilich M, 1989, The Relevance of Culture, 218
  19. Friedland R, Mohr J. 2004b. The cultural turn in American sociology. See Friedland & Mohr 2004a, pp. 1–70
  20. Gilbert D. 1998. Ordinary personology. See Gilbert et al. 1998, Vol. II, pp. 89–150
  21. Hall J. 2004. Theorizing hermeneutic cultural history. See Friedland & Mohr 2004a, pp. 110–39
  22. Harvey DC, 2009, Poetics, 38, 184
  23. Hechter M, 1993, The Origin of Values
  24. Hechter M, 2001, Social Norms
  25. Herskovits M, 1964, Cultural Dynamics
  26. Higgins ET. 2007. Value. See Kruglanski & Higgins 2007, pp. 454–72
  27. Horne C. 2001. Sociological perspectives on the emergence of norms. See Hechter & Opp 2001, pp. 3–34
  28. Ikegami E, 2000, Soc. Res., 67, 989
  29. Medin D, Unsworth S, Hirschfeld L. 2007. Culture, categorization, and reasoning. See Kitayama & Cohen 2007, pp. 615–44
  30. Meglino B, 1998, J. Manag., 24, 351
  31. Nunn N, 2012, Econ. Hist. Dev. Reg., 27, 108
  32. Patterson O, 1982, Slavery and Social Death
  33. Patterson O. 2013. Institutions, colonialism and economic development: the Acemoglu-Johnson-Robinson ( AJR ) thesis in light of the Caribbean experience . Presented at 38th Annu. Meet. Soc. Sci. Hist. Assoc., Chicago
  34. Patterson O, 2014, The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth
  35. Pinker S, 1997, How the Mind Works
  36. Roese NJ, Sherman JW. 2007. Expectancy. See Kruglanski & Higgins 2007, pp. 91–115
  37. Russell R, 1992, J. Manag., 18, 639
  38. Sangren PS, 2000, Chinese Sociologics
  39. Shore B, 1998, Culture in Mind
  40. Spillman L, 2002, Cultural Sociology, 1
  41. Sztompka P, 2007, Pol. Sociol. Rev., 159, 247
  42. Turner V, 1969, The Ritual Process: Structure & Anti-Structure
  43. Wacquant L, 2004, Body & Soul
  44. Wacquant L. 2006. Habitus. In International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology , ed. J Beckert, M Zafirovski, pp. 316–21. New York: Psychol. Press
  45. Woodward FL, transl. 1948. The Minor Anthologies of the Pali Canon, Part II. Udana: Verses of Uplift. London: Oxford Univ. Press
  46. Wyer RS Jr. 2007. Principles of mental representation. See Kruglanski & Higgins 2007, pp. 285–307

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 301–398 of 398

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Patterson, O.
Affiliations
Harvard University (US)
Corresponding author
Patterson, Orlando
Venue
Annual Review of Sociology
Publisher
Annual Reviews
Published
2014-07-30
Volume
40
Issue
1
Pages
1-30
ISSN
  • 0360-0572 (ISSN-L)
  • 1545-2115
DOI
10.1146/annurev-soc-071913-043123
OpenAlex
W2161797449
Cited by
399
References
248
Citations by year
2026: 44 · 2025: 42 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 36 · 2022: 37 · 2021: 41 · 2020: 37 · 2019: 44 · 2018: 26 · 2017: 24 · 2016: 25 · 2015: 19 · 2014: 2
FWCI
7.71
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Annual Review of Sociology (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Anthropological Studies and Insights
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory
Keywords
sociology of culture, cultural practices, cultural configurations, pragmatic knowledge, cultural change, power, contextualism

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review