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Some Problems of Analyzing Cultural Evolution
The study of cultural evolution is concerned with two overlapping but separate topics: understanding the emergence of culture as a (possibly unique) character of Homo sapiens as a problem in hominid biology, and understanding how culture changes. This essay considers a number of conceptual and theoretical problems with current approaches to the second topic and suggests some directions for further research. Much of the chapter is devoted to the way we conceptualize culture and some difficulties that arise when we rely heavily on the analogy between cultural evolution and evolution of species on the Darwinian model. Let us begin with an example that frames many of the issues I want to consider:
I was for some years what is called a Saturday night musician, making myself available to whoever called and hired me to play for dances and parties in groups of varying sizes, playing everything from polkas through mambos, jazz, and imitations of Wayne King. Whoever called would tell me where the job was and what time it began and usually would tell me to wear a dark suit and a bow tie, thus ensuring that the collection of strangers he was hiring would at least look like a band because they would all be dressed more or less alike. When we arrived at work, we would introduce ourselves—the chances were, in a city the size of Chicago (where I did much of my playing), that we were in fact strangers—and see whom we knew in common and whether our paths had ever crossed before. The drummer would assemble his drums, the others would put together their instruments and tune up, and when it was time to start, the leader would announce the name of a song and a key—“Exactly Like You” in B-flat, for instance—and we would begin to play. We not only began at the same time but also played background figures that fit the melody someone else was playing and, perhaps most miraculously, ended together. No one in the audience ever guessed that we had never met until twenty minutes earlier. And we kept that up all night, as though we had rehearsed often and played together for years. In a place like Chicago, that scene might be repeated hundreds of times during a weekend (Becker 1982, 513).
This description illustrates many of the most important things about culture that we need to understand. First, for the most part, people know what they’re doing and know how to act in a given circumstance. The musicians know how to play their instruments, they know many songs, and they know how to work together in bands and how to conduct themselves at dances and parties. Second, they often know much of what they need to know before they need it, even if they’ve never been there before and don’t know the other participants in the situation. Third, in any particular situation, there are typically many details that have to be decided on the spot—for example, local dress conventions, the particular songs to be played, the order in which they’re played, and so on. However, the variations are typically small, and differences can often be reconciled easily and quietly. Fourth, sometimes, things go wrong; for example, a musician might not show up or might not know one or more songs, the band might unwittingly play the wrong song for an occasion, or there might be a disagreement among the musicians. Typically, there are routines available for dealing with such contingencies. Fifth, participants often introduce “reasonable” variations into the conventional way things are done. These might be rejected by other participants, but they are sometimes accepted as good innovations and incorporated into the conventional practices. New arrangements, new songs, new genres, even new kinds of instrument appear and are accepted.
Most of the time, people succeed in conducting their affairs reasonably reliably and predictably. Most of the time, most of us make it to our offices, classrooms, and airplane flights on time, conduct our business successfully, and make it home again without serious difficulties. Moreover, we often have well-established procedures for dealing with trouble when it does arise. The crucial question then for understanding culture and culture change is what mechanisms create and maintain this extraordinary reliability and consistency in patterns of behavior, even when the people and organizations that carry them out don’t know one another? How does the routinized and standardized conduct that makes up the structure of an institution change? What sorts of thing enable and encourage changes in the way things are done, and how are the changes brought about?
Often, we can point to structural changes in institutions that bring about changes in routine practice. New legislation, for example, may mandate different kinds of behavior. Natural disasters may wipe out the materials and arrangements needed to carry out normal activities. Conquest or revolution may be the occasion for changes in routines. New technology may enable different ways of doing ordinary activities. However, changes in institutional arrangements are not limited to these special circumstances. Changes in the way things are done take place all the time without the impetus provided by new technology, war, natural disaster, or legislation. Sometimes, people just decide to do things differently, and these changes “catch on” and become part of the ordinary ways that people lead their lives. Understanding the nature and limits of these processes is the core problem of understanding culture change.
These are large questions. Here, I am concerned with the way culture is conceptualized, and particularly with the difficulties presented by using biological metaphors (and particularly, analogies to Darwinian evolution) as ways of thinking about culture and culture change. For that reason, I begin by mentioning several different classes of culture definitions. I then expand upon the most useful of them for sociological purposes, which conceptualizes culture as a system of institutions, each composed of conventional practices. With this definition in mind, I turn to a discussion of biological metaphors of cultural change, in order to show their inadequacy for a viable theory of culture organization or change. I end with a brief discussion of an approach to the analysis of culture that offers some promise of progress.
Definitions of Culture
There are many definitions of culture, and none of them are completely accepted. Since the first modern anthropological definition of culture was proposed by Tylor in 1871, there have been dozens of different definitions proposed (cf., e.g., Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952; Kuper 1999). Many areas of inquiry beyond the social sciences have also made use of differing notions of culture, and scholars in a variety of disciplines feel free to propose and use new alternatives. As a result, researchers often talk past one another, and there’s a lot of confusion. Here, I want to mention four alternative conceptions of culture, each of which has a following among some researchers. Then, I’ll focus on one of these as the most useful for thinking about cultural change. The alternatives are culture as an object of evaluative criticism; culture as systems of meaning, symbolization, and belief; culture as intergenerational transmission via learning; and culture as a system of conventions and institutions. There are many variants within each of the major definitional families, but a discussion of the differences among them is far beyond the scope of this paper. I view culture as a system of conventions and institutions. Before elaborating this view, I discuss the others very briefly in order to make the contrast among the different definitions clear.
The first group of culture definitions is based on the idea that culture is the expression of aesthetic and moral commitments. This idea was expressed by Matthew Arnold in his definition of culture as “the best that has been known and thought in the world” (Arnold 1869). A different version of the same idea was put forth by William Morris, who spoke of culture “of the people, by the people and for the people” (Morris 1882). There are two important characteristics of this class of definitions. First, they are explicitly evaluative and normative. Second, they are, tacitly or otherwise, rooted in the local perspective of the observer. These definitions are thus used by critics, not scholars. Since we are not concerned here with normative approaches, we need consider them no longer.
A second view of culture often used in the social sciences sees culture as a system of meanings, symbols, and beliefs that shape conduct. In this view, culture is separate from “structure,” which is about organizational relationships, categories of people, and patterns of interaction. Thus, Kroeber and Parsons (1958, 583) defined culture as “transmitted and created content and patterns of values, ideas, and other symbolic-meaningful systems as factors in the shaping of human behavior and the artifacts produced through behavior.” The culture-as-meaning view is most closely associated with functionalists such as Talcott Parsons and his students, notably Clifford Geertz (1973). The anthropologist Adam Kuper has given us a very useful full-length discussion of this view and its history (Kuper 1999). One variant on the culture-as-meaning view considers culture as a system of symbols, which are to be interpreted by anthropologists (and, possibly, members of the culture as well). This view holds that understanding culture is a kind of literary exercise, a matter of reading and interpreting a text.
There is a major problem with the culture-as-meaning view and its variants. The meaning view systematically attempts to split culture away from social organization and conduct. This practice threatens to reify culture. Instead of being a part of what people do and how they do it, symbols and meaning become something independent of people’s conduct. The view threatens to create a disembodied supermind which thinks things into existence. This split view of culture is particularly troublesome because it maps so easily onto traditional categories of stratification; the distinction between symbol and value systems and social organization all too easily comes to reflect and legitimate the distinction between those who work with their heads versus those who work with their hands.
A third view of culture defines it as the transmission of practices or ideas from individual to individual via some form of contagion (i.e., imitation, learning, teaching, etc.). This view is held by scientists from several specialties (e.g., Dawkins 1976; Cziko 1995; Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby 1992; de Waal 2001; Richerson and Boyd 2005; O’Brien and Shennan 2010; Sperber 1996). The view that culture consists of transmission from individual to individual raises many difficulties for any analysis that seeks to understand institutions such as organized research or textbook publishing. These approaches may attempt to capture the effects of institutions via reference to “biases” in transmission or “background” factors, but this strategy simply begs the question of how we are to understand repeated assembly of coordinated practices and their scaffolding by excising the very phenomena which were to be explained.
The fourth view of culture, and the one I shall adopt here, defines culture as a system of institutions made up of conventions. An institution is a collective capacity to carry out some task, “a collective enterprise carried on in a somewhat established and expected way” (Hughes 1942, 307). So Howard Becker and his fellow musicians (Becker 1982) can carry out the work of performing jazz, even though they haven’t worked together before, because the work of playing together is already “somewhat established and expected”: they know how to work with one another before they get to the venue in which they are playing. That is, the conduct of tasks that make up the work is conventional.
The conventions and institutions view of culture thus sees culture as made up of nearly standardized practices or conventions which give shape to the moment-to-moment conduct of individuals. This is entirely commensurate with the meanings view, as long as meanings are not split apart from the work of the world and made into an independent (and causally primary) phenomenon. There are several aspects of the conventions view of culture that require further discussion.
Aspects of Culture as a System of Institutions
The view that culture is a system of institutions grew up in various places, but the version I'm most familiar with comes from the Chicago school of sociology, and especially the work of Everett Hughes, who was influenced in turn by W. Lloyd Warner (e.g., Warner and Lunt 1945) and Robert Redfield (1941). The best discussion of the conventions approach I know is by Howard Becker (1982), from which the jazz band example above is taken, but important discussions have also been provided by Swidler (1986) and Bonnell and Hunt (1999), among others. The core idea in this view is that a culture is made up of a system of interdependent and interacting institutions. Institutions, in turn, are systems of related conventions. For example, it was conventional for Saturday night jazz bands in post–World War II Chicago to wear dark suits and ties, to know and be able to play a large number of “standard” songs, to coordinate their playing through a series of routinized gestures, to allow for solos as part of the performance of songs, to receive payment in standardized ways, and so on. For conduct to be conventional means that all the participants in a class of situations know what to do, and how to deal with one another, in order to make some activity go forward properly. A convention then, is a collective capacity to conduct a certain kind of organized activity, to come together and make something happen reliably.
Conventions vary in many ways. They can be relatively specific or vague. For example, formal rituals that take place on ceremonial occasions such as weddings are usually highly specified. By contrast, informal parties vary widely in many ways (e.g., in their kinds of food, drink, music, participant dress, and kinds of entertainment) without losing their character as parties. Some conventions are broadly distributed; for example, almost everyone knows how to produce and interpret applause at a performance. Some are narrowly specialized; for example, the work of designing new guitars. Some are changed easily while some change only with great difficulty.
A group of people do not always do all the things they are capable of doing together all the time; rather, to the contrary, there are typically standards of conduct that specify what sorts of things must, may, or must not be done in any given situation. People in groups can conduct many different activities together even though they do not do so all the time and in every circumstance. To say that some activity is conventional or institutionalized, then, is to say that, in the right circumstances, appropriately competent people can and will reliably carry out the activity. Thus, conventions are enacted and reenacted many times in multiple particular situations. Each occurrence is a version of the convention but does not exhaust it. The next performance may introduce variations on the theme, but the participants will recognize and respond to the theme more-or-less appropriately. Performances vary from situation to situation, but the convention remains recognizable.
Not everything that happens is conventional; some kinds of interaction haven’t become conventional yet or are simply idiosyncratic. And conventions are modified all the time as new technologies, population shifts, and other events require or enable new sorts of conduct. Some participants in a setting may not be familiar with the conventions being performed or don’t understand which conventions are applicable or even that some appropriate convention exists. Stories about groups of people isolated from others for long periods often illustrate the difficulties involved in modifying or creating conventions where none exist (e.g., Golding 1958). In more normal situations, some participants can’t or won’t participate effectively; these include children, strangers, the insane, intellectuals, the ill, and criminals. Typically, substantial institutions exist to segregate and care for such people and their activities.
Change of Structure versus Change of Scope
The structure of an institution is the pattern of relationships among the conventions that make it up. Eating a meal, for example, involves many conventions about required and forbidden ingredients, how dishes are composed, the order in which they are eaten, the use of implements such as knives, chopsticks, napkins, bread, and so on. This pattern is almost entirely independent of the scope of the institution, which refers to the number of people who are capable of participating effectively in the institution. Virtually every competent adult in a given society knows how to recognize and consume a meal, for example, but only a relatively small number know how to conduct themselves as part of a jazz band. The idea that culture consists solely of transmission from individual to individual confounds the scope or range of an institution with the organization of the institution. An institution can change structure without changing its scope, and vice versa. These two different properties of institutions are not completely separable. For example, if the number of people who eat salad becomes small enough, then the institution will disappear.
Institutions Are Embodied in Organizations
The collective capacities that make up institutions are embodied or instantiated in individuals with particular skills and in concrete particular organizations. Such organizations include (for example) jazz bands, families, clubs, gossip networks, hobby worlds, unions, scholarly disciplines, markets, commercial firms, armies, patronage networks, schools, and many others. These individuals and organizations are the material things which actually perform the activities, the parts of society whose operation realizes institutions. Organizations perform conventions and institutions just as jazz bands play music. Indeed, a jazz band playing a “standard” song (e.g., “Exactly Like You”) is neither more nor less than an organization conducting a convention.
An institution is typically embodied and enacted many times in multiple organizations; for example, many different jazz bands play standards songs such as “Exactly Like You” at affairs and in clubs all over Chicago (and other sites) every weekend for years on end. None of these performances is exactly like any of the others, even though all of them (well, most of them) will be recognizable versions of a standard song. In this sense, songs such as “Exactly Like You” are quite variable, and it is very likely that some of these variations (e.g., in rhythm, arrangement, key, pace, or improvisation) will “catch on” and be played repeatedly by several bands. In this way, conventions can develop stable variants while remaining “the same” in structure.
The conventions serve as a guide or template or toolkit (Swidler 1986) for organizing the work of playing the songs. The conventions tell us that, in order to have a band, we must have suitably skilled musicians, a place to play, arrangements for getting paid, ways to notify and entice audiences, and so on. In this sense at least, the institutions create the organization as much as the organization creates the institution: they are inseparable from one another. This point is worth repeating: institutions give order to the conduct of organizations; organizations give material substance to the conduct of institutions. Society is the repeated assembly (Caporael 2003) of organizations in an institutionalized way; culture is the routinized manner in which organizations are assembled and conducted.
One implication of this view is that institutionalized conduct cannot consist simply of following rules. For virtually any institution, we can see people acting effectively without explicit rules. Moreover, for virtually every kind of conduct, it isn’t even possible to express a set of comprehensive rules which will govern the conduct adequately. The simplest and most obvious example is the use of language. People who can’t express the rules of the language they speak can nonetheless speak it effectively. Moreover, it’s not possible for anyone to write down an exhaustive grammar for any natural language. The idea is familiar to economists as the notion that labor contracts are inherently incomplete because it is impossible to specify every action which must be taken for every contingency which might arise. New institutional economists such as Williamson (1975) have been leaders in making this point. Institutionalized behavior thus cannot be conceptualized effectively as rule following. Instead, the institution is recreated each time it is conducted, just as a jazz band recreates the music each time it plays, even though there is no score. However, if there’s no rule book and no score, then how do musicians and their audiences know what to do or how to recognize a failure of performance? They are guided by common knowledge.
Institutions Are Articulated through Common Knowledge
One of the most puzzling aspects of the notion of culture has been the relationship between individual and collective behavior. The notion of culture implicitly contains the assumption that there is something that transcends individuals, even as they somehow grasp or participate in it. What this something might be, and how it is to be construed, has always been a thorny problem for philosophers and social scientists. No approach to culture can be adequate unless it provides some effective way of dealing with this question, one that does not presuppose either some supra-individual force or substance or entity controlling the behavior of individuals, on the one hand, or the absence of mechanisms of coordination on the other.
The behavior of individuals is articulated as joint actions by means of the common knowledge (Chwe 2001) that participants have. Conversely, individuals may be said to participate effectively in an institution to the extent that they possess the common knowledge associated with the institution. Knowledge is common when each participant knows that the other participants know it. For example, everyone knows that everyone knows that red lights mean “Stop” and green lights mean “Go.” When I approach an intersection and the light is green, I know that a car traveling on the intersecting street will stop (on pain of violating the convention) for the corresponding red light in that direction. Similarly, the other driver knows that I won’t stop. So I rely on the other driver knowing that I know what he or she knows, and conversely. As a result, we can coordinate our behavior when we come to an intersection without negotiating, or even communicating, with one another first. This is a critical point: common knowledge sharply reduces or even eliminates the need for explicit coordination of activities when working together. Each person knows what to do and can rely on the fact that coparticipants know both their own jobs and enough of others’ to coordinate their activities effectively.
Take Becker’s jazz band, for example: (1) Players know what to expect of others in a situation (e.g., everyone in the band assumes that everyone else knows how to play an instrument, knows the songs, knows the procedures for playing songs in front of an audience, and so on); (2) players know what’s expected of them (that they can play their instrument, coordinate effectively with the others, and so on); (3) players can, in fact, meet those expectations; and (4) players know how to improvise in the face of difficulties (drunks, hecklers, power failures, band members missing for any reason, broken instruments, raids by the police, closing time, natural disasters) in order to keep the activity on track. All this is possible because players have a joint understanding of what they’re doing together, can anticipate one another’s actions, and modify their conduct in order to compensate for variations in others’. Common knowledge therefore is what mediates between individual and collective behavior.
Every concrete organization participates in multiple worlds simultaneously. Even in the most narrowly specialized and isolated organizations, participants have knowledge of the place in which the organization lives, conventions for dealing with physical maintenance, and so on. Moreover, every organization interacts with others, both directly and indirectly. In these ways, every organization participates in the common knowledge of many worlds. For example, jazz musicians know: a great many songs, how to play an instrument, how to work with other musicians at a performance, how to negotiate with people who hire musicians, what the local “scene” expects in its music, some of the history of jazz and the local scene, where to get food at 3 a.m., and many other specialized aspects of the jazz world, the music business, and the local situation.
Specialized or localized common knowledges thus overlap in particular organizations, and this overlap (which may be by happenstance) provides a scaffold that supports the flow of knowledge from one world to another. For example, conversations among musicians at a venue may pass information about new clubs and other opportunities to play or new musical variations becoming popular. They might also exchange information about other things of interest—for example, new restaurants or law enforcement policies by the local police. This flow of knowledge, in turn, provides the basis for many kinds of variation in the conduct of an organization’s ordinary affairs. In this way, the juxtaposition of common knowledges in concrete organizations facilitates the flow of innovations among settings. Since each of the musicians takes part in many worlds beside the world of local jazz, the venue thus acts as a locale (Strauss 1961), a place where multiple worlds interact and exchange news. The venue thus scaffolds these intersections.
Common knowledge acts as a kind of infrastructure for the social world that it supports. In this respect, common knowledge is analogous to the system of public roads or utility networks. Common knowledge is available to anyone who participates in the community, much as the roads are available to anyone who chooses to use them. In addition, common knowledge is built, modified, and used jointly; by its nature, no one can have exclusive use, possession, or control of it.
Cultural Change Is Not Like Biological Evolution
With these ideas about the nature of culture in mind, we can turn to the use of biological metaphors to talk about culture and culture change. Biological analogies have often been used to discuss culture change, and some scholars go so far as to use biological theories as models of the culture change process. There is a long history in cultural anthropology of such usages; the work of Leslie White (1949) and Julian Steward (1972) are still well-known. In recent years, such attempts have come largely from biologists and psychologists. Doubtless, some processes of cultural change are superficially similar to the kinds of changes studied by evolutionary biologists. However, it is a large leap of faith to go from this metaphorical resemblance to the assumption that biological and cultural evolution exemplify the same “deep” processes or that cultural evolution is simply a continuation of biological evolution under another name. There are some similarities between biological processes and culture change, but a useful analogy requires some basic structural similarities (Bartha 2010) and not just superficial resemblances. The biological metaphors used to describe cultural evolution are often highly misleading. A review of two common metaphors will make this clear: culture change as a kind of evolution and culture change as a kind of development.
Culture Change Is Something Like Evolution, but Not Really
Many researchers have drawn analogies between evolution and culture change. Typically, these attempts call attention to the pattern of “random variation and selective retention” (RVSR) described by Campbell (1960). However, a closer examination reveals many mismatches between the process of culture change and the process of biological evolution. There’s room to mention only a few of them here, but that should serve to make clear that culture change and biological evolution are very different processes.
The idea of RVSR is attractive, but that idea is used to frame a phenomenological view of evolution. Evolution, in Darwinian theory, depends upon variation across generations, that is, progeny vary in character when compared to their parents. Moreover, the significant part of this variation is attributable to variation in genetic endowment, which in turn results in variation in observable characters. However, in culture change, the notion of heritable genes separate from characters doesn’t apply; there’s no useful analogy to the distinction between genotype and phenotype. Indeed, the hard-won genotype/phenotype distinction was arguably a way of getting over analogies with legal notions of property inheritance which were obstructing progress in biology in the early twentieth century (e.g., Johannsen 1911). Progress in the study of biological evolution thus came when scientists stopped using a malformed analogy with cultural change. We shouldn’t impose the difficulty in the opposite direction. Moreover, RVSR is a very abstract notion—so abstract, in fact, that it offers no guidance, for it suggests no structural features to serve as the basis of any useful analogy. The significance of analogies is discussed below.
Worse, in the case of cultural evolution, many kinds of variation are not random; instead, they are generated through research and development, war, or other forms of politics. Because human interaction is self-referential and recursive (Mead 1934), the structure and scope of institutions is always under review and revision by both innovators and adopters, who are often the same people and organizations. This means that many innovations are systematically and deliberately generated; that is why we have so many kinds of research. At the same time, the success of an innovation is always dependent on local circumstances among the people and organizations that encounter it. This implies that innovations will succeed or fail locally for many reasons beside their “adaptive” value. As a result, it makes equally good sense to say that institutional change is as much a matter of selective variation and random retention as it does to argue for RVSR.
Still another difference between evolutionary and institutional views of culture change lies in the role of populations in the two approaches. Population notions are at the core of modern thinking about biological evolution; speciation is said to occur when two subpopulations have diverged far enough in character to make fertile interbreeding impossible (e.g., Mayr 1963). The virtue of this approach to Darwinian evolution is that it requires no notion of species above and beyond the capacity of individuals to generate fertile progeny. There is no need to conceptualize some essential property of the species that differentiates it; its “essence” lies solely in its capacity to reproduce itself.
The implicit analogy with culture fails because population-oriented approaches to culture change typically track diffusion, that is, recruitment of new people and organizations to the scope of an institution, not changes in the structure of an institution. The population considered may consist of individual people, organizations, or artifacts, but such approaches routinely ignore institutional structure. The analogy therefore is not sustainable. Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory portrays descent as tree structured rather than reticulate (with rare exceptions). The implication is that, once split, two clades do not influence one another’s genetic makeup, and the chance that they will do so becomes smaller, the farther apart they are from one another in the descent tree. This is not true of culture change. Cultures routinely influence one another in many ways, but their historical relationships are a very poor guide to estimating if or how they will do so in the future.
In sum, analogies between biological evolution, on the one hand, and culture change do not work because they are not well-formed analogies. Instead, we must skip over important differences and mismatches in order to accept them. However, the difficulties with cultural analogies to evolutionary processes are not exhausted by this difficulty, for other biological analogies suffer from the same problem.
Culture Change Is Something Like Development, but Not Really
Another biological analogy treats culture as if it were like an individual organism; cultural growth and change thus becomes a form of development. This analogy becomes strained very quickly, and it is not adequate as a way of talking about institutional change. In biological evolution, the “plan” or architecture of the individual organism is held (in the standard model) to be internal, carried in the genes. Development then consists of the “expression” of these genes and follows a similar course for each organism of the same species. The “environment” is largely a source of variation or disturbance in this basic pattern. In cultural evolution, the architecture of the individual person is external, embodied in the system of institutions that organize what it is to be (and become) a proper person. These institutions are typically realized as scaffolding organizations, for example, families, schools, television programs and movies about growing up, hospitals, jails, churches, organizations enforcing laws and regulations that protect and restrict children, and so on. The “environment” is thus a source of structure and stability for individuals.
This is especially true as attention moves from small societies with simple systems of stratification and divisions of labor to larger, more differentiated societies with complex divisions of labor. Darwinian models are utterly lost in the face of modern industrial economies with relatively fluid systems of stratification. In these societies, many different interacting institutions form a complex reticulated system of dependencies. As a result, there are many alternative life courses available to individuals, and their social characteristics are only loosely determined. Developmental histories and environmental variation, not the intrinsic properties of individuals, are overwhelmingly important.
Since common knowledge exists independently of particular individuals or organizations, new organizations can be formed, and new participants recruited and taught the common knowledge. In this way, institutions grow, differentiate, and reconstitute themselves by reassembling themselves over time as older organizations and participants leave and new ones appear. The structure of institutions can change over time, but they generally do so in a path-dependent way, with new arrangements constrained but not fully determined by what has gone before. Although institutions grow and develop, culture change is not like biological development, because the development of an individual organism is relatively fixed; once a certain kind of cell has formed, its daughter cells are of the same kind and cannot revert to a different kind. This “developmental lock” (Schank and Wimsatt 1986) implies that tissues and organs (and hence organisms) have relatively inflexible developmental courses.
Culture, by contrast, is different; it is possible to reconstruct an institutional arrangement along alternative lines, shaping the conduct of affairs in different ways. For example, the laws for conducting an election can be changed. This kind of change is not simply the growth of new and different institutions; it is the abandonment of one institutional form and its replacement with another. This does not happen with biological organisms; we do not see the removal of a limb with five digits, and its replacement with a limb with six digits or a tentacle in the same organism. Regeneration and wound healing reliably replace an organ or tissue with a similar organ or tissue; processes of social change often modify or replace conventions with different conventions.
Still other analogies between culture change and biological phenomena are possible, but they are even less satisfactory than these. For example, culture change can be likened to a kind of contagion, by analogy with the spread of a disease in a population. One major difficulty with this analogy is that it describes changes in the scope of institutions and not their structure. The fact that institutions form a complex web of interdependencies suggests still another metaphor: the idea that culture is like a system of ecological relations among species. However, it’s not clear what the analogue of “species” is in this metaphor; once again the structural relationship between the source and the target of the analogy is badly clouded and offers no useful help in understanding culture. Although analogies of this kind are occasionally useful as an aid to modeling, it is far too common for the analysis to be captured and distorted by the metaphor. Moreover, overextended analogies of this kind are a fertile opportunity for abuse in public discourse, as they are often popularized and used as tools to push a particular view of social and political affairs, thus giving a spurious “scientific” justification to ideological commitments. Ideologies and political platforms will always be with us, but until we develop reasonably rigorous standards for creating and using biological analogies, they are best left aside in the scholarly study of culture change.
Conceptualizing Institutional Change
In the long term and large scale, major population changes (war, migration, plague, natural disaster) enable and force cultural change. To these exogenous sources of change we can add the effects of economic disaster (e.g., extremes of the boom-and-bust cycle, or the disappearance of critical resources) and the effects of major technological innovations (e.g., printing, steam power). In addition, infrastructure such as effective water and sewage systems, the telephone, electrical, and computing grids, and transportation networks (roads, railroads) changes the relative capacities of local organizations and more distant ones (e.g., Chandler 1977; Guldi 2011, Levinson 2006) or makes some kinds of organization feasible where they weren’t before. These changes often enable and encourage significant institutional changes. Finally, the development of political and legal arrangements that enable and support some institutional patterns while banning or discouraging others is another important source of large-scale change.
These large-scale and long-term institutional arrangements scaffold a myriad of smaller changes within and among the system of institutions. For example, the development of “common carrier” law and regulation in the United States in the twentieth century scaffolded the development of effective utility and transportation networks by establishing rules of practice that protected both the carriers and their customers. Such regulations thus indirectly support all the benefits that those networks provide. Scaffolding both supports and limits the kinds of changes that can take place. A particular culture can thus be seen as a network of interacting and mutually dependent institutions, changing in response to one another. Following the course of change for a single innovation and its consequences is thus one way of tracking and explaining institutional change (e.g., Levinson 2006; Puffert 2009). For all this is a very useful view, it does not tell us about the actual mechanisms that enable and block influences among institutions. For that we need a complementary form of analysis that focuses on the manner in which changes in institutional structure appear. Only the briefest outline of such a form of analysis is possible here.
In one view of change, conventions from one institutional pattern (the source) are transferred into another context (the target) and become part of it. This picture of linear institutional change is very close to simple diffusion of innovation and is far too simple. When the structure of institutions change, conventions characteristic of different institutions typically conjoin to reshape an existing institution or create a new one. For example, a great deal of technological innovation is the result of combining or conjoining ideas and practices from multiple contexts (e.g., Arthur 2009; Schon 1963). Often, the conjunction takes place in contexts where different worlds meet, and the flow of innovation among worlds is two-way or multidirectional. Thus conjunctions result from flows of conventions among concrete settings.
In particular, “movement” from one institutional setting to another has three aspects: abstraction, creation of analogies, and concretizing these analogies in the new or transformed context. The abstracting takes place on both sides of the conjunction: two different conventions or groups of conventions are abstracted and then juxtaposed in an analogy that creates correspondences between the elements of the two abstractions. Work in cognitive science (e.g., Gentner 1983; Coulson 2001; Fauconnier 1997; Holyoak and Thagard 1995) offers numerous insights into the formation and use of analogies. This approach is very helpful for understanding how analogies are organized, but it leaves out the institutional-level phenomena of negotiating and modifying conventions, together with consideration of institutional factors that encourage or discourage adoption. I noted above that conduct is self-referential and recursive (Mead 1934). This recursion supports a critical stance toward one’s own work as well as the work of others. The critical stance, in turn, supplies the requisite capacity to analogize, and hence innovate, at the interpersonal and organizational levels.
Analogies are used to guide the (re)specification of conventions in new settings and thus concretize them in a new form. Innovations must be modified if they are to work well in their new context, and they must be localized to meet the requirements of the situations in which they are conducted. The re-creation (concretizing) process always takes place in specific organizational settings; it is these material settings that form the concrete part of the process and which are involved in repeated assembly. It is in this concretizing process that tacit knowledge (e.g., Collins 2010) and situationally relevant expertise become important.
The process of culture change is historical in character and is not adequately described simply as a transfer of parts or elements among objects. Rather, institutions are (partially) recreated in new ways by imitating or adopting characteristics of predecessor institutions and other institutions in different contexts. The analogy between culture change and biological development contains an important truth: culture change is a historical process in which earlier events influence the character and course of later events. This places such changes in contrast to processes that assemble systems from well-defined parts and procedures, the way a factory creates its products.
An example will make these ideas clearer. Hip-hop or rap music first appeared in the African-American community of New York City in the 1970s. It began as “sampling,” the practice of repeatedly playing small selections of different popular songs on two turntables. The context for this practice was the custom of live disc jockeys at parties, itself a substitute for expensive live bands. Disc jockeys traditionally accompany their songs with patter, and this grew, in the sampling context, into a rhythmic kind of poetry called “rap,” merging with other traditions of rhythmic public speech as it did so. As the new genre became popular, it underwent many changes in style. It was noticed by the commercial popular music industry and commercialized in the late 1970s and 1980s. As it became widespread, it underwent a variety of changes, making it more acceptable and accessible to “mainstream” audiences and to the industry that supports them (Price 2006; Charnas 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop_music). This development created a new musical genre out of many different conventions: extant genres upon which the practice could draw, the custom of having disc jockeys rather than live bands at parties, the availability of recording and playback equipment, traditions of rhythmic commentary and poetry in public meetings, and so on.
The forms of the abstractions and analogies that enable culture change can themselves often be institutionalized. For example, the use of formal protocols and interfaces in the telecommunications and computing industries (e.g., IP/TCP, XML, RSS, and many others) establishes standard ways to bring together different information processing systems hardware, software, and communications. The practice of defining new protocols based upon the established ones has itself become a convention in these industries, so that these technologies now consist of many layers of protocol. Change in information systems and their uses now depends on the development of new protocols in this manner.
This process is thus an institutionalized way of producing new conventions, which are routinely incorporated into the work of many worlds, and which enable further changes in the work of those worlds. The process of developing new institutions for developing new institutions can, in principle, continue indefinitely. This recursion is another important property of cultures; it implies, first, that there is no intrinsic limit to the formation of new institutions and, second, that the richer the system of institutions becomes, the more easily it can generate additional new institutions.
Conclusion
An adequate view of culture change begins with a definition: a culture is a system of institutions. “Culture” is not a category for supporting normative judgments, a system of meanings divorced from material arrangements for conducting affairs, or a simple aggregation of individuals or their characteristics. Rather, institutions and conventions establish orderly, predictable, and efficient ways of coordinating repeated activities. Understanding institutional change is thus about understanding persistent coordinative arrangements and the way they change. In particular, institutions are joint or collective capacities—not plans or rules—for carrying out a line of activity reliably and repeatedly.
The use of common knowledge is a mechanism that allows extensive and fine-tuned coordination of activities in many situations without requiring explicit negotiation or even communication. It serves to supply a rich store of relevant “background information” to participants without requiring any form of centralized facility for keeping information current. At the same time, it imposes few restrictions on what can be done in a situation and so supports flexibility and innovation. It also serves to scaffold interaction by serving as an infrastructural resource that anyone can use to accomplish their own purposes. Common knowledge is thus an important mechanism of coordination.
Institutionalized activities are embodied in material organizations (which scaffold one another) via repeated assembly, scaffolded by common knowledge. Many institutions interact at each organization. For this reason, particular organizations are sites where institutions affect one another and where changes in convention arise and move from one institutional context to another.
Biological metaphors for analyzing culture are sometimes suggestive, but the analogies typically fail. A serious scholarly attempt to understand cultural change by means of these analogies implies that evolutionary, developmental, and ecological analogies must be mixed and articulated in ways that typically violate the assumptions of at least one of the analogies. The model of Darwinian evolution should be confined to the origin and adaptation of Homo sapiens and other species, not culture. To understand culture change, we should be identifying and analyzing mechanisms of institutional change.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to William C. Wimsatt, James R. Griesemer, Linnda Caporael, Christopher DiTeresi, J. Peter Murmann, and Pete Richerson for helpful comments and good ideas; to the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research for supporting the conference; to the National Science Foundation for SES-0823125 and SES-0823401; and to M. Sue Gerson for advice and continuing support.
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